the mit press ham radios technical culture dec 2006

Kristen Haring Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Haring Photograph by Tim Soter Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Kristen Haring Decades before the Internet, ham radio provided instanta- neous, global, person-to-person communication. Hundreds of thousands of amateur radio operators—a predominantly m ale, middle- and upper-class group known as “hams”— built and operated two-way radios for recreation in mid twentieth century America. In Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, Kristen Haring examines why so many men adopt- ed the technical hobby of ham radio from the 1930s through 1970s and how the pastime helped them form identity and community. Ham radio required solitary tinkering with sophisticated electronics equipment, often isolated from domestic activi- ties in a “radio shack,” yet the hobby thrived on fraternal interaction. Conversations on the air grew into friendships, and hams gathered in clubs or met informally for “eyeball contacts.” Within this community, hobbyists developed dis- tinct values and practices with regard to radio, creating a particular “technical culture.” Outsiders viewed amateur radio operators with a mixture of awe and suspicion, impressed by hams’ mastery of powerful technology but uneasy about their contact with foreigners, especially dur- ing periods of political tension. Drawing on a wealth of personal accounts found in radio magazines and newsletters and from technical manuals, trade journals, and government documents, Haring describes how ham radio culture rippled through hobby- ists’ lives. She explains why hi-tech employers recruited hams and why electronics manufacturers catered to these specialty customers. She discusses hams’ position within the military and civil defense during World War II and the Cold War as well as the effect of the hobby on family dynamics. By considering ham radio in the context of other technical hobbies—model building, photography, high- fidelity audio, and similar leisure pursuits—Haring high- lights the shared experiences of technical hobbyists. She shows that tinkerers influenced attitudes toward technology beyond hobby communities, enriching the general techni- cal culture by posing a vital counterpoint. Inside T echnology series Kristen Haring is a visiting scholar in Columbia University’s Department of History. She holds degrees in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a PhD in history of sci- ence from Harvard University. Haring’s work has been rec- ognized by the Society for the History of Technology, which awarded her the IEEE Life Members’ Prize in Electrical History for portions of Ham Radio’s Technical Culture. She has served on the board of directors of the Keith Haring Foundation since its creation by her brother in 1989. h istory of technology “Although approximately one million Americans operated ham radios in the course of the twentieth century, very little has been written about this thriving technical culture in our midst. Kristen Haring offers a deeply sympathetic history of this under-appreciated technical community and their role in contributing to American advances in science and technology, especially the electronics industry. In the process she reveals how technical tinkering has defined manhood in the United States and has powerfully constituted ‘technical identities’ with often utopian, even, at times, revolutionary, notions about the social uses of technology.” —Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, and author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination “Haring’s book is a nuanced and elegantly written cultural history that throws new light on the com- plex relations among masculinity, domesticity, emotional connection to technology, and American technical culture.” —Donald MacKenzie, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh “Kristen Haring has constructed an engaging account of ham radio culture in mid-twentieth-century America. In so doing, she illuminates how people assign meaning to—and identify with—technologies of all kinds, thus her book will be of value to all students of technological culture.” —Emily Thompson, Professor of History, Princeton University The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 http://mitpress.mit.edu 0-262-08355-8 978-0-262-08355-3 Cover illustrations from Amateur Radio Defense, November 1940, and Cleveland Institute of Electronics advertisement, CQ, October 1967; reprinted with permission. 50701Haring 10/31/06 10:55 AM Page 1 Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Inside Technology edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch A list of books in the series appears at the back of the book. Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Kristen Haring The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ( 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Every effort has been made to contact those who hold rights for all materials repro- duced here. Any rights holders not credited should contact the publisher so a correc- tion can be made in the next printing. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu. This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong, and was printed on recycled paper and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haring, Kristen. Ham radio’s technical culture / Kristen Haring. p. cm.—(Inside technology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-262-08355-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-262-08355-8 (alk. paper) 1. Amateur radio stations—History. 2. Radio operators—United States—History. 