1873 | Communications, Media
Communications, Media
The Harvard Crimson has its beginnings in the Magenta, a weekly that begins publication January 24 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. A staff of 10 has defied a dean to put together the independent 10-page paper, which offers brief editorial comments, announcements, poetry, and occasional news items with two columns on a page. It will become a daily in 1883 with four columns on a page (but no graphics or pictures) and be renamed the Daily Crimson. Unlike some other universities, Harvard will provide no financial support to its school paper and will not have a journalism school, but some of the nation's foremost journalists will receive their training on the Crimson.
Former Boston Traveller reporter and New York Tribune correspondent Charles H. (Henry) Taylor, 27, becomes publisher of the 1-year-old Boston Globe, which is $100,000 in debt and losing $1,200 per week. Working 16 hours per day, he manages the editorial as well as the business side of the paper, averts bankruptcy, and will eventually make the Globe a success (see 1877).
The Detroit Evening News begins publication August 23 under the direction of London-born newspaperman James E. (Edmund) Scripps, 38, who began as a reporter for the Chicago Democratic Press in 1857. Printed initially on Detroit Free Press equipment, the four-page daily sells for 2¢ when competing papers go for 5¢. Scripps will soon obtain additional capital from his brother George and sister Ellen and set up his own printing plant (they will join him in his enterprise), and within a year the News will have twice the circulation of any other Detroit paper (see Cleveland Penny Press, 1878).
St. Nicholas Magazine begins publication under the editorship of Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge of 1865 Hans Brinker fame, who will run the new periodical for children until her death in 1905 at age 74. Dodge will attract work by such poets as Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier.
Typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes aligns the letters of his 1867 machine in an arrangement that by some accounts is arbitrary although many will claim that it permits rapid fingering and minimizes jamming of keys:
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM
James Densmore and G. W. Yost persuade Remington Fire Arms Company to produce the machine (see 1868; 1874).
Television has its beginnings in the discovery reported by Joseph May and Willoughby Smith to engineer Josiah Latimer Clark that the electrical resistance of selenium varies according to its exposure to light, and since electricity can be transmitted from one point to another it should be possible to transmit images as well (see Nipkow, 1883).
The Brazilian Submarine Telegraph Company and the Western and Brazilian Telegraph Company are established to give the South American country instant communications to the rest of the world and her own interior.