Editing The World Wars (section)

==Notes==
[[File:Cathedral Radio.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''"...We now return to the adventures of Bobby Gill and the Imperium Boys, brought to you by George Rough Ridin' Martin's Jackets. Bundle up tight, because Winter is Coming!"'']]
*Radio! While radio was being used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of mass media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger ''Volksempfanger''] radio sets to get one in every german house to feed a steady stream of Nazi propaganda to the German masses. FDR's famous "fireside chats" were made possible by radio, as was the speed and shock power that defined ''Blitzkrieg''.
**A quirk of Radio of this time was as a major part of the standardization of language. Beforehand most people learned how to speak from their families, friends and neighbours and accents were far more pronounced. While other things such as railways and records had some impact, having a radio set meant that there was a voice being piped into your parlour every day. It also meant that the speaker needed a Radio Voice: something which was legible to the audience especially with the crappy speakers of the early 20th century. In the UK this lead to Received Pronunciation (the clipped middle class UK accent the Imperials use in Star Wars) while in the US they went with the Midatlantic Accent (that sort of posh way you here people talk in old hollywood movies) and eventually a Midwestern Accent.
*During this time science fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed people's lives, there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, radio and pulp magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to a wide audience. Ideas such as Rockets, Robots, the towering cities of the future, day to day life in them and the future of human evolution were all discussed. The downside of this was that there was also a ''lot'' of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shovelled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of atomic warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers. 
*Art Deco became a thing during this time and remains iconic to this day. Breaking with traditional European styles, its stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments became widely popular. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which was important in an era when cars, planes and trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph.
* Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in assembly line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the gold standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet. On the other hand it could be really fucking boring for the people on the line whose job was to slot one bit of metal into another every twenty seconds for eight hours a day. It would remain king until the Japanese worked out Just-In-Time manufacturing in the 60s.
* These improvements in manufacturing evolved further with the invention of modern quality control. While America did have the largest manufacturing base at the start of WWII, it experienced many teething problems such as explosive shells failing to explode, or vehicle parts not being cross-compatible between factories. And without extremely tight tolerances, many newer technologies couldn’t be developed. New disciplines in measuring tolerances and conforming to standards helped improve the quality of these technologies. After the war, though, these standards were gradually relaxed as meeting them was expensive and American civilian manufacturers had little economic reason to make extremely high quality products, what with most of their competitors trying to rebuild from the war. Ironically enough, it would be the Japanese that would rediscover and improve upon QA tools to become an economic powerhouse in the postwar era.
* The [[Superhero]] Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
*In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. The first Conan the Barbarian was written in 1932 and the [[The Hobbit]] was released in 1937. [[The Lord of the Rings]] was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the '50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but all the pieces were there and coming together.
* Everybody smoked like fucking chimneys. In the late 19th century cigarette-making machines were developed and cigarette companies started using modern advertisement methods. Cigarettes were advertised to soldiers in WWI as a way to "relieve stress" which family members could send to the front as gifts, to women as "torches of freedom" in the 20s and 30s, and in WWII the cigarette companies made deals with the military to provide cigarettes as part of every soldier's ration pack. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was first found in 1939 by Franz Muller (and highly politically motivated at that, as Hitler famously hated cigarette smoke), but his work was met with reasonable if misplaced skepticism given that it was done in Nazi Germany and it would not be until 1950 that non-Nazis came to the same conclusions. (Hitler of all people was famed for his anti-smoking stance; he harangued his friends and cronies endlessly about the negative effects of cigarettes and even offered them gold watches as an incentive to quit.) By 1945, the average American adult smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year. True Anti-Smoking campaigns like we see today, and the general trend of people quitting smoking is only a very recent occurrence though. Just zap into any archived footage of a talk show on TV of that time and you will be amazed at how casually everyone has their own personal ash tray and is sucking on cigars and cigarettes. 
** As a sidenote, Cigarette brands were one of the avenues American cultural influence started to slowly entrench itself into the public consciousness in western countries and revolutionized product advertisement. Before WW2, most countries had their own Tobacco industries, especially France and Germany, and every country their own local brands of cigarettes. The introduction of the much smoother American Virginia tobaccos changed global tastes in tobacco significantly; the old traditional European brands (like Roth-Händle or Gauloises before they were bought out) were reviled by younger people who didn't enjoy the sensation of having their lungs forcibly cut out by Cigarettes with lovely nicknames such as "Lung Torpedo". Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Camel were pushed by novel advertising strategies that emphasized brand recognition over the quality of the product itself, so if you wonder why Coca-Cola somehow still feels the need to spend millions each year on advertising, this is why.