MUST-301 Lessons

As the students enter, they see papers strewn all over the walls and tables. Some are familiar newspapers and magazines with instantly recognizable faces, and others are unknown and written in foreign languages. Most interestingly, the photos plastered on their front pages are static, with oddly still people staring back at their reader. 

Good day, class, and welcome back to Muggle Studies! You are nearing the end of your first year with me, and I hope you have so far had an excellent journey into the world of Muggles. We’ve merely dipped our toe into the culture that Muggles have created for themselves, and we still have so much to cover. So without further ado, let’s get started with today’s lesson.

One of the biggest differences between Muggles and ourselves, aside from the obvious magical difference, is how we all entertain ourselves. After all, non-magical people do not own things such as flying broomsticks or the ability to travel instantly using a Portkey. While we will go more in depth into fun and games later on this year, I wanted to use this lesson to discuss some important developments in the history of Muggles that you may have not interacted with before.

Read All About It

Something I’m sure you’re aware of though is the newspaper. If you are based in Britain, you are surely aware of our magical newspaper, The Daily Prophet. The Prophet is the only national paper of its kind in this country, although there are plenty of other newspapers in the world, as well as other British publications, such as The Quibbler. Both of these examples of written news sources are read by many people in this country every day to gather information about the world around them. Huge events such as war developments and major crimes are often covered front and center, but smaller more local news may be covered in these newspapers and magazines as well. 

Magical people have their own newspapers and magazines, but Muggles do as well. It is common for witches and wizards to read these Muggle papers as well to keep watch over what is happening in the world of non-magical people, as it may affect us as well. If you have not seen a Muggle newspaper before, you may observe the differences using the examples I have supplied throughout the classroom.

A note on the most observable difference between the two types of newspapers: their respective photographs. The photos used in the Prophet move as they are enchanted to do so. This is designed to give the reader more of an idea about what happened while the photo was being taken. In contrast, the photos in Muggle newspapers are not enchanted, and thus do not move in any way. 

Muggle newspapers generally only publish and circulate a copy once a day (unlike the Prophet, which often publishes both a morning and evening edition). A Protean Charm may be used to alter previous editions of the Prophet if new information is discovered, but traditional Muggle papers do not have this option. Once writing is printed on paper, it is stuck there. Thus, there are often follow-up articles in following papers to bring updates and corrections if applicable. 

Newspapers are a good way of receiving new information about the world, but it is not the only way to do so. Generally speaking, newspapers are slow and outdated even if they are circulated daily. This is even more accurate for Muggles who do not have the ability to magically update their papers. Thus, technologies have been invented to share news more quickly with the Muggle community.

It Comes in Waves

The following technologies we will discuss today are used to make information travel much more quickly than the printed word. They both utilize a natural property all around us, even now, called electromagnetic waves. There are many different kinds of these waves that are used to do various tasks. We discussed microwave ovens earlier this year, which uses its namesake waves to heat up food. Other waves can be used to transport information.

Radio waves are a type of wave that are much larger than microwaves. This means there is less radiation, and therefore very little risk of them heating things up while they travel. At its core, radio technology works by one party sending a radio wave signal with a transmitter, and another party receiving the wave with the aptly named receiver. These waves have information that travels with them, through something called a carrier.

The information that radio waves carry with them can be of any subject. Generally speaking, Muggles use this technology to get information in a much quicker fashion, which is especially good for learning about time-sensitive news. In the home, Muggles often have a device called a radio (I know, it’s confusing! Just remember that the machine ‘radio’ uses ‘radio waves’) to hear this information. 

The radio device that is used today was developed and perfected by many different people throughout history, as is the case with many of the Muggle inventions we will discuss in this course. However, the man credited with creating the machine that is most similar to the modern radio is Guglielmo Marconi, who in 1901 used his invention to transmit the first transatlantic audio signal. 

The radio itself is audio-only, which means it can only carry sounds. Generally these sounds are music, or someone speaking on the other end. Listening to the radio means turning on the machine, and then dialing in (using its knobs) to find the specific station you want to hear. Think of the dialing in process as choosing which specific wave you want to hear something from. Some stations may simply have music 24/7, while others may cover different types of news.

If the experience of listening to the radio is familiar to you, that may be because magical people have a similar technology that we call Wireless. Our Wireless system allows users to tune into specific frequencies to listen to the news, such as the WWN (Wizarding Wireless Network, if you are not familiar) on one station, or Celestina Warbeck on another. On a surface level, the two systems are identical. Of course, the Wireless system is powered by magic rather than electricity, but for the user the process is functionally the same. In fact, the two are so similar that there have been times that Wireless stations have accidentally been received by Muggle devices. 

If you’ve grown up amongst Muggles, you no doubt have had experience with a television. However, if you’ve never experienced much of Muggle life, a television may seem like a strange concept. The wizarding world does not have a device quite like a television set, so it may seem a bit odd. 

A television (also abbreviated as a TV, or sometimes referred to as a telly or “the tube”) is a box that produces moving images. The effect is a little like the photographs we see on magical newspapers, although these are longform videos. Along with the video, there is audio! Thus, one can see a depiction of real life both visually and audibly. The TV may show all sorts of things, depending on which station you are tuned into, just like the radio. The TV is used to show news (think: actual coverage of the news story, just as it is happening!) and even scripted stories. We will discuss the latter option later on in this course, as the types of scripted programs shown are quite numerous. 

Televisions work in a similar way to radios, actually. They also use radio waves in order to transport information in order to be picked up by the home receiver, the family television set. These waves carry much more information though, as they must carry both audio and visual broadcasts, but regardless the Muggle viewer would be able to pick up these signals in the same way that they would with the radio. The first functional television was invented by a Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who was only 21 when he conceived the idea for the TV. He essentially took the idea of a radio and expanded upon it to make the television model we have today. All this while living in a home without electricity!

As aforementioned, the television is a technology that magical people do not quite have an equivalent of (as opposed to the radio, in which we have our Wireless). But interestingly, this is not due to lack of want. In the 1980’s, various witches and wizards posited the idea of beginning our own Wizarding Broadcasting station, to be played on magical TVs, in the same way Wireless works. 

However, it was ultimately decided that this would lead to too many problematic situations. You see, even now there is an occasional chance that a Muggle radio may pick up on a wizarding program. This nearly always results in the Muggle insisting that they must have misheard something and not thinking upon it further. The Wizarding Broadcasting Corporation was dissolved as it is believed that if a Muggle device were to accidentally pick up on magic signals, that they would be less inclined to believe that they’d hallucinated its broadcast like they might with the radio. (If interested, one can read more about this theory in former Professor Mordicus Egg’s book The Philosophy of the Mundane: Why the Muggles Prefer Not to Know). Perhaps one day this rule will be reversed, though, and we’ll see the station take off after all. 

Overall, these technologies are very fascinating and are truly a form of magic in their own right. Being able to communicate and entertain even over great distance was a monument and has led to many more following discoveries. It has brought the Muggle world closer together even when separated by geography, something that the wizarding population has already known. That said, it is my hope that we may all be able to experience the joy of intermingled technologies one day…

And that is it for today’s class! I do hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to take any newspaper that you may like for extra reading if you are so interested. I have a quiz for you as usual, and a fun essay. Until next time!

Sources: 

https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-daily-prophet 

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Protean_Charm 

https://www.business2community.com/video-marketing/heck-cinemagraphs-newest-innovative-video-format-content-strategy-01207724 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_wave 

https://dissolve.com/video/Close-Old-Radio-Display-All-Radio-royalty-free-stock-video-footage/001-D91-28-078 

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Wireless 

https://www.lafilm.edu/blog/pete-carpenter-fellowship/ 

https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/technology

https://www.savethestudent.org/uploads/UK-newspapers-spread-out-tabloid-broadsheet.jpg