484 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE legraphers felt uncomfortable with unions, which they associated with manual laborers; accordingly, they never fully closed ranks with their supposed ally, the Knights of Labor, depriving themselves of a po tentially valuable resource during the strike. Also, segmentation within the craft (by location, status, function, and age) weakened solidarity. Contributing this volume to a series on class and culture, Gabler probably regarded historians of technology as a secondary audience. Indeed, observations about technology per se are rare, though Gabler does note that, with the advent of multiplex telegraphy, “pressure for increased productivity shifted from capital to labor” (p. 53) and that “all operators had a shared work culture that grew out of the nature of the medium itself” (p. 79). Gabler opens the book with a straightforward sketch of the 1883 strike and returns to it in the last chapter as the basis for a more detailed examination of unionism and telegraphy. In between, he devotes chapters to the industry’s structure, the work and social cul ture of telegraphers, and women in the field. Although this organi zational scheme has much to commend, splitting discussion of the strike introduces some redundancy. Gabler draws his inferences care fully—for example, by adjusting salaries for deflation and dealing with telegraphers’ perceptions of well-being as well as the reality. The book is exceptionally well written, enlivened by selective use of vi gnettes and vivid characterizations of individuals. Richard B. Kielbowicz Dr. Kielbowicz. an assistant professor of communications at the University of Wash ington, is currently studying the effects of the telegraph on news and the news business. Inventing American Broadcasting 1899—1922. By Susan J. Douglas. Bal timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Pp. xxix + 363; il lustrations, notes, index. $45.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Little more than ten years ago, the student seeking a good book on the early history of radio technology was out of luck. The best work on the subject was W. Rupert Maclaurin’s Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry—first published in 1949 and skimpy in its technical explanations. This situation began to change in 1976 with the pub lication of Hugh G. J. Aitken’s Syntony and Spark, which afforded a concise and thoughtful look at radio’s transition from curious labo ratory phenomenon to realistic technical possibility. The second vol ume of Aitken’s researches, The Continuous Wave, appeared in 1985, providing a thorough investigation of the technical history of radio’s development in the first decades of this century. Now, with Susan Douglas’s treatment of economic, social, and political aspects of the same period—what she terms “the social construction of radio” (p. technology and culture Book Reviews 485 xvii)—it is fair to say that there are few technologies better covered by recent scholarship. Douglas’s contribution to this fine state of affairs is a well-written and well-organized study of the key inventors, companies, and gov ernment agencies that collectively shaped radio in its first two decades in the United States. Her survey of this period is subdivided into three phases. The first of these, from 1899 to 1906, was characterized by Guglielmo Marconi’s successful transfer of his early wireless enter prise to American shores and the responses to this by three inventors: Reginald Fessenden, Lee De Forest, and John S. Stone. As Douglas makes clear, our understanding of the first American efforts in radio requires sorting out not only different technical contributions but also the entrepreneurial strategies of the various players. In addition, the American experience was shaped from the beginning by the changing attitudes of the press and the U.S. Navy toward the emerging tech nology. Douglas sets out her cast of characters carefully and clearly, which greatly assists her subsequent analysis. The second phase of this story is the period 1906—12, when the independent inventors become increasingly entangled with the large corporations that are such a prominent part of American technology and business at the turn of the century. None of the early American inventors turns out to be a successful entrepreneur, so Douglas’s story here is largely one of Marconi’s success...
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Sep 1, 1989
Eugene E Leach 
Open Access