Television in the Age of Radio

"This brilliant example of a materialist analysis of technology shows how the fevered fantasies of television's early years were 'acts of invention as real as soldering together circuits in a lab.'"

~Thomas Streeter, author of The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet

"With valuable scholarship, Sewell provides a useful corrective to the existing account of the prehistory of television and illuminates the formative processes of television as a medium."

~Alexander Russo, author of Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks

"Philip Sewell’s exploration of radio-era television powerfully illuminates a formative chapter in the medium’s history, one with special relevance today as the constellation of practices called television continues to transform."

~William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Sewell explores the history of US television's development into what was to become a mainstay of society. Recommended."

~Choice

"Television in the Age of Radio effectively establishes a rich, revised history of the development of television as a cultural formation. It offers insight beyond the surface-level policy and commercial power struggles and impacts to reveal a deep history of whom, how, and what made television what it was when released as a consumer product."

~Journal of Communication

"Television in the Age of Radio reveals how imagination precedes and influences invention, how America's cultural conversation shaped technology, how corporate interests steered American television in a direction so unlike that of British television."

~Journal of American Culture