Work in Progress.

Well, let us try yet again. Below should appear the preface from the book I'm writing; I just copied it and will now paste it in.

Cautionary Preface

I wrote this book entirely off the top of my head. A curious expression: I mean I wrote it entirely out of the contents of my mind.[1]I didn’t check any dates or facts,[2] I gaily ignored some things that might cause a reader to say ‘hold on a minute’, and I spent time nit-picking where the reader might say ‘Oh, do get on with it.’ Even so, I don’t think there’s anything so wildly wrong that it will seriously mislead. Besides, the readers I’m after are ones I hope to entertain at least as much as edify or inform and the wrong is notoriously more fun than the right.

This is a book about the history of Wireless in the sense that Moby-Dick is a book about fishing or Between the Acts one about a village fête. You will find in the main text what is I hope a straightforward account, all the way from Faraday’s experiments with magnets and coils in the mid nineteenth century to the arrival of transistors in the mid twentieth. Any readers who are interested only in that, and have no interest in, to name just a few things, metaphysics, vintage motorcycle clubs, music, Sod’s Law, Proust, and Greek etymology should ignore the footnotes and especially the footnotes to the footnotes.[3]The curious and perverse who have little interest in wireless but picked the book up anyway might like to skim the main text and concentrate on the footnotes.

[1] Even if we subscribe to the quaint notion that the mind and the brain are one and the same^α, the top of my head would hardly be the place: it would be somewhere inside the brain; the frontal lobes, I suppose.

^α the Mind-Brain Identity Theory turned up in the mid twentieth century, the product of a group of philosophers. (They were Australian, which some might think a mitigating circumstance.) It looks easy to refute: the brain is a physical object inside the skull, white, (it seems it’s not grey), having a certain weight and volume and gloopy consistency. The mind is none of these things. To be fair, the theory has ways round these obvious objections, but why bother?

[2] But then of course if they’re facts they don’t need checking do they? A fact is a fact is a fact, as Gertrude Stein didn’t say. What need checking are statements, to see whether or not they are (in fact) statements of fact.

[3] Persuading Microsoft Word that one can have footnotes to footnotes wasted a lot of my time, as the essays of the excellent David Foster Wallace suggest it must have wasted a lot of his.

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