Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Forgive me if today's post is a little poetic/incoherent, as I've just gotten back from a gathering of a few hundred producers in Woods Hole, Mass. We were there to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Transom, a non-profit education center has been a spiritual home for those who want to tell creative, human-centered stories in audio.

Most of the attendees slept in cabins rented out by the Marine Biological Laboratory. In buildings where scientists research the reproductive lives of cephalopods or changing ocean currents, we talked about interview techniques and story structure and scoring. Speakers knew this was a safe space to exclaim "fuck video!" and we would burst into both applause and tears of relief.

Cape Cod, where we met, happens to be the region where radio began in North America more than a century ago. Much of that technology, then called wireless telegraphy, was dedicated to communicating with ships, especially hearing their distress calls.

I believe the people who produce narrative audio are among the truest heirs of the wireless. That's because to do our work, we must deploy one of the oldest skills the technology demands: We listen.

We listen not just passively, but with active discernment for meaning against a backdrop of constant static, of noise.

When we set out to make an audio documentary or series, first we do research and then interview people, which means listening as we hold the mic. Later, we listen again to those recorded interviews, not only for the good bits, but also the threads of story we might have missed in person.

As we build the story, we listen again for emotional and musical subtexts. We listen (cringing) to the sound of our own voices in narration. After we assemble a first mix, we listen for the stuff that feels distracting, that gets in the way of deeper meaning. We often work in collaboration with other listeners, because it's really hard for one person to hear what's working after being close to this material for so long.

When we are done, we transmit our stories to the world via a system we call "the cloud." People point their wireless devices to this cloud and then hear our work.

Are we not wireless operators, too?

In the beginning there were wires — the telegraph, then the telephone. Wires could get noisy, particularly early telephone connections that produced sounds like "spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming."

When people first tried to send Morse code via bursts of electromagnetic radiation (then called "Hertzian waves") they used receivers attached, as with telegraph machines of the time, to ticker tape. The device would try to translate the radio signals into dots and dashes, but it looked a mess.

That's because the receivers were picking up all kinds of ambient electromagnetic waves from solar winds, from thunderstorms, from who knows what in outer space. Wireless telegraph machines had a hard time distinguishing signal from noise.

But there was a better receiver: the human ear. Inventor Guglielmo Marconi came up with a receiver that used magnets and wires (Marconi supposedly built a demo of this device with a cigar box, horseshoe magnets and wire from a florist's shop).

Marconi's new machine converted the bursts of Morse code into sounds that a telephone receiver could pick up. To leave their hands free to transcribe the signals, people started clamping the receivers to their heads. Voilà:

The more you read about broadcast history, the more you realize it's all about static. The quest to avoid sonic interference fueled the invention of the vacuum tube, FM radio, and the establishment of regulatory bodies like the FCC (now protecting the populace from the interference of late-night comedians).

Nowhere did atmospheric disturbances play a bigger role than in one of the foundational stories of radio: Marconi's infamous "Beacon Experiment," his 1901 attempt to prove Morse code could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean.

To accomplish this goal, which seemed impossible to most people at the time, the inventor took a ton of investor money and built a giant transmission tower in Cornwall, in the UK. And he started to build a giant receiving station in South Wellfleet, Cape Cod.

Years later, Marconi's daughter Degna retraced her father's steps and talked with some of the Cape Codders who helped Marconi scout a site and make his plans. But it all came to naught when a gale blew the antenna towers down.

"People of the Cape still speak of the terrible clamour and the sense of disaster that filled the night," she wrote in 1966.

Because Marconi had a lot riding on this experiment, he decided — pretty much in secret— to find another reception site up the coast. He and his assistants went up to Newfoundland, to a place aptly named Signal Hill, to use kites as the antennae.

On the appointed day of December 12th, Marconi announced that they'd distinctly heard the three dashes of the Morse-code "S" repeated in their headphones.

The newspaper coverage was breathless, but many scientists were skeptical. They said it was just the noise of the sky that Marconi heard.

A few years after the Beacon Experiment's 100th anniversary, amateur historians and radio operators teamed up to research and then try to replicate it. They concluded that the experiment probably worked, given the equipment and atmospheric conditions of the day. Feel free to nerd out on that study here.

I came to the story of wireless, naturally, via an audio doc: "The Letter S," by Canadian producer Chris Brookes, who lived in the same part of Newfoundland where Marconi's experiment took place. His piece is beautiful; it is weird; it contains the stilted voice of Marconi himself and all the voices of doubt and wonder that surrounded this famous transmission.

A decade after he made "The Letter S," Brookes wrote in Transom about his approach to radio:

What Brookes describes is the kind of humanistic exploration that every producer must learn to do in their own way. At Transom25, attendees would ask presenters like Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, aka The Kitchen Sisters, how they knew when a piece of scoring was right, or when they had enough material for a story.

"You just know it!" came the answer. But also: "You listen a LOT."

Were I to make a documentary about Marconi, I would go in a different direction than Chris Brookes did. I am fascinated Degna Marconi's book My Father Marconi, a poignant and — by its own admission — apocryphal attempt to explain the life of a man she rarely saw as a child, but whose impact she sensed through her mother, grandmother and siblings. Marconi cared about science, money, women and his kids, in that order.

But Degna has access to some incredible stories. She ends with her father — who'd long suffered from heart trouble — lying in bed after a bad day. In the middle of the night, he holds up his forearm and examines the artery.

According to his doctor, Marconi then asks, "How is it my heart has stopped beating and I am still alive?"

The doctor tries to reassure him that everything is fine.

"With a little wry smile he said: 'No my dear doctor, this would be correct for the veins but not for an artery,' showing that to him, as a scientist one could not tell pitiful lies which broke the laws of physics. And in fact he was perfectly right in his conclusion."

It was 1937. Guglielmo Marconi stopped breathing.

There's a lot about Marconi that his daughter really doesn't want to go into, especially his early and pretty consistent support for the regime of Benito Mussolini.

Some historians are convinced Marconi was researching a particle-beam weapon, something the dictator would have been more than happy to use in his monstrous invasion of Ethiopia, and beyond. That the inventor’s heart gave out when it did might have saved a lot of lives.

Literary scholar Timothy Campbell argues that wireless telegraphy and fascism are all tangled together, because "wireless writing" facilitated a language of command and conformity.

I see the connection between wireless radio and fascism as something even more primal: A kind of horror that arose when people were exposed, for the first time, to the chaos of sonic interference.

When a new technology opens the door to a multiplicity of voices and noises, it both thrills and disturbs us. After the novelty wears off, many want to retreat to an imagined past before all those voices appeared, a time when — so we believe — everything was simpler. A time, leaders claim, when wise men knew all the answers.

"The truth is that men are tired of liberty," the Mussolini (allegedly) said.

Today we are offered the fantasy again that a single voice can answer all our questions. Yes there are still over-confident leaders, but in a new twist, we now have an oracle in the cloud.

The oracle supposedly holds the sum of all human knowledge. We just call on it, and it appears by our side ready to help. Of course, this also terrifies and disgusts us, as the oracle threatens to bury meaning with "slop," senseless noise.

Does it really offer us a signal? Or just more electrical hash?

It is in this zone of uncertainty that we, the wireless operators of today, matter most. We have long trained our ears to detect meaningful signals inside human voices and the sonic world around us.

We recognize the distress calls, even as they fall between static bursts of lightning and the sky's thunderous reply.