Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The Rhetoric of Technical Communication.-  Chapter 2. Analyzing Technology to Uncover Social Values, Attitudes, and Practices -- Chapter 3. Marconi's Representations of the Wireless -- Chapter 4. Popular Press Representations of Marconi's Wireless -- Chapter 5. Tropes of Progress in F.T. Marinetti's Early Futurist Texts -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References.

This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The wireless excited early twentieth-century audiences before it even became a viable black box technology. The wireless adhered to modernist values—speed, efficiency, militarization, and progress. Language surrounding the wireless is a form of technical communication, overlooked by today’s practitioners. This book establishes a broader definition for technical communication by examining a selection of the discourse surrounding Marconi's wireless. The book’s main themes are the following: 1) technical communication is all discourse surrounding technology, 2) the field of technical communication (or technical writing) should incorporate analyses of discourse surrounding technologies into its epistemology, 3) the wireless is a product of the society from which it comes (early twentieth-century Western civilization), and 4) the discourse surrounding the wireless is infused with tropes of progress—speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity.