Having finished the last book that I was reading,
The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3, by David Shippy and Mickie Phipps, a few days ago I started reading a new book that I recently got for my birthday called,
200 Meters & Down: The Story of Amateur Radio by Clinton B. DeSoto.
200 Meters & Down was billed as being a detailed history of the beginnings of amateur radio, from its origin until about the mid-1930's. Because of that, I mistakenly assumed that this was a recently-written book where the author only went that far through amateur radio's history due to his personal choice of when he felt that he should stop. However, that is not the case. The book stops detailing the history of amateur radio at around the time of the mid-1930's because
it was actually written and first-published in 1936! That was not what I had expected at all, and it almost threw me off from reading it since the author does make some assumptions that I would be at least somewhat familiar with what the everyday amateur radio scene was like during the time when the book was written. However, as it turns out the author has a fairly pleasant writing style, so I was still able to become engaged with the book anyway. I also love how wondrous the author makes long-range radio communication sound, as he makes statements about how radio's miraculous invisible waves travel through the aether out into the Milky Way, and cross "roaring oceans and trackless lands." That kind of romantic view of the technology sounds kind of cheesy in this day and age, but then you have to remember the time period that this book was written in. Back then the world truly was a much larger and more mysterious place, and if you wanted to travel to distant lands that were across the Atlantic you had to do it either by ship or by Zeppelin. As a result, talking to people from around the world through a telegraph straight key, a home-built spark gap transmitter, a 100-feet of wire, and 100-Watts of power must have truly seemed almost miraculous back then! In any case, I think that this book is going to turn out to be a pretty good read!
