1929 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

Turkish newspapers and magazines verge on bankruptcy as the government forces them to give up Arabic type faces and switch to the Roman alphabet.

The Chinese Communist Party establishes the New China News Agency (Xinhua, or Hsinhua, or NCNA) at Beijing to serve as its press outlet. The NCNA will grow under strict government control to provide domestic and international services for Chinese and non-Chinese media, reflecting official policies and promoting state programs.

Britain's Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies merge with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. to form Imperial and International Communications (see Eastern, 1872; Marconi, 1907).

BBC begins publishing The Listener January 16 as British radio ownership grows. The weekly competes with the New Statesman, The Spectator, and others for readership.

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is founded November 11 by David Sarnoff, who has bought station WEAF from AT&T October 29 and makes it the flagship of a 19-station Red Network, which soon has 31 affiliates (see 1922; 1927).

U.S. radio sales total nearly $950 million as Americans pay $118 and up for elaborate Atwater Kent and Stromberg-Carlson console sets with seven tubes and built-in superpower magnetic speakers to hear Amos 'n' Andy, Rudy Vallée, and Graham MacNamee's NBC sports broadcasts.

The Motorola radio invented by Paul Galvin is the first commercially successful radio for automobiles (see 1928), but while it plays in a moving car it is twice the size of a fishing tackle box, its bulky speaker is stuffed under the floorboards, and its audio qualities leave much to be desired (see 1930).

An airmail letter crosses the United States in 31 hours at a cost of 25¢ postage for 3 ounces.

The United States has 20 million telephones, up from 10 million in 1918 and twice as many as all the rest of the world combined. Most are wooden boxes hung on walls with cranks to ring Central, but many tall tube-like phones are in use with hooks to hold their receivers, and French phones are beginning to appear with mouthpiece and receiver in one piece.

Telephone pioneer and gramophone inventor Emile Berliner dies at Washington, D.C., August 3 at age 78.

Radio Corp. of America (RCA) acquires the 28-year-old Victor Talking Machine Co., whose stock has soared 35 percent and is now the world's largest maker of phonographs (gramophones) (see RCA, 1927). Using the trademark dog "Nipper" listing to "His Master's Voice," RCA will distribute Victrola phonograph (gramophone) records under the name RCA-Victor.

The Blattnerphone designed by German film producer Louis (originally Ludwig) Blattner is the world's first tape recorder. Based on patents obtained by German sound engineer Kurt Stille, the device employs large reels of steel tape rather than the wire used in the Poulsen recorder of 1898, it is the first successful magnetic recorder with electronic amplification, and Blattner uses it for adding synchronized sound to the films he makes at the Blattner Color and Sound Studios at Ellstree, England. The BBC will acquire the first commercially produced Blattnerphone in 1931 (see Begun, 1934).

"Popeye" appears for the first time January 17 in the 10-year-old "Thimble Theatre" drawn by New York cartoonist E. C. (Elzie Crisler) Segar, 34, whose one-eyed, spinach-loving sailor with corncob pipe and outsize sense of chivalry has a girlfriend, Olive Oyl. His hamburger-loving pal J. Wellington Wimpy will soon join the strip.

Former Associated Press president Melville E. Stone dies at New York February 15 at age 80.

Bodybuilder Charles Atlas, now 35, advertises his "Dynamic-Tension" method of physical development in new magazine and newspaper advertisements written by New York advertising account executive Charles Roman, 22, who has come up with the term Dynamic-Tension and promotes the former "97-lb. Weakling" and his mail-order lessons with cartoons that show bullies at the beach kicking sand in the eyes of sissies who later demonstrate their "manliness" by punching out the bullies and impressing their lady friends (see 1922). Roman will become sole owner of Charles Atlas Ltd. in 1969, Atlas will live to age 78, the less muscular Roman to age 92.

Business Week magazine begins publication September 7 at New York. The new McGraw-Hill publication will have lost $1.5 million by the end of 1935 but will turn the corner to become the leading magazine of its kind. In many years it will be the leading magazine of any kind in terms of advertising pages.