Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television

Mr. Wizard's World. Bill Nye the Science Guy. NPR's Science Friday. These popular television and radio programs broadcast science into the homes of millions of viewers and listeners. But these modern series owe much of their success to the pioneering efforts of early-twentieth-century science shows like Adventures in Science and "Our Friend the Atom." Science on the Air is the fascinating history of the evolution of popular science in the first decades of the broadcasting era.      Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette transports readers to the early days of radio, when the new medium allowed innovative and optimistic scientists the opportunity to broadcast serious and dignified presentations over the airwaves. But the exponential growth of listenership in the 1920s, from thousands to millions, and the networks' recognition that each listener represented a potential consumer, turned science on the radio into an opportunity to entertain, not just educate.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette is an independent historian who has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, the George Washington University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910-1955, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century.