Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis
6.5 out of 10Marconi first experimented with wireless transmissions. But it was the Americans (de Forest, Armstrong, Sarnoff, et al.) who made radio ubiquitous. Shipping distress calls, military communication, news reports, music, entertainment, commercial advertising, radar, and walkie-talkies became key uses of amplitude-modulated and frequency-modulated electromagnetic waves. The story of radio would be incomplete without discussing RCA, the FCC, patents, and lawsuits.