1917 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

Washington D.C.-born Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent (Raphael) Floyd P. (Phillips) Gibbons, 29, files a 4,000-word story on the sinking of the Laconia after she is torpedoed in the North Atlantic February 25 while en route to France. He was one of her 76 passengers, many of whom have been rescued.

President Wilson establishes the first U.S. propaganda agency 1 week after the declaration of war in April. Total government censorship is imposed; newspapers and magazines are prohibited from publishing photographs of dead soldiers lest they discourage enlistments. The new U.S. Espionage Act contains a provision empowering the postmaster general to bar materials from being sent through the mail if he considers them radical, dissenting, or otherwise suspect. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson enforces the provision, seizing a wide variety of literature.

Esperanto founder L. L. Zamenhof dies at Warsaw April 14 at age 57, having seen the world go up in flames for lack, in part, of a universal language; Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis dies at Hollywood, California, July 30 at age 80.

The June issue of Seven Arts magazine at New York carries an article by Randolph S. Bourne, "The War and the Intellectuals." The magazine is suppressed in September after further antiwar articles, many of them by Bourne.

New York-born journalist Dorothy Day, 19, quits her job on the IWW newspaper The Call and joins The Masses, the literary and political journal edited since 1911 by Max (Forrester) Eastman, now 34; it is suppressed in December for its opposition to U.S. participation in the war. Day began her career with the New Orleans Item by working on assignment as a taxi dancer in a cheap Canal Street dance hall; she will abruptly become a Catholic in 1927 after years of Bohemian Greenwich Village life in which she will rally "the masses," go to jail, drink all night with her radical friends, marry on the rebound, write a novel, fall in love, and bear a child (see 1933).

Excelsior begins publication at Mexico City. The daily will become Mexico's leading newspaper.

"The Gumps" appears February 12 in the Chicago Tribune, whose publisher Joseph Medill Patterson has dreamed up the comic strip and named it (see 1910). Bloomington, Ind.-born cartoonist Sidney Smith, 40, has created the characters based on real people, and in mid-March 1922 he will be signed to the first $1 million cartoon contract with a guarantee of $100,000 per year and a new Rolls-Royce.

The "Katzenjammer Kids" launched in 1897 is renamed "The Captain and the Kids" as German names become unpopular. The comic strip moved 5 years ago from Hearst's New York Journal to Pulitzer's New York World.

"The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All the Trains" begins syndicated publication. Devised by Louisville, Ky.-born cartoonist Fontaine (Talbot) Fox, 33, the strip features the Powerful Katrinka, who can single-handedly put the trolley back on its tracks; the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang, who may be based on Fox's father; Suitcase Simpson; Eppie Hogg ("the fattest woman in three counties"); and Mickey (Himself) McGuire.

Shufunotomo (Housewife's Companion) begins publication in March at Tokyo.

Forbes magazine begins publication at New York September 15 under the management of Scottish-born Hearst financial columnist B. C. (Bertie Charles) Forbes, 37, with Magazine of Wall Street general manager Walter Drey. Forbes has been business and financial editor of the New York American since 1912, writing a syndicated daily column that will continue in the Hearst papers until 1942; he will claim that he gave up a salary higher than that of the governor ($10,000 per year) to start the 15ยข fortnightly.

A superheterodyne circuit developed by New York-born U.S. Army Signal Corps major Edwin H. (Howard) Armstrong, 26, will become the basic design for all amplitude modulation (AM) radios (see 1906). By modulating the intensity (amplitude) of sound, it greatly increases the selectivity and sensitivity of radio receivers over a wide band of frequencies (see FM, 1933).

David Sarnoff urges marketing of a simple "radio music box" (see 1912). The American Marconi Co. says his plan will make the radio "a 'household utility' in the same sense as the piano or phonograph" (see 1920; speaker, 1918; RCA, 1919).