Eighty-one years ago, a broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds supposedly caused mass hysteria in America, as listeners thought martians had invaded New Jersey. There are varying accounts of the controversial incident, and it remains a topic of fascination, even today. Back when Welles’s fictional martians attacked, broadcast radio was considered a state-of-the-art technology. And since the first transatlantic radio signal was transmitted in 1901 by Guglielmo Marconi, radio has greatly innovated the way we communicate.

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