Michael B Schiffer (The Portable Radio in America) is fighting an uphill battle and he knows it.
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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