In This Issue

Hugh R. Slotten ("Radio's Hidden Voice: Noncommercial Broadcasting, Extension Education, and State Universities during the 1920s") studies radio stations which emerged in the 1920s as part of the educational mission of state universities, particularly those in the land grant tradition. Letters from listeners, one major element of Slotten's exhaustive evidentiary base, provide intimate perspectives on station-listener relations. Anecdote by anecdote, these letters build his case that early university stations, when studied at the level of operational detail, reveal a broadcast profile distinctly different from the emergent commercial radio networks of the same period. The university-based stations emphasized richly textured networks of relationships between those who produced and those who listened to radio programming. Their locally-oriented virtual communities were nurtured variously: through amateur-student radio personalities who attracted home-town fans, and through question-and-answer sessions addressing letters from listeners on issues of immediate concern. According to Slotten, "if, beginning in the late 1920s, commercial networks worked to standardize American society to better serve national advertisers . . . educational stations committed to noncommercial ideals affirmed connections to local communities" (p. 19). Slotten's account therefore suggests an early alternative vision of what radio might have become and, in the process, provides a glimpse of the conceptual origins of the network of National Public Radio stations in the United States which would emerge in the 1960s.

Vincent Guigueno ("Building a High-Speed Society: France and the Aerotrain, 1962– 1974") contends that Jean Bertin, the driving force behind the 1960s effort to establish the high-speed "Aerotrain" as part of France's transportation system, was not alone in seeking to develop breakthrough technologies through the application of aeronautical technology to new purposes. Reading of the efforts at Bertin et Cie to introduce a frictionless air-cushion train into France's postwar transportation network may remind readers of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House project. Bertin et Cie designed an airplane without wings that could move at aircraft speeds. Fuller self-consciously adopted the materials and construction protocols of aircraft manufacture to provide postwar homes for the mass market. Both ventures failed because neither established a viable fit between the new technology and its societal fabric. By 1969 Bertin's prototype had offered rides to some 15,000 passengers along a stretch of experimental track, "a kind of theme park for politicians and technocrats dreaming of an urban and technologically advanced France, and seeing the Aerotrain as one of its symbols" (p. 37). But in 1974, the Aerotrain project was terminated. France's new generation of high-speed trains would run on rail and would be designed from the outset as an integral part of the nation's matrix of local and long-distance rail transport. "The Aerotrain," observes Guigueno, "conquered a segment of the technocracy . . . but it didn't seduce the French" (p. 40), who chose instead to tackle the national task of building a technologically modern land-transportation system by integrating the new with existing technologies.

Paul Josephson ("The Ocean's Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick") treats the fish stick as a post–World War II exemplar of investments in production (notably, new factory trawlers capable of producing large frozen blocks of indiscriminately wedged together fish, as well as breakthroughs in freeze drying technologies), in distribution (including long haul shipping at appropriate temperatures and new supermarket freezer-display cases), and marketing (for busy moms with little time for labor intensive cooking). Does Josephson consider the fish stick story a history of success or failure—or both? Some of each, actually. After an early burst of sales following its 1953 introduction, the fish stick, an everyday item lacking much glamour, settled into a stable but modest place in American supermarkets. Using the company archives of Gorton's of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a leader among postwar fish-product manufacturers, Josephson explores the postwar evolution of seafood-processing technology. This firm's experience, he argues, "illuminates the challenges facing fish processors during the postwar years when new, scientifically tested products had to be developed, new regulatory pressures had to be met, and new foods had to be marketed in the changing retail setting of...