Radio Broadcasting by Gordon Bathgate is a new publication from the excellent Pen & Sword History. It comprehensively covers the history of radio broadcasting from Marconi and his predecessors up to 2019. Although it majors on Britain, the USA and Australia & New Zealand, Europe is covered fairly well too. Typically for Pen & Sword, there is a lot of information in this book. However, anyone who is interested in radio will wallow in that detail! The Marconi Company began the first officially approved broadcast service to Britain in 1922 from station 2MT although radio hams had been transmitting speech and music to the London area since 1920. 2MT gave rise to a sister station in London: 2LO, with a transmitter power of 100 watts. That’s right, the same as a household light bulb before Nanny stopped us buying them. In 1920, Station 2ADD in New York produced what is likely to have been the first public entertainment broadcast in the US. The US government at that time wasn’t keen on foreign control of its international communications and pressured Marconi to sell its operations to an American firm. OTL in Belgium, however, was broadcasting musical entertainment in early 1914. There is humour in the book. Bathgate mentions Mexican stations broadcasting into the US that didn’t have to abide by US laws: “Another radio evangelist reportedly was trying to sell listeners autographed photos of Jesus Christ.” And the image of sound engineers producing the sound of splattering blood and guts using a bathroom plunger and warm spaghetti will stay with me for a while. The BBC Board of Governors weren’t impressed with the American artistes heard on the Force Programme during the war, even though the public loved the programme. The Board’s minutes stated “Popularity noted, but deplored.” Although Bathgate mentions Radio Caroline North, which was stationed off the Isle of Man, he doesn’t mention that the pejorative term “anoraks” arose from the DJs seeing the fans in wet weather gear who wanted to go out on a boat the see the station. This is a very well written and edited book. I didn’t spot any spelling punctuation or grammatical errors - hurrah! The only quibble that I have – and it really is a nerdy minor one – is that the book doesn’t explain the logic behind the early station call-signs. We had 2MT and 2LO but then Birmingham became 5IT. Why the jump in numbering? I told you it was a minor quibble! #RadioBroadcasting #NetGalley