Please join us for a presentation of work-in-progress with Professor Reinhold Martin, with a response by Professor Richard John.
Designing Wavelength: Production in a Vacuum, c. 1930
What is use? Much more than a means to an end, use is an idea, a symbol as well as a technical act. Reconstructing a dialectic of ideational and material professes, The Idea of Use: Technology as Symbolic Form from Petroleum to Photovoltaics, the manuscript from which this draft chapter is excerpted, cut a historical cross-section through the twentieth-century American technosphere. From oil underground to atmospheric microwaves to satellites in orbit, the technological systems--or media complexes--examined in the book all helped to write and to realize the American myth of technological progess and national triumph, cast in capital. The Idea of Use is an intellectual history of that myth as an untimely elegy, a promise unmade.
Long recognized but largely unutilized, by the First World War the electromagnetic spectrum had been reconceived and partitioned as a resource subject to engineering design. Longer wavelengths were reserved for commercial and military use; shorter ones were left amateurs until, with the development of vacuum tubes, these proved especially suited for voice communication over long distances. Within this context, the continuous wave technologies that found widespread application during the war formed a new horizon of thought, with point-to-point communications and broadcast radio representing two conflicting ideas of use. The two also drew a new geography: one was reserved for air and seal the other addressed the nation as a terrestrial body. The techniques they shared, including the production of a vacuum in a sealed enclosure and the use of feedback to amplify a signal, bore both meaning and economic value. In 1920, a combination of military and commercial interests formed the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to secure the control of international wireless market by US-based capital. But with broadcast radio as the new law of the land, RCS quickly turned it focus inward, toward the nation as a zone of production in which it held a near monopoly over the supply of vacuum tubes. As AT&T correspondingly scaled back its quest for wireless telephony, a group of smaller firms linked to the San Francisco shipping industry, seeking to circumvent RCA's patents, formed a nexus around point-to-point shortwave radio in what would become Silicon Valley. An apotheosis of the modernist skyscraper-as-steamship, the RCS Building (1933) in New York, was but one component in this media complex. Even as that building's site, Rockefeller Center, commemorated the petroleum complex, passing invisibly through the skyscraper-steamship's walls like a radio wave was the intellectual, technological, and economic history of the vacuum tube, disassembled.