"Why do you write? Can’t you remember?"

In 1916 David Sarnoff sent a memo to the director of the American Marconi Company advocating the idea of a music box(radio receiver) in the home. It was ignored. That was the year of the Irish Easter rebellion and of the first radio broadcast.

Wireless had already been used on ships as ship-to-shore ‘telegraph’. The Irish rebels used a ship’s wireless to make, not a point-to-point message, but a diffused broadcast in the hope that getting word to some ship that would relay their story to the American press. And so it proved.

Even after broadcasting had been in existence for some years, there was no commercial interest in it. It was the amateur operators or hams and their fans, whose petitions finally got some action in favor of the setting up of facilities.

There was reluctance and opposition from the world of the press. To those, this fact is quite as baffling as literacy is to natives, who say, “Why do you write? Can’t you remember?"

- 『Understanding Media :: The Extensions of Man』, Marshall McLuhan