1919 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes formulates a "clear and present danger" test for defining conditions under which the constitutional right of freedom of the speech may be abridged. "When a nation is at war," says Holmes March 3 in an opinion handed down in the espionage case Schenck v. United States, "many things that might be said in times of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight."

U.S. Navy officials advise Herkimer County, N.Y.-born General Electric president Owen D. Young, 45, that GE's high-frequency Alexanderson alternator is vital to long-distance wireless communications and must remain in U.S. hands. U.S. authorities seized the assets of Italian-owned American Marconi Co. 2 years ago and merged the patents of major companies to facilitate the war effort. British Marconi has offered $5 million for rights to the alternator, but the assistant secretary of the navy Franklin D. Roosevelt wants radio patents kept under U.S. control and urges GE to start its own radio company. Owen Young convinces Congress to give G.E. and American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T) a monopoly in international radio, founds Radio Corp. of America (RCA) October 17, and puts David Sarnoff in charge as general manager (see Sarnoff, 1917); the navy loans Ernst Alexanderson to RCA, which will employ him as chief engineer for 5 years (see 1906). RCA acquires Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. (see 1907), it will have $4 million in revenues from "wireless" by 1925, and it will go on to acquire the Victor Co. (see Victrola, 1906), becoming a radio-phonograph colossus; Young will be chairman of RCA until 1933, but antitrust court actions will separate RCA from GE (see NBC, 1926).

The U.S. telecommunications industry returns to private ownership August 1 after a year of nationalization in which American Telephone & Telegraph Co. and Western Union have been allowed to raise rates, AT&T has earned an extra $42 million in that year, and the Treasury Department pays AT&T another $13 million to cover any "losses" it may have incurred.

Dial telephones are introduced November 8 at Norfolk, Virginia, by AT&T, which has earlier rejected dial phones but accepts them now under threat of a telephone operators' strike. So many switchboard operators are needed to run the nation's telephone system that the growth of phone ownership will soon outstrip the supply of available labor.

Ha'aretz (The Land) begins publication at Tel Aviv under the direction of Russian-born Zionists who include Gershon Agronsky. Tel Aviv's population is scarcely 50,000, but it will grow, as will the newspaper's circulation.

The King Features comic strip "Barney Google" makes its debut in U.S. newspapers June 17 under the name "Take Barney Google, F'rinstance." Chicago artist Billy DeBeck, 29, has started the strip about a half-pint sports fan and will continue it until his death in 1952, but it has little initial appeal (see Spark Plug, 1922).

The New York Daily News (initially the New York Illustrated Daily News) begins publication June 26 under the direction of Chicago Tribune veteran Joseph Medill Patterson, 40, a socialist who tells his editors, "Tell it to Sweeney—the Stuyvesants will take care of themselves." A war correspondent before 1917, when he won a captaincy and commanded a field artillery unit in the Rainbow Division, Capt. Patterson got the idea for his paper from British publisher A. C. W. Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, 54, a family friend whose London Mirror is selling 800,000 copies per day. Patterson remains in Chicago but has rented offices in the Evening Mail Building and uses the slogan, "See New York's Most Beautiful Girls Every Morning"; he begins with a print-run of only 57,000 copies, fills his paper with suggestive pictures, comic strips, sports coverage, beauty and limerick contests with cash prizes, and stories of sex and crime that attract readers who never before read any newspaper on a regular basis. The News will not show a profit until 1920, but Patterson will make it the first successful U.S. tabloid and the most widely read U.S. newspaper of any kind (see 1910; 1921).

Collier's Weekly is acquired by J. F. Knapp's Crowell Publishing Co., which pays $1.75 million for a majority stock interest (see 1911; Robert Collier's death, 1918). Competing with the Saturday Evening Post, Crowell will pour $15 million into the 5¢ magazine over the next 15 years before Collier's becomes profitable (see Chenery, 1925).

True Story magazine is started by New York physical culture enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden, now 51, who has been publishing Physical Culture magazine since 1898. True Story will reach a peak circulation of more than a million as it titillates readers with suggestive morality stories while Macfadden goes on to publish a host of movie, romance, and detective story magazines plus 10 daily newspapers, including the New York Evening Graphic (see Fawcett, 1922).

Fawcett Publishing Co. has its beginnings in Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, a 25¢ pocket-size monthly that started as a mimeographed off-color joke sheet for hospitalized veterans put out by Minneapolis Tribune reporter Wilford H. Fawcett, 33, who served as a captain in the war; his sons Roger, Buzz, Gordon, and 6-year-old Roscoe haul the magazine to local cigar stores and newsstands on Roscoe's red coaster wagon; within 6 years it will have a circulation of about 500,000 (see True Confessions, 1922).