1926 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

The first contract airmail flight takes off February 15 from Dearborn, Mich. The all-metal Ford Pullman monoplane lands at Cleveland.

Publisher E. W. Scripps dies of apoplexy aboard his yacht Ohio in Monrovia Bay off the Liberian coast March 12 at age 71, having drunk whiskey, smoked cigars, and played poker almost to the end. He leaves an empire that includes 25 newspapers, the United Press that he helped found in 1907, and the Newspaper Enterprise Association (a syndication service).

Houston Chronicle founder Marcellus E. Foster retires from the 25-year-old paper and sells his remaining interest June 26 to Jesse Jones (see 1908). Now 55, Foster will join the outspoken Scripps-Howard Houston Press next year and remain there until early 1937 while Jones uses the Chronicle to help him in his efforts to guide the city's development.

Smith-Corona Co. is created by a merger of the L. C. Smith and Corona typewriter companies (see Smith, 1908; word processors, 1981).

General Telephone & Electric Corp. (GTE) has its beginnings in the Associated Telephone Utilities Corp. founded by southern Wisconsin inventor Sigurd L. Odegard, who obtains backing from Chicago utilities magnate Marshall E. Sampsell and acquires a Long Beach, Calif., telephone company.

Deutsche Welle GmbH (later Deutschlandsender) begins broadcasting from Berlin January 7 on longwave 182 kHz, reaching all of Germany (see 1923).

English physicist Edward Victor Appleton, 33, discovers a layer of the ionosphere that proves a reliable reflector of the shorter shortwave radio waves, thus making possible more dependable long-distance radio communication. The layer will be called the Appleton, or F, layer and will spur development of the radio.

Electrical engineer Arthur E. Kennelly tells an audience, "Through radio I look forward to a united states of the world. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the Earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence."

The first Philco radios are introduced by the 34-year-old Philadelphia Storage Battery Co., whose management will change its name to Philco in 1940. Having built an efficient distribution system for its batteries, the company sells 96,000 radio receivers within a year and escapes bankruptcy. It has been producing a "Socket Power" rectifier that permits radios to be plugged into mains instead of having to use batteries, but the advent of alternating current has made the rectifier obsolete and forced the company to find another product; it enjoys phenomenal success despite its high price and competition from hundreds of other makes. By 1929 the Philco radio will be selling for $49.50 plus tubes—the equivalent of a week's salary for most people; the company will borrow $7 million to retool its Philadelphia plant for mass production, and slash prices to make itself the second-leading radio maker in America (see 1930).

Scottish inventor John L. Baird, 28, gives the first successful demonstration of television, but his mechanical system is based on the Nipkow rotating disk of 1883 and has serious limitations (see 1927). Says U.S radio pioneer Lee De Forest, "While theoretically and technically television may be possible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility" (see 1927; BBC, 1932).

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is founded November 11 by Radio Corp. of America (RCA) at the initiative of David Sarnoff (see 1922). RCA has bought the New York radio station WEAF and the Washington, D.C., station WCAP from AT&T October 29, merged them with its own WJZ at New York, and makes WEAF the flagship of a 19-station Red Network that soon has 31 affiliates (see 1927).

Amazing Stories magazine is founded by Luxembourg-born New York inventor and science-fiction enthusiast Hugo Gernsback, 42, who came to America at age 20 to promote an improved dry cell battery he had invented.