1898 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

Stenotypy inventor John Celivergos Zachos dies at New York March 20 at age 77.

A message to García is delivered by Virginia-born Army lieutenant Andrew Summers Rowan, 41, who lands in an open boat April 24 near Turquino Peak on a secret mission to obtain information from Cuban insurgent Calixto García y Iñiguez. Ordinary lines of communication have broken down, but Rowan delivers an oral message from President McKinley and returns to Washington, D.C., with intelligence on the rebel army. General García is named to represent Cuba in negotiations with the United States for Cuban independence but dies at age 62 (see Fiction, 1899).

William Randolph Hearst publishes special editions of his New York Journal from his private yacht anchored in Havana Harbor. He has sent cowboy painter Frederic Remington to Cuba earlier, Journal stories inflame U.S. opinion ("Remember the Maine!"), the paper offers a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator of the February 15 explosion, and its circulation reaches 1.6 million May 2. President McKinley has refused Hearst's offer to provide two ships and Hearst goes to Cuba as a foreign correspondent.

The New York Times drops its price from 3¢ to 1¢ and circulation triples to 75,000 within a year (see 1896; 1897). By 1901 it will be over 100,000.

Sunset magazine begins publication at Los Angeles to promote business for the Southern Pacific by attracting tourists, settlers, and developers to the West. Named for the railroad's crack Sunset Limited between New Orleans and Los Angeles, it will become a family magazine in 1928.

Offset printing has its beginnings at Columbus, Ohio, where a pressman for the Enterprise Envelope Company chastises a worker who has missed a sheet while feeding paper by hand into the press. Alfred G. Harris of the Harris Automatic Press Company founded late in 1895 at Niles has been installing an E-1 Harris Automatic envelope feeder in the shop and asks the pressman what happened. The pressman runs another sheet to show him that the press has printed the image on the impression cylinder, the cylinder then places a reverse image on the next sheet that goes through the press. Harris and the pressman see that the lithographed image on the back of the sheet is better than the one on the front, and the discovery prompts Alfred and his brother Charles to work on developing an offset lithographic press (see 1906).

Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen, 28, of the Copenhagen Telephone Company pioneers the tape recorder with a device that employs magnetized steel piano wire to record and reproduce sounds. Thomas Edison produced a talking machine in 1887; British inventor Oberlin Smith, now 58, suggested the following year that sounds could be recorded magnetically using "tapes" of fabric containing iron filings; and a "telegraphone" devised by Poulsen 8 years ago recorded sounds on a wire. Poulsen found that he could register human speech by alternating the magnetization of a steel piano wire, recording continuously for 30 minutes on a wire moving at a speed of 84 inches per second; he now applies for a patent on this telegraphone, a machine for use with telephones that permits the user to record and erase messages (see 1900).

Electrical engineer Josiah Latimer Clark dies at London October 30 at age 76, having helped to develop pneumatic messaging and wireless telegraphy.