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See www.seanclark.org and www.interactdigitalarts.uk for information about Sean Clark's current artwork and projects.

Crystal Radio Workshop

Sun, 15 Mar 2015

Crystal Radio Workshop

On Saturday, as an activity connected to Julian Oliver's exhibition at Phoenix in Leicester, I hosted a crystal radio making workshop at Interact Labs. The crystal radio (or crystal set) is a wonderful little device. It is the simplest possible radio receiver and despite being over one hundred years old it still has a magical quality to it.

Like many other people I first made a crystal set when I was a child. I remember being amazed how a bundle of wire, a couple of electrical components and an earpiece could be transformed in to something you could use to listen to radio stations from thousands of miles away. The whole thing was even more miraculous given the fact that it didn't require any external electrical power.

When I got my new crystal set working a couple of nights ago I had the exact same sense of wonder as I had as a child. Perhaps appropriately (since I live near Leicester) the first station I tuned in to was an Anglo-Indian channel with Indian music and English spoken word. The Bollywood tunes were literally "crystal clear" as they danced around the little earpiece.

As suggested by Julian Oliver's artwork, it can be argued that the crystal radio marked the beginning of the modern world. The invention of the telegraph (only half a century or so earlier) was itself a huge leap forward in communications. But voice and music? Transmitted wirelessly to millions of people in their homes and received on a device that could be made with a handful of parts. The impact of radio technology was world-changing.

The rate at which radio was developed was as impressive as the technology itself. The first audio radio transmission was in 1900, the BBC began broadcasting to the nation just 20 years later in 1920, and they were experimenting with broadcasting images over radio waves by 1932.

It's a timeline that was to be mirrored at the end of the century by the rise of the World Wide Web, another world-changing communication technology. I recall creating my first website in 1993. Just 22 years later and it's impossible to imagine a modern world without the web, and other Internet technologies.

I have a few crystal radio kits left over, so contact me if you would like to buy one. Or why not have a search on the internet and find out how to make one yourself? Julian Oliver's exhibition runs at Phoenix until 30th March. See my pictures from the workshop here.

Author: Sean Clark