1934 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

German Navy Signals Research chief Rudolf Kuhnold conducts the first practical radar tests March 20 at Kiel Harbor. He has developed a 700-watt transmitter working on a frequency of 600 megacycles plus a receiver and disk reflectors, succeeds in receiving echoes from signals bounced off the battleship Hesse anchored 600 yards away, and in October picks up echoes from a ship seven miles away in a demonstration before high-ranking naval officers at Pelzerhaken near Lübeck. Signals are also received accidentally from a seaplane flying through the beam (the first detection of aircraft by radar), and the Reichstag appropriates 70,000 Reichsmarks ($57,500) to develop Kuhnold's idea (see Hertz, 1887). The Naval Research Laboratory at Washington, D.C., creates the first modern radar system in December, basing it on the telomobiloskop collision-prevention device for ships patented in 1904 by German engineer Christian Hülsmeyer (see Watson-Watt, 1935).

Danzig-born German engineer S. (Semi) Joseph Begun, 29, pioneers magnetic recording with the first tape recorder for broadcasting (see Blattnerphone, 1929). He will emigrate to America next year and in 1938 will join Brush Development Co. of Cleveland, where he will continue his work (see plastic tape, 1935).

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created by Congress June 10 supervises the U.S. telephone, telegraph, and radio industries. Radio stations receive licenses; licensees and license-applicants must show that they serve, or intend to serve, the "public interest, convenience, and necessity," but licenses will, in fact, be granted and renewed almost automatically over the next 25 years.

France bans advertising on government radio stations.

The Mutual Broadcasting Network is created by an amalgamation of Chicago's WGN, Detroit's WXYZ (whose Lone Ranger is the network's chief early-evening attraction), and New York's WOR.

Canadian radio station operator Roy Thomson pays $5,800 for Ontario's Timmins Press, acquiring his first newspaper (see 1931). Now 40, Thomson will make the weekly a daily beginning next year, acquire 27 additional Canadian newspapers plus six U.S. papers, start other radio stations in partnership with other newspapermen, and become a major player in North American media (see 1953).

French newspaper publisher and perfume maker François Coty dies at Louveciennes July 25 at age 60, having lost much of his wealth.

"Terry and the Pirates" by Ohio-born comic-strip cartoonist Milton A. (Arthur) Caniff, 27, establishes an adult adventure story line with an Oriental setting and reflects such current events as the Japanese invasion of China. The Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate strip will employ explicit sexiness to attract a wide following.

"Li'l Abner" by New Haven, Conn.-born comic-strip cartoonist Al Capp (Alfred Gerald Caplin), 35, is set in the fictitious hamlet of Dogpatch, Ky. Capp has been ghost-drawing "Joe Palooka" for Ham Fisher, whose eyesight has begun to fail owing to diabetes; the new strip will soon be syndicated to hundreds of papers.

"Flash Gordon" by New Rochelle, N.Y.-born King Features comic-strip cartoonist Alex (Alexander Gillespie) Raymond, 24, is a world-of-tomorrow adventure strip that competes with the popular 25th-century strip "Buck Rogers."

Comic-strip pioneer Winsor McCay of "Little Nemo" fame dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., July 26 at age 62.

The first double-crostic puzzle appears in the weekly Saturday Review of Literature. Onetime Brooklyn, N.Y., schoolteacher Elizabeth Kingsley (née Seelman), 63, has created the variation on crossword puzzles, which she will continue devising for the next 17 years.

Challenge magazine begins publication at New York under the direction of Boston-born Harlem writer Dorothy West, 27, who visited the Soviet Union with poet Langston Hughes and 19 other black Americans in 1932 and remained for a year. The quarterly is intended to be a showcase for younger black writers who hope to rekindle the vitality of the Harlem Renaissance, but it will survive only until 1937.

The Partisan Review begins publication at New York to give intellectuals a new literary magazine. Initially an organ of the communist John Reed Society, its founders include New York-born English instructor William Phillips, 26, and Ukrainian-born critic Philip Rahv (originally Ivan Greenberg), 26, who emigrated to America at age 14 and has been writing for New Masses, Nation, New Republic, and New Leader. The quarterly will quickly become the leading U.S. magazine of its kind, introducing writers such as James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Bernard Malamud, Wallace Stevens, and Lionel Trilling as well as European authors and poets past and present; it will be revived in 1937 to promote the cause of literary modernism in combination with anti-Stalin Marxism, and although its circulation will never be higher than 15,000 it will be influential.

Weekly Illustrated magazine begins publication at London under the direction of former Münchener Illustrierte Presse publisher Stefan Lorant, who has left Nazi Germany (see LIFE, 1936; Picture Post, 1938).