Wireless
by Rudyard Kipling
 

Scribner's, August 1902

in Kipling collections
& anthologies

"Wireless" provides details about the earliest home-built radio sets (much antecedent to the crystal radio sets of the 1920s), analogous to contemporary experimenting with automobiles, and much later with home computer kits.

The atmosphere Kipling evokes of a cold winter's night in a small-town drugstore in England is very well done. The narrator is bemused by the drugstore paraphernalia, by the bitter cold of the night, and by the description of the new science of radio. But when a marginally literate drugstore clerk seems inspired to write down snatches of Keats' poetry, what does it signify?
  

I can't tell you more without retelling the story. But here's a bit, not referred to in "Wireless", from "The Eve of St. Agnes":

             ... Soon, up aloft,
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide:
The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests ...

At length burst in the argent revelry,
With plume, tiara, and all rich array,
Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
The brain ...

John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes  (1820)
The Poems of John Keats

© 2005 Robert Wilfred Franson

  
W.H. Stoddard's review of
Station X by G. McLeod Winsor