1906 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

"The City That Was" by Oneida, N.Y.-born New York Sun reporter William Henry "Will" Irwin, 32, is an extensive chronicle of the earthquake and fire that devastate San Francisco in early April.

"The men with the muckrakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society," says President Roosevelt April 14 in an address to the Gridiron Club at Washington, D.C., "but only if they know when to stop raking the muck and to look upward . . . to the crown of worthy endeavor." Roosevelt has in mind John Bunyan's reference in Pilgrim's Progress (1684) to "a man who could look no way but downwards, with a muckrake in his hand," and has in mind also such magazines as McClure's (1902, 1905) and books such as The Pit (1903) and The Jungle (1905).

Newspaper publisher James E. Scripps dies at Detroit May 29 at age 71.

The Sunday Times of Johannesburg begins publication in South Africa.

International News Service (INS) is founded by William Randolph Hearst, whose wire service will compete with the AP founded in 1848 (see Brisbane, 1897; United Press, 1907).

Radio pioneer Aleksandr Popov dies at St. Petersburg January 13 (December 31, 1905, on the Russian calendar) at age 46, having been the first to use an antenna in transmitting and receiving radio waves.

Danish laboratory apprentice Peter Laurits Jensen, 20, links a microphone and a transmitter circuit as a sending apparatus and creates a receiver by connecting a crystal detector to a grounded telegraph ticker. Jensen has worked since 1903 for radio pioneer Valdemar Poulsen, who has developed an improved transmitter for generating continuous signals by means of an arc that burns in an atmosphere of hydrogen in a strong transverse magnetic field, but Poulsen's transmitter has been unreliable. Jensen will sell U.S. rights to his patents in 1909 to the California-based Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Co. (later the Federal Telegraph Co.) and emigrate to America (see 1913).

New York Telephone Co. advertises in September that the city has 269,364 phones, a number two and a half times as large as London's.

German academic Arthur Korn, 36, uses "telephotography" October 17 to transmit a photographic image more than 1,000 miles (see Caselli, 1862). He invented a method in 1902 for manually breaking down and transmitting still photographs over electric wires and employed his technique 2 years ago to send a photograph by telegraph from Munich to Nüremberg and back, advancing development of the fax machine (see Belin, 1907).

The International Radio Telegraph Convention at Berlin adopts the distress call SOS (dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot) to replace the CQD (Stop Sending and Listen) call adopted 2 years ago by Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. and agrees to drop the CQD call completely after 1912. Marconi will have acquired most of its competitors by 1913 and be operating 60 land stations across America, having installed its equipment on more than 500 steamships (see RCA, 1919).

The first radio broadcast of voice and music booms out of Brant Rock, Mass., Christmas Eve and is picked up by ships within a radius of several hundred miles. Quebec-born engineer Reginald A. (Aubrey) Fessenden, now 40, worked for Thomas A. Edison at Orange, N.J., in the late 1880s and evolved an "electrostatic doublet theory" of cohesion and elasticity based on electricity rather than the generally accepted gravitational force. He patented a high-frequency alternator in 1901 that generates a continuous wave instead of the intermittent damped-spark impulses now being used for transmission of wireless signals. He organized the National Electric Signalling Corp. in 1902 to sponsor his experiments; he has engaged Swedish-born General Electric Co. engineer Ernst (Frederik Werner) Alexanderson, 28, to build a large 80-kilohertz alternator for the station he has set up at Brant Rock. The alternator develops a frequency of 50,000 cycles, Fessenden's equipment features a receiver circuit of his own invention that blends an incoming radio frequency signal with another, slightly different, signal produced locally to yield a beat frequency (number of vibrations or oscillations per unit of time) in the audible range, and this heterodyne circuit will be generally adopted in radio broadcasting. By year's end Fessenden has established two-way wireless telegraphic communication between Brant Rock and Machrihanish, Scotland (see De Forest, 1909; Armstrong's superheterodyne, 1917; RCA, 1919).