1922 | Communications, Media
Communications, Media
New York station WEAF (later WNBC) airs the first paid radio commercials in August, setting a pattern of private control of U.S. public airwaves: "What have you done with my child?" radio pioneer Lee De Forest will ask. "You have sent him out on the street in rags of ragtime to collect money from all and sundry. You have made of him a laughingstock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere" (see 1906). But revenues from sales of radio sets do not provide a large enough revenue stream to support broadcast stations, the 10-minute commercial for which a real estate developer has paid $100 produces $127,000 in sales within a few months, and while taxes and fees will support broadcasting in Britain and Europe it will be advertising that supports it in America (see NBC, 1926).
Raytheon Corp. has its beginnings in the American Appliance Co. founded by Everett, Mass.-born MIT professor Vannevar Bush, 32, and his Medford, Mass.-born college roommate Laurence K. Marshall, 33, who team up with inventor Charles G. Smith and obtain financial backers to produce a home refrigerator that Smith has invented based on artificial coolants. The project never gets out of the laboratory, but Bush suggests that the company produce an earlier Smith invention—a gaseous rectifier called an S-tube that permits radios for the first time to be plugged into wall sockets instead of depending on costly, short-lived A and B batteries for power. The tube will be introduced under the Raytheon name in 1925 and produce more than $1 million in sales by the end of 1926 (see technology [Bush's analog computer], 1930).
Radio broadcasting begins on a daily basis in Uruguay and other Latin American countries.
Radio Paris (initially called Radiola) begins regular broadcasts November 6. France's first private radio transmitter, it will change its name in 1924, by which time it will have been joined by Radio Toulouse and Radio Lyons (see 1939).
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) transmits its first broadcast November 14. Financed in part by royalties on radio sales and in part by a 10-shilling Post Office license fee that anyone owning a receiver must pay, it begins with a staff of four, and Scottish-born engineer John C. W. (Charles Walsham) Reith, 33, becomes general manager in December; a six-foot-six misanthrope who will run BBC for the next 16 years, Reith will make the BBC one of Britain's most revered institutions as more and more Britons take to "listening in" (see 1936).
AT&T advises the U.S. Independent Telephone Association that the Bell System will take over no more independents without giving advance notice to the ITA and buy no company unless it fits logically into nearby Bell facilities and is in the public interest.
Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell dies at his summer home near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, August 2 at age 75.
The first U.S. neon lighting sign is installed on a Packard motorcar dealership at Los Angeles (see 1910).
The Reader's Digest begins publication at New York with a February issue that appears January 20. Canadian-born social worker Lila Bell Acheson, 32, was married in October of last year to former St. Paul, Minnesota, book salesman De Witt Wallace, also 32, and has helped him condense articles "of lasting interest" that they found at the New York Public Library and have collected in a pocket-size magazine which they edit in a basement apartment under a speakeasy at 1 Minetta Street, corner of Sixth Avenue. The Digest contains no advertising, its cover will carry its table of contents until 1998, bar girls hired from the speakeasy help the Wallaces wrap and address the first 1,500 copies that arrive from the printer, and circulation will grow to more than 200,000 by 1929 as the Digest plants some of its articles in other magazines and then condenses them. The magazine will accept no advertising until 1955 and by the 1970s will be publishing 29 million copies per month in 13 languages. Although its readership will be overwhelmingly female, the Digest will not be averse to publishing off-color stories; for years to come it will show a marked bias in favor of Europe's rising totalitarian governments and against both Jews and Roman Catholics (see 1933).
The Harvard Business Review begins publication with articles by Business School professors and other experts. It will continue into the 21st century, gaining great prestige.
True Confessions magazine begins publication to compete with Bernarr MacFadden's 3-year-old True Story. Its publisher is Wilford H. Fawcett, whose 3-year-old Captain Billy's Whiz Bang will reach a circulation of 425,000 per month next year.