3. Hobbies—Social aspects. I. Title. TK9956.H3626 2007 384.540973'0904—dc22 2006046597 10987654321 for my brother, Keith, with abiding love and respect Contents Prologue ix 1 Identifying with Technology, Tinkering with Technical Culture 1 2 The Culture of Ham Radio 19 3 Equipping Productive Consumers 49 4 Amateurs on the Job 75 5 Hobby Radio Embattled 95 6 Ham Radio at Home 119 7 Technical Change and Technical Culture 147 Acknowledgments 163 Notes 165 References 195 Index 215 Series List 219 Prologue Every night thousands of men retreat to radio stations elaborately outfitted in suburban basements or tucked into closets of city apartments to talk to local friends or to strangers on the other side of the world. They commu- nicate by speaking into a microphone, tapping out Morse code on a tele- graph key, or typing at the keyboard of a teletypewriter. In the Internet age, instantaneous, long-distance, person-to-person communication seems ordinary. But amateur radio operators have been completing such contacts since the 1910s. The hobbyists often called ‘‘hams’’ initially turned to radio for technical challenges and thrills. As the original form of wireless technology became more reliable and commonplace in the 1930s, ham radio continued as a leisure activity. This book examines why men in mid twentieth century America operated two-way radios for recreation and how the hobby shaped social and technical encounters. It primarily concerns the period after radio broadcasting became routine and before personal computing did. The hobby is still widely practiced, with more than 680,000 hams in the United States in 2000—more than ever before. While there may be many points of continuity between past and present ham radio, what follows is a historical analysis based on evidence from the 1930s to 1970s and aiming only to in- terpret events of that era. To become an amateur radio operator required considerable skill, ma- chinery, and time. The first hurdle was obtaining a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by passing a written examination of electronics theory and radio regulations and a hands-on test translating words into and out of Morse code. Once he earned an FCC-assigned call [...]... highlights the creation and implications of technical culture I hope that my presentation of the notion of technical culture through the example of ham radio will stimulate investigation into other technical communities and ultimately offer insight into the formation and function of the technical cultures that are so familiar to us that we take them for granted Ham radio existed within a larger category of technical. .. with the people who take part in the automotive hobbies.’’7 Model rocket builders, ham radio operators, computer hackers, amateur pilots, and other technical hobbyists shared an inclination to technology despite the differences in the apparatus and methods of their hobbies All broadly enjoyed technicality technical devices, technical interactivity, and status in separate technical communities—to the. .. of the hobby can adequately convey the personal stories of the roughly one million Americans who operated amateur radios over the course of the twentieth century I expect that this book will prompt diverse hams to speak up about their own experiences and how those may break from my analysis If I succeed at least in convincing readers of the relevance of technical recreation, the addenda offered by hams... clarify that this framework is merely the subset of cultural norms specific to technology, I refer to it as ‘ technical culture. ’’ As does technical identity, technical culture puts a name to an idea beginning to emerge in technology studies Lisa Gitelman documented the shifting technical culture and its relationship to the shifting print culture that accompanied the phonograph, a process that was guided... legitimize their activities, to clarify what the hobby was, and to increase its popularity The editors of Modelmaker magazine urged readers in 1924 to join their local chapter of the American Model Engineer Society, suggesting that membership would give the hobby ‘‘a boost.’’ ‘ The more the Societies develop,’’ they figured, ‘ the more interest will be taken in Model Making in the U.S.’’ In 1942, The Model... Among the titles were Human Geography in the Air Age, Social Studies for the Air Age, and The Biology of Flight.37 The specific proposals these texts made for how to prepare for a new technical culture, though, were atypical among vague yet urgent warnings that sweeping change was coming Taking technology into their own hands, technical hobbyists were ready for—often leaders of—revolutions in technical culture. .. passions and then altering their class status On average, a radio hobbyist completed more years of schooling than the non-hobbyist—after World War II this usually included some college—and he was far more likely to hold a job in a technical field The military recruited hams for their radio skills, and military service gave hams further technical training and eased access to higher education under the GI Bill... referred to these buildings as their ‘ ham shacks.’’ Whatever the etymology, hobbyists played to the name’s obvious negative connotation in facetious recipes for cooking hams and jokes about amateurs’ piggishness The pride with which hobbyists accepted the peculiar moniker reflects their eagerness to identify with amateur radio xvii 1 Identifying with Technology, Tinkering with Technical Culture I set... categories of skill into the technical, I find it more revealing to expose how technology took on its specific sociopolitical identity and to question the valuation of technical skill over other kinds of skill Merely classifying ham radio as a technical hobby and knitting as a non -technical hobby does not impart additional qualities to either activity, nor does it rank one above the other Technical hobbies are... the United States held licenses, Great Britain had the second most hams, with only around 9,400 Roughly half the world’s countries then had less than 25 registered hobbyists each, and only 16 countries had more than 1,000 hams.3 These figures—compiled by a hobby magazine to inspire respect for the difficulty of contacting foreign operators—speak to the political, economic, and technical position of the . Kristen Haring Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Haring Photograph by Tim Soter Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Kristen Haring Decades before the Internet, ham radio provided. and implications of technical culture. I hope that my presentation of the notion of technical culture through the example of ham radio will stimulate investigation into other technical communities. a job in a technical field. The military recruited hams for their radio skills, and military service gave hams further technical training and eased access to higher education under the GI Bill.