Thomas Watson
Thomas Watson
Natural Radio, Natural Theology
Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, heard the sounds of natural radio when the first telephone test line acted as an unwitting antenna. He was most probably the first person on earth to hear radio, that is, as a natural phenomenon rather than a technological device. His speculations that the sounds were of extraterrestrial origin or produced by storms on the sun were keeping with other notions of the time. That Watson heard natural radio in telephone lines is supported by other examples in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The aesthetics of his extended periods of listening is related to his later spiritualist writings.
Keywords: Thomas Watson, natural radio, radio history, radio noise, telephone history, telephone noise, media archaeology, natural theology, outer space sounds, whistlers, solar storms
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