Technology, Influencers, and The Lady Who Never Was
We can trace the beginnings of today’s world of extreme influencers, for example, to people like Margaret Penrose — a lady who never was.
Immensely popular as a children’s author in the early 1900’s, Margaret Penrose wrote about a dazzling new technology In her series “The Radio Girls of Roselawn.” She described a thrilling magic that emerged from experiments in Scotland, America, Russia and England. Already dazzled in the Gilded Age by the invention of the telephone, phonograph, light bulb, automobile, box camera, electric streetcar, and airplane, people were nonetheless shocked at the prospect of hearing ‘sound through aether’.
Even imaginative futurists like H.G. Wells — author of “War Of The Worlds” and “The Time Machine” — could not believe their ears. Wells wrote “I have anticipated radio’s complete disappearance…confident that the unfortunate people, who must now subdue themselves to listening in, will soon find a better pastime for their leisure.”
He’s not the only bold futurist to fall a bit short; Authur C. Clarke predicted in 1974 that sone day computers would be small enough to “fit on a desktop”!
But radio fascinated the young heroines of the ‘Radio Girls’, even if it was so big it required copper wire strung across the yard:
“The three girls huddled around headsets, stretching their ears to distinguish the sounds. Voices of the singers travelled to their little group from the broadcasting station thirty miles away!
“The slurring notes of a jazz orchestra greeted their ears as plainly as though it were coming from a neighboring room instead of a broadcasting station. Amy confessed that it made her feet itch. She loved to dance. String music, reaching their ears so wonderfully, hushed their speech.”
Amy recalled that she had heard about a man carrying some kind of a condensed receiving set in one’s pocket — a receiving and a broadcasting set, too.
A friend interjected: “Oh! But that is a dream.”
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