When the long evenings drew in at the end of 1925, families gathered around their new wireless sets and tuned in to the ether. With each twist of the dial, strange new sounds filled the air—beeps, jazz, and the faint, unintelligible voices of foreigners calling from distant lands—all borne upon the waves of what came to be called the "ether ocean."
With so many mysteries crackling through the air, the BBC launched a new service called "Which Station Was That?": a sort of Shazam for radio, powered by good old-fashioned human intelligence. Listeners would jot down whatever details they could—an estimated wavelength, the time, a guess at the language—on a small slip of paper and post it to the BBC, where a team of boffins would consult the hive mind to ascertain the sound's origins. The results appeared each week in a magazine column.
Reading these weekly snapshots offers a glimpse into radio's thrilling early days, when just the right amount of chaos filled the air to make anything seem possible. Radio announcers in Spain marked the hours by striking gongs. Morse code from ships at sea might cut across a church service. You could even follow along with gymnastic lessons—if you happened to speak Swedish.
I first stumbled across these remarkable columns nearly a decade ago, leafing through early editions of World Radio magazine (later folded into the beloved Radio Times). As a child of the early internet who grew up "surfing" from one personal webpage to another, I recognized the feeling immediately—the thrill of discovery in an unmapped world.
To mark the centenary of that moment, I'm launching a radio simulator that recreates this uncanny soundscape: Ether Ocean. I've tried to stay faithful to what the experience might have sounded like—from the whistles of frequency interference to the thumping bass that once made old radio cabinets hum. But most importantly, the interface is simple: a single dial from 0–180. No feeds, no popups, no overlays. When you tune in, it's just you and the ether.
A hundred years later, we live in very different times. But my hope is that by tuning in, we can recover some of that original wonder—and perhaps even connect with those voices that, for more than a century, have been calling out into the ether, hoping someone might listen.