The earliest such volume, John Trowbridge's Story of a Wireless Telegraph Boy (1908) appears to be the first children's book focusing on radio. This was followed by Harrie Irving Hancock's The Motor Boat Club and the Wireless; or, The Don, Dash and Dare Cruise ( 1909); James Otis',The Wireless Station at Silver Fox Farm (1910); and one of the famous Tom Swift series-Victor Appleton's (pseudonym for Howard Garis) Tom Swift and His Wireless Message; or, The Castaways of Earthquake Island (1911). After 1912 the pace picked up, with several other wireless and radio-related boys titles, including the first multivolume radio series-the six-title The Ocean Wireless Boys, in which high school boy Jack Ready and friends use wireless to find a lost ocean liner, warn ships away from icebergs, and fight in World War I. Likely influenced by the Titanic disaster, many of the later wireless stories show how radio can help ensure the safety of ships at sea.

     By far the best-known and most hotly collected titles today are the two Radio Boys series that appeared in the 1920s under the names of Gerald Breckenridge and Alan Chapman (the latter a pseudonym) for a number of different syndicate authors. Unlike the earlier wireless tales, most of the Chapman series took place on dry land (though each featured a different short preface by S.S. Republic wireless hero Jack Binns). The first volume had the boys building a radio in order to win a cash prize, and in others, the boys share their hobby by taking their radio equipment to homes for the aged, hospitals, and other venues where the less fortunate would not otherwise have access to this wondrous new device. Chapman's radio boys were of working-class background, and many of their adventures took place near their small town in New York. In all 13 books of the Chapman series, the same two story elements are repeated and resolved: a local group of bullies is thwarted using nonviolent methods, and a criminal is brought to justice using radio, resulting in accolades from the community. During the eight-year run of the Chapman series, his boys remained the same age and in the same year in school.

     The Breckenridge radio boys series is quite different. Though written during the same period, these boys are of upper-middle-class background: their fathers are doctors, lawyers, and bankers. The Breckenridge radio boys grow up, age, and progress in school during the series. And whereas the Chapman boys spend some time away from their small town, the Breckenridge youth travel the world, go to Yale, and become embroiled in foreign adventure. In a story very atypical of a juvenile series, The Radio Boys as Soldiers of Fortune (1925), radio boy-now-man Jack, having graduated from college, gets married and moves to Mexico to learn an aspect of the family business. Jack befriends local citizens who are trying to oust the current dictator and return a popular democracy to power. In a bizarre twist, Jack invents television, called a "televisor," and uses it to spy on the dictator and thus ensure his removal and replacement by democratic forces. This early portrayal of television is quite realistic.

     What unites both series is the hobby of radio and its use in keeping communities safe while promoting law and order. What differentiates them is their focus and the career paths depicted in the stories. Whereas the Chapman boys stay in high school and experiment with radio locally, the Brecken­ ridge boys graduate from college and go into banking, medicine, and the law. Not a career in radio for these savvy lads, but the hobby of radio as entertainment, as a way to spend their newfound wealth. Another difference may have been in the focus of the series publisher: Chapman was a pseudonym used by the Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate, the major owner of juvenile series in the first third of the 20th century. Stratemeyer would develop a story synopsis and then hire writers to do the book under the pseudonym, and so volumes in the same series were often written by different writers. Gerald Breckenridge was not part of the syndicate; he used his own name, and it is possible that he enjoyed writing about his boys' aging and progressing through life. Unlike the syndicate writers, Brecken­ ridge likely had more artistic freedom, as long as he sold books.

     At least two other Radio Boys series were published, and by 1922 a Radio Girls series, though of only four titles, appeared. By the next decade, when broadcasting was more fully formed, Ruthe S. Wheeler's Janet Hardy in Radio City ( 1935) featured a high school performer who gets the lead in a film, writes a radio script, and ends up in Radio City for its premiere. Betty Baxter Anderson's Four Girls and a Radio (1944) included broadcast entertainment consisting of accordion and vocal, and Julie Campbell's Ginny Gordon and the Broadcast Mystery (1956) featured a young woman who discovers she has talent as a radio interviewer and a solver of mysteries.

     Radio broadcasting was commonplace when Franklin W.Dixon's The Hardy Boys and the Short Wave Mystery (1944) was introduced, but there was still hobby interest. Tracking down the source of an illegal transmission used in a smuggling operation, the boy aid law enforcement and further post­ World War II interest in amateur radio. The Hardy Boys was but one of several longer juvenile fiction series that featured at least one story centering on radio; others included The Bobb­sey Twins, The Navy Boys, The Brighton Boys, and Bert Wilson. Series that continued into the 1950s, such as Tom Swift Jr. and Rick Brant Electronic Adventures, used radio and combined it, actually overwhelmed it, with undersea adventure, microelectronics, space science, and robotics, but radio transmission was always at the basis of their experiments, and saving the day-for local law enforcement, the government, the armed services, and the community-was always the overriding use portrayed for radio.

     Nearly all such books followed a basic pattern. Running 250 or more pages in most cases, with a frontispiece drawing or painting featuring the heroes at a key point in the story, the books offered fast-moving adventure stories wrapped in gaudy dust wrappers (few of which survive today). Their titles were often formatted with a main title followed by or and a subtitle hinting at the excitement within. The writing was often exaggerated and certainly old-fashioned by today's standards, and stories sometimes ended with a cliff-hanging reference to the next book in the series. The heroes or heroines rarely aged, though a series might appear over nearly a decade. Using cheap paper and inexpensively bound, these books were intended to be enjoyed and discarded, and few survive today in good condition.

     More than entertainment, the depiction of radio in early juvenile novels may have influenced and reinforced some of the cultural and social convictions held by young people. More than merely a technical device, radio in these novels was almost always related to the ideals and preservation of community and family, career choice, patriotism, and attitudes about law and crime, and the stories may have encouraged their young readers toward discovery and invention as adults. There is a clear "right and wrong" point of view in these books, and the books champion the radio hero who uses wireless and later broadcasting to do good for communities, to preserve a way of life, to promote a common good, and to save lives.

     What was the real significance of radio as depicted in such novels? First, the simple stories mirrored the public fantasy and its knowledge and sometimes misunderstanding of communication and later entertainment using this 20th-century invention. The stories traced the evolution of radio from a spark-gapped, Morse-coded curiosity into a powerful medium to which everyone listened. These stories of young men and women of high school age mostly provided escape, but in the process, both the hobby and the business of radio and broadcasting were portrayed as a force for public service, for the good of community, and a way to reinforce our view of ourselves. Overwritten though they are, these books remain a wonderful window on the excitement created first by wireless and later by radio broadcasting. The "gee-whiz" nature of the stories and the central role of radio in each is a good indicator of the general public fascination with cat's whiskers, DXing, silent nights, and crystal sets.