Telegraphy without wires -- how attractive it sounds. No more unsightly pole lines disfiguring the streets and highways, ornamented with the dangling skeletons of by-gone kites. No more perpetual excavation of the streets, to find room beneath their surfaces for additional circuits that cannot possibly be crowded on to the staggering lines that darken the sky with their sooty cobwebs. A little instrument that one can almost carry in the pocket, certainly in a microscopic grip, and if your correspondent is likewise equipped, you may arrest his attention and talk to him almost any time or place, with no intervening medium but the ether. Possible? Certainly. But will it pay? For this is the final criterion with which this utilitarian age tests all such propositions, and for the present under ordinary circumstances, the answer must be NO.
	-- from the magazine Electrical World, June 10, 1899, as quoted in Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 1.
´provocations: all entriesª	submitted  by  Henry Jenkins