One of the striking patterns on your site was how many complaints there were about radios. Now it seems like the biggest complaint are cell phones. Why?
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Yeah, that is intriguing and interesting. I think that amplified sound was still relatively new in the late 1920s. Initially people started listening to radios around the turn of the century. But commercial broadcast radio didn’t really begin until around 1920 and even then people originally listened through headphones and it was only around 1922, 1923 that radios and then phonographs came with loudspeakers and were electrically amplified sounds. So I think that certainly for people who have lived through that change it is a new kind of sound, a new volume, a new quality of sound.
Unfortunately the people who wrote in to complain didn’t indicate their age but as best as I can get a sense from the context of their letters we probably weren’t hearing from too many 20 year olds at the time. I would suggest that they probably were older people and older people probably bristled against the unfamiliarity as well as the inconvenience and the other problems associated with the noise of other people’s radios.
