Of course, the recipients of all this good fortune were the backers of the newly formed RCA, which officially bought out American Marconi in April 1920. RCA then went into a frenzy of marketing activity to establish its brand and clear any confusion over who was the new master of the wireless era. Trademarks such as the vintage “World Wide Wireless” logo became prominent, to indicate that RCA was in the business of transoceanic and overland communications. It expanded the war-delayed operations of American Marconi and accelerated the introduction of new equipment to transmit and receive signals, partnering with GE and, later, Westinghouse Electric Corp. And it investigated a new portion of the spectrum called “short wave” to identify any potential business applications it might offer.

One of the first trademarks RCA registered was a brand identity for its new line of receivers, Radiola. In the fall of 1920, Westinghouse, which had missed out on most of the profitable pieces of the radiotelephony action RCA inherited, decided to fund an experiment in its hometown of Pittsburgh—to transmit audio transmissions to those who owned amateur reception sets that monitored short-wave signals. Granted the call letters KDKA, the new station was soon broadcasting regularly scheduled programming to any users who could monitor its transmission. A local department store noticed the development and began offering low-end receivers at cut-rate prices. The public caught the lure and the store was mobbed with radio customers. They could now listen to phonograph “concerts” and live news and weather reports over the airwaves—for free. Within weeks, a national craze was in full bloom. Demand for low-cost receivers skyrocketed across the nation. And the single biggest technology boom of the 1920s was under way. Making money from using transmitters to broadcast audio content to sell incredible numbers of receivers was the most prosperous enterprise of the decade. It was practically a license to print currency.

So RCA shifted its business model on a veritable dime. The person who recommended the new approach to his superiors was named David Sarnoff, the company’s commercial manager, and he set out to make the name Radiola synonymous with tuning in to broadcasting. While RCA started out behind Westinghouse in the race to cash in on receiver sales, it roared from behind in a hurry, through product innovation and marketing, to overcome the first mover. This is where Wenaas’s book becomes a saga. Little that transpired from 1922, when RCA became a serious player in the broadcast radio arena, to 1929, when the first rumblings of a collapsing U.S. economy threatened to disrupt the ravenous appetite of Americans for newer and better radio sets (many of which were now elegant appliances), escapes the author’s notice.

Wenaas covers the territory in such comprehensive detail that the casual reader will be excused from doing more than scanning the introductions and summaries of chapters (and, of course, admiring the period illustrations) and leaving to the hardcore enthusiast the serious slogging through descriptions of new Radiola models and accessories. He includes a valuable afterword, in which he contributes a succinct account of how RCA managed to weather the Great Depression years, most notably by reorganizing its operations and removing itself, with the help of federal antitrust regulation as fate would provide, from the corporate parents that had come to dominate its interests, notably GE, Westinghouse, and AT&T. Beyond this, RCA’s progress under the leadership of an ascendant David Sarnoff is a story that most of the general public will know from history lessons or childhood memories.

Obviously, Wenaas has poured his heart into this work. Radiola is a masterpiece in a magnifying glass, like an old-fashioned form of artwork that emphasized exacting precision to produce a landscape of wonderful detail. On the dust jacket, he mentions that he “has been interested in collecting antique radios and crystal sets since his youth when he experimented with radio devices and repaired radios and televisions as a hobby.” Now retired, after a long career in electrical engineering pursuits in the defense sector, Wenaas states that his avocation has returned to understanding the history of the first marvels of engineering produced in the Age of Radio.

This handsome coffee-table book is a fine testament to how seriously the author took that assignment. If you’re a true radiophile too, you'll want to have a copy of it.