Better Homes and Gardens magazine (initially Fruit Garden & Home) begins publication at Des Moines, Iowa, in September under the direction of Edwin Thomas Meredith, now 46, who started Successful Farming in 1902 and served as President Wilson's secretary of agriculture. His readers are people who have moved from farms into cities and towns.
Krocodil begins publication at Moscow. The illustrated supplement to the newspaper Worker (Rabochy) will develop into a political humor magazine.
The Bengali-language daily Ananda Bazar Patrika begins publication at Calcutta and will grow to rival the English-language Indian Express, with a circulation that far exceeds those of the Times of India, the Statesman, or the Hindu (few other Indian-language papers will have circulations of more than a few thousand).
Houston Chronicle editor-publisher Marcellus E. Foster blasts the Ku Klux Klan in fiery editorials while the Houston Post equivocates (see 1908). Chronicle advertising and circulation department heads plead with Foster to soften his stance, and he replies that before he will comply with their wishes he will "dismantle the presses and throw the pieces into the Buffalo Bayou" (see 1926).
German-born Hearst circulation director Moses L. (Louis) Annenberg, 44, and two colleagues pay $500,000 to acquire the Daily Racing Form, a tip-sheet established a few years ago by Chicago newspaperman Frank Buenell. Annenberg was brought to America with his seven siblings in 1885 at age 8, started his career as a Western Union messenger, will buy the competing Morning Telegraph, quit Hearst in 1926, go into partnership with Chicago gambler Monte Tennes to control bookie joints with leased wires to racetracks, and force his Racing Form partners to sell their interests to him for more than $2 million (see 1936).
The 3-year-old comic strip "Barney Google" gains popularity beginning July 17 when cartoonist Billy DeBeck has his diminutive hero knocked down while standing on the sidewalk outside the Pastime Jockey Club. A fight has started inside the club, and a man has come crashing through the window. The man is so grateful for having his fall broken that he gives Barney a racehorse named Spark Plug, and the horse will become a permanent part of the strip.
California publisher C. K. (Charles Kenny) McClatchy founds the Fresno Bee and starts buying radio stations (see 1857). Now 54, McClatchy became a full partner with his late father in the Sacramento Bee at age 21 and has fought the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad. His brother Valentine will sell his interest to C. K. in 1923, C. K. will buy the Sacramento Star and merge it with the Sacramento Bee in 1925, and by the time he dies in 1936 his paper will have a circulation of 50,000 as compared with 10,000 for its rival Sacramento Union.
Charles Atlas wins the "World's Most Perfectly Developed Man" contest sponsored by Physical Culture magazine publisher Bernarr MacFadden. Brooklyn-born Angelo Siciliano, 28, is a former 97-pound weakling who has built himself up with exercises he claims to have developed after watching a lion at the zoo. He will win MacFadden's contest again next year, will open a Manhattan gymnasium in 1926, and by 1927 his Charles Atlas, Ltd., will be taking in $1,000 per day from students who subscribe to his mail-order physical culture course (see Roman, 1929).
Bayonne Times publisher Samuel I. Newhouse persuades his employer Hyman Lazarus to join him in buying a 51 percent interest in the Staten Island Advance for $98,000 (see 1911). Lazarus will sell his stake to Newhouse and two associates in 1924. Newhouse will acquire a 60 percent interest in the Advance that year; he will buy out his associates in 1928 for $198,000; and by 1955 the Newhouse chain will include the Long Island Press, Newark Star-Ledger, Syracuse Post-Standard, Herald-Journal, and Herald-American, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Portland Oregonian, and Portland (Oregon) Journal.
British press lord Alfred C. W. Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, dies at London August 14 at age 57, having ruined his health through megalomania; his younger brother Harold, Viscount Rothermere, survives. New York-born journalist John Jacob Astor, 36, 1st Baron Astor, acquires a 90-percent interest in the Times of London from the Harmsworth estate and enters Parliament as a Unionist; he will control the Times until 1966.