Jacob Ward, Bodleian Libraries Byrne-Bussey Marconi Fellow, Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL, gives the 2018 Marconi lecture. The term 'wireless' has very different meanings today to what it meant in the early twentieth century. Today, it connotes mobility, flexibility, instantaneity, whereas previously it has connoted fixity - 'the' wireless - and spirituality, with transmitting invisible signals through the ether.

In this lecture, Jacob Ward explores what happened to 'wireless' in between these two meanings, from after World War II to the birth of the new wireless in the 1980s and 1990s, by exploring the imagination and imagery associated with wireless communications by its biggest proponents: the Marconi Companies.