I blame scuba diving watches for this.  Add a bezel ring to a timepiece and it's just the thin end of the wedge!

Ever since wristwatches became popular during the First World War people have insisted on strapping new technologies to their forearms.  And we're not just talking timepieces here. Go into any of the geekier shops and you can find wrist compasses, barometers, GPS receivers, altimeters, thermometers, PDAs, cameras,  televisions, and (if you inhabit a Bond film) garrotte wires and laser beams. 

So it isn't surprising that one of the more common artefacts of Future Past was the wrist radio.   Dick Tracy would be naked without one.  The idea of having a two-way radio that you could wear like a Timex was pretty mind blowing at a time when radio sets were generally regarded as pieces of furniture and were filled with delicate glass radio valves that put out as much heat as an Easy Bake oven. 

The fly in the ointment was that wrist radios were a long time in coming, though there were some toy crystal sets and Dr. Cledo Brunetti produced an unsuccessful wrist radio in the late '40s. 

But that didn't stop enterprising DIY enthusiasts from trying to build their own wrist sets.   Of course, the lack of microminaturised circuitry was a bit of a bother, but if you didn't mind having nine tenths of the set riding in a box on your belt and a wire running to the "radio" on your wrist, you could have a passable device. 

Thing was, you couldn't pack much power into a set small enough to fit in a watch and even if you could build one with a range of more than half a mile you couldn't operate more than one pair in an area without having all the joys of a party line. 

Today, of course, we can make radios so small that you can swallow them and cell technology has removed the range and number issues, so wrist cell-phones are perfectly feasible, never mind simple two-way affairs.  So, why aren't we seeing them everywhere? 

Probably for the same reason that we don't see people using the speaker phone function on their cell phones: people don't like having private conversations in public.  Not to mention that you look a proper fool having a conversation with your watch. 

One canny variation on the wrist radio is this neat little British prediction from 1946 that shows a wrist device that receives the latest news as  text messages.  Utterly mad in its day, but, thanks to cell technology, now a reality for the half-gone news junkie. 

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