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You’re Amped Up

Amplifiers and loudspeakers had become boring in the United States by 1926. Yet they had only been invented a couple of decades earlier. At other points in history, a revolutionary technology like this—one so impactful on the world—would have taken much longer to adopt.

Source: Wireless World (June 30, 1926), 878. Available via Google Books

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Present-Day Sources about Electronic Amplification and Related Technologies

Secondary Source

Select Primary Sources

  • “Men of Science See De Forest’s Audion,” New York Times, 11 December, 1915.
  • “Crowd Hears Loan Speech from Plane High in Sky” Washington Times, Final edition, 21 Apr., 1919, 1 & 17.
  • “A Voice from the Sky,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 95, No. 1 (July 1919), 81.
  • Robert William West, Purposive Public Speaking: A College Text Book for Courses in Public Speaking (New York: Macmillan Company, 1924), 4. https://books.google.com/books?id=dQg2AQAAIAAJ
  • “Loud-Speakers in Bath Abbey: Improving Poor Acoustics in a Famous Church” in Wireless World (June 2, 1926), 736. https://books.google.com/books?id=1WWTxTG30AYC
  • “The Ubiquitous Loud-Speaker” photo & caption, Wireless World (June 30, 1926), 878. https://books.google.com/books?id=1WWTxTG30AYC

By Doug

Doug Sofer, Ph.D., is a Professor of History at Maryville College in Tennessee. He's the creator of You Are A Weirdo, a media project that reaches beyond academia to share how history helps everyone understand the strangeness of now. Sofer hosts a podcast, writes a blog, and has penned a book manuscript on this same theme.

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