STEAM RADIO

[Q] From Eiður Svanberg Guðnason, Faroe Islands: Could you enlighten me about the origins of the English expression steam radio? Was the term born with television to distinguish the old “voice radio” from the new medium?

[A] That’s pretty much it. It was coined in the UK no later than the early 1950s at a time when television was the coming medium.

Radio, or sound broadcasting as it was still called in the BBC at the time, was starting to be thought old-fashioned and out of step with the times by the pioneers of television. It was also a period in which steam locomotives were being phased out on British railways and in which steam power had gained the image of a technology that was moribund and characteristic of the previous century. The equation of steam with old-fashioned most probably occurred to several people around this time and we may never learn whose fertile mind came up with it first.

The first example I know of is in a 1953 book by Percy Cradock, Recollections of the Cambridge Union, “Today radio broadcasting is so commonplace that the TV men speak of it patronisingly as ‘steam radio’.” Four years later, Val Gielgud, a pioneer of radio drama on the BBC in the 1920s, wrote that “The flight from ‘steam-radio’ to television has become an admitted rout.” Radio, of course, has long since shaken off this defeatist and depressing belief and is still a very important force in British broadcasting, belying the critics who thought it would waste away in the face of the visual medium.

Until I came to research the term, I had believed that it was the writers of the Goon Show, Spike Milligan in particular, who coined the term as a defensive epithet for the older medium. The show used it so often, however, with sound effects, that it must have done a lot to popularise it.

Not only has this English expression been borrowed into Icelandic, by the way, but also — Harald Beck tells me — into German, as Dampfradio. Doug Meyer commented that a similar idea exists among aircrew, who refer to conventional mechanical instruments as steam gauges, as opposed to the glass cockpit, in which information is presented to them via cathode ray tubes.

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