This here column is all for celebrations, and we're happy to add our hurrahs to the hip-hips coming out of Donnybrook this weather, toasting what they call 75 years of Irish radio.
Nonetheless, we shouldn't forget that what they and we are marking is three-quarters of a century of a particular institution, the apostolic succession that begins with Douglas Hyde's voice on 2RN on January 1st, 1926, runs through the glory days of Radio Eireann from the 1930s to the 1960s, and lives today in every 2FM jingle and every garbled file in RTE's Internet archive.
Even if the State broadcaster has had legal transmission all to itself for more than three-quarters of its history, let's recall that there is another story of radio in Ireland, that the first "broadcast" worthy of the name here - some say the first in the world - took place not 75 years ago, but 85 years ago, under heavy artillery fire.
Now there's an anniversary to mark - but if it weren't for a story on the front of this newspaper's "Commercial Property" supplement last month (of course I read that, don't you?), this column would have forgotten all about it. It seems a bank building on the corner of O'Connell Street and Abbey Street in Dublin is being sold or let or something (I said I read "Commercial Property", not that I have total comprehension or recall), and it used to house the school of wireless telegraphy.
And that's where the 1916 rebels got a transmitter going on Easter Tuesday and told the world about the Rising (the initiative is credited to that relatively pragmatic lot in the Irish Citizen Army).
So depending on whether you prefer the ecclesiastical calendar or the normal sort to mark these anniversaries, the 85th anniversary of this historic broadcast is either next week or the week after that - soon enough to start hanging bunting from your Walkman today, anyway.
Of course, the 1916 station wasn't pumping out rebel ballads - unless it's your thing to get pissed and shout along to a series of dots and dashes. Listeners far and wide were treated to the news from Sackville Street in Morse code. Mind you, the relatively few people in the world with receiving equipment would have been used to that.
The claims to priority for this broadcast aren't to do with the technology, which was well established. They have to do, instead, with the intended audience, i.e. anyone who would tune in: the rebels were casting broad, not narrow, for listeners. And the message apparently did get out, as far away as the US, where the short-lived station got its news into New York newspapers.
I am no expert, but I don't know of any objections to the claim that this broadcast was an Irish first. Its cutting-edge global claims, however, can only be sustained with the help of a dictionary that defines "radio broadcast" narrowly - perhaps, for example, as "transmissions sent out from a national rebellion to an undifferentiated international audience".
After all, 10 years before the Rising, thousands of enthusiasts in the US were able to tune in to a station broadcasting voice, not Morse code; and in 1915, a spoken message made it from the Eiffel Tower to Arlington, Virginia. The Easter rebels were sharp and brave and adaptive in this regard, but technologically speaking they were scarcely beating Marconi to the punch.
In the modern era, I doubt that even RTE and Today FM, let alone the Independent Radio and Television Commission, would want to follow the British lead and use snipers and gunboats against unlicensed radio.
Some readers may be uncomfortable with the notion of celebrating military despatches and granting them pioneer status. Unfortunately, however, the broadcasts are a military footnote to what is largely a military story: although radio was invented well over 100 years ago, its rapid development in the early part of the 20th century owes more than a little to the technological race that preceded and ran through "the war to end all wars". As I write this, I'm thumbing through a fascinating little volume called Radio For All, published in 1922 by US radio enthusiast H. Gernsback, who breezily refers to "the great role" radio technology "will play . . . in the next war". Like that of your car, your computer and the next aircraft you fly on, the development of radio has blood and shrapnel all over it.
Anyway, when Ireland went on the air officially in 1926, it was already five years behind my own beloved New Jersey, cradle of broadcasting. I have to admit Ireland has done it rather better, though.
One of the niftier things about radio transmissions, and their TV cousins, is the way they just carry on into space. So an alien starfleet 85 light years away is only now setting its translators to work deciphering Morse-code messages from James Connolly - tragically far too late to help. Matt Groening's Futurama cartoon, set in AD 3000, has done the funniest take I've seen on this techno-fact: an advanced species, residing on a planet 1,000 light years away, zaps a mother ship to Earth, where the crew threaten to wreak destruction on our planet unless they are shown the 1999 season finale of something called Single Female Lawyer.
Similarly, when we ourselves look and listen into outer space, we're stuck with old news from the cosmos, if not (yet) old soaps and sitcoms.
The first programme in Martin Redfern's new series, Living Universe (BBC World Service, Friday, repeated Saturday, Monday and Tuesday), reminded us what a boon this history lesson is for our understanding of the nature of creation. Powerful radio telescopes are picking up waves from many billions of light years "away", and bringing us pretty darn close to the origin of everything.
Redfern is never less than ambitious in his globe-trotting forays, and here he's spanning the orb to hear from the astronomers who are looking at and listening to the early cosmos. This time, however, he's struggling a bit for both liveliness and coherence. He's trying, as the Living Universe title suggests, to illustrate an intriguing new metaphor (or is it?) that views astronomical objects as analogous to biological systems, so that these boffins talk unselfconsciously about the birth, evolution and death of stars and galaxies, and about steady-state systems in their relationships.
Their "organic" language, which also included "cheese", "pie", "bubbles" and "fingers" in the first programme, ended up as more of a burden than a clarifier; its ability to explain, as opposed to its mere novelty, certainly never became obvious. Living Universe is dealing with big and admittedly still-mysterious ideas, so it probably needs more than 25 minutes before a final judgment can be made. Maybe we should wait and see what the aliens make of it.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie
