I'm reading Joanna Bourke's book Fear – A Cultural History at the moment, and in the Social Hysteria chapter we've just moved from the story of Fr. Knox's 1926 panic-inducing radio play Broadcasting from the Barricades to the better known War of the Worlds 1938 event
A comment in the text is establishing the importance and authority of radio at that time, and says :-
Twenty-seven and a half million American families (out of a total of thirty-two million) possessed radios – a higher proportion of families enjoyed the use of a radio than owned a telephone or car, or could boast of residing in a home with plumbing or electricity
It took me a couple of minutes to parse that statement – more people had a radio than had electricity. Battery technology probably wasn't too good in 1938 … so how were their radios powered?
Well, I eventually remembered crystal set radios ! These will happily receive a radio signal with no external power source, although they may be a little quiet. Amplification without electricity was also available, through ingenious use of a kerosene flame in a ceramic cone.
So, with these radios being in popular common use at the time, the concept of people without household electricity or reasonable battery technology being able to still use a radio makes sense, and a seemingly-nonsensical statement becomes completely resonable …
But without a knowledge of historical technology, I might have assumed that the quoted statement was mis-stated, or just plain wrong …