This thesis aims to identify and explain how, through the consumption of the wireless as a modern consumer durable, modernism was brought to society. To understand this process, the study will map how social change during the period responded to wider intellectual and aesthetic currents and trends but was driven by emergent commercial, cultural and political economies of a newly mediated society. Furthermore, it seeks to establish that this happened not as a result of social engineering through model housing schemes but as a result of consumer-led demand. This investigation considers how, as part of that newly mediated social environment, the wireless developed following its arrival on the domestic market without having adopted a single stylistic form. It addresses how that form, both stylistically and technically, evolved over a relatively short period to address the economic and cultural requirements and expectations of a new electrically powered domestic entertainment technology. In so doing, a discourse will be established considering these expectations and requirements related to how the wireless in Britain adopted and adapted the Modernist design idiom. It will further consider how the language of Modernism was propagated as the accepted version of what a radio could or should look like, so developing the modernist paradigm in a broader sense. To gain an appreciation of this it is necessary to understand the contemporary public conception of what the modern was in a more general sense. To decipher this public perception of modernity the project aims to extrapolate that public conception through examining other popular forms and products. Although this suggests that Radio was not alone in adopting the language of the moderne, as a product it is notable for its widespread commercial success and as such can be identified as a significant carrier of the coded message of what was modern. Design historians such as Yagou and Forty have attempted to incorporate radio into various strands of historical perception but the typologies they have devised to describe and understand wireless fall short in addressing the relationship between modernity and the wireless and instead see the wireless in terms of being an independent consumer product, a quasi-scientific instrument or else a furnishing form, rather than creating categories which accommodate the wireless and its position as a design type in its own right. To overcome this shortcoming a strand of this thesis seeks to argue that the wireless was itself a proto-modernist device during the early years of market expansion. That device then developed along a natural stylistic course embracing contemporary decorative ideas. By assessing the response of radio manufacturers to the socio-economic conditions of their market, this study has highlighted how through producing a product which addressed contemporary ideas of glamour, ease of use and functionality, the wireless entered a wide range of homes during the 1920s and 1930s. For the public, the immediate appeal of the wireless was that it provided access to the international experience of listening in while simultaneously it provided a template for the consumer to base their understanding of the modern World, both in its mediated form and stylistic appearance. This thesis seeks to demonstrate that during the period 1925 to 1939, the wireless established itself as an unashamedly modern device which appealed to a broad socio economic cross section of the public. By consuming the wireless, the British public accepted a significant technological and stylistic aspect of modernity into their homes. This was achieved despite the privations of the era because of the perceived desirability of wireless broadcasts and the perception of listening in as a popular leisure activity. As a result of that consumer demand, the British public was given access to a range of stylistic versions of modernity through the design of radio cabinetry. These modern styles were readily consumed throughout the social spectrum in preference to historicist alternatives. This demonstrates that the wireless was instrumental in introducing the modernist aesthetic to the British domestic environment.

There is an increasing interest in the deployment of wireless communication systems in vehicles. The motivation for this work is to provide a fundamental characterisation of the in-vehicle Electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation environment, and to demonstrate how this can be used to aid the deployment of wireless communication systems in vehicles. The fundamental characterisation of the in-vehicle EM wave propagation environment presented in this dissertation yields a number of useful outcomes. The instantaneous impulse response of the in-vehicle channel is characterised, which is presented in the form of a statistical model for arriving rays. Noticing that it is impractical to undertake a full statistical characterisation of the time-varying impulse response, the time variation of the in-vehicle channel is instead characterised as a Doppler spread. This approach provides parameters which are sufficient to perform an information theoretic analysis to lower bound the capacity of the in-vehicle channel. For typical operating conditions, it is found that the channel capacity is approximately equal to that of the same channel with perfect channel state information available at the receiver. Having established the fundamental EM wave propagation characteristics for a single in-vehicle wireless channel, the EM properties of the cavity itself are characterised. This is achieved through a thorough investigation into the analogy between vehicle cavities and reverberation chambers, specifically considering the quality factor (and hence time constant), EM isolation, and electric field uniformity of typical vehicle cavities. This approach yields the important insight that the root mean square delay spread is approximately the same for all wireless links in a typical vehicle cavity. Also, that the angular spread of energy received at any given location (away from the cavity boundaries) is approximately uniform, and that over short distances the coherence distance is well defined, and hence Multiple Input Multiple Output antenna arrays should work well in vehicles. To what extent a typical wireless system can exploit this characterisation depends on how well the parameters can be estimated by a typical wireless communication system. This is also addressed, specifically investigating the estimation of the cavity time constant, and channel time variation. It is found that both of these can be estimated well using a typical wireless sensor network system.