Empire of the Air
The Men Who Made Radio

I enjoyed this book. I liked the writing style and the conversational tone. The biographical information is excellent and Tom Lewis portrays the main characters vividly and realistically, showing their strengths and flaws. This book is certainly not a hagiography to the inventors of the radio. I lik......more

It was a good (if wordy) look at three men who really founded and furthered the radio industry: Lee De Forest---always striving for fame, petty, and a lackluster inventor who accidentally discovered the audion based on another's invention. Howard Armstrong---True engineer and the real inventor behin......more

A warm introduction to the history of radio and broadcasting? Why bother? It's the beginning of the digital age.......more

This narrative history isn't primarily technical nor is it a study of all the corporations spawned by the new medium, which is what I expected. It's part group biography (Marconi, DeForest, Steinmetz, Armstrong and Sarnoff among others), part technical history but mostly a history of the Radio Corpo......more