1938 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

John L. Baird gives the first demonstration of high-definition color television February 4 at London's Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road (see 1926). He transmits color films, shows them on a nine- by twelve-foot screen via a 120-line-per-inch system, and within 2 weeks transmits live action in color from the Baird Studios at Crystal Palace, but his refusal to consider electronic transmission in place of mechanical transmission blocks commercial development (see Goldmark, 1940).

The British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) begins its first foreign-language service with Arabic programming for overseas listeners.

The first true Xerox image appears October 22 at Astoria, Queens (see 1937). The electrophotographic image is imprinted on wax paper that has been pressed against an electrostatically charged two- by three-inch sulfur-coated zinc plate that has been dusted with lycopodium powder. Chester Carlson has been helped by a German refugee physicist; he attends New York Law School night classes, will be admitted to the bar in 1940, and will receive his first patent that year for the process that he will call xerography, using the Greek word xeros for dry, but he will fail in his initial attempts to get financial backing (see 1946).

The ballpoint pen patented by Hungarian chemist George Biro, 41, and his brother Lazlo (or Ladislao), 39, a Budapest proofreader, has a vein-like tube that fits inside its barrel and moistens the ball at its tip by capillary attraction, but their pen will achieve its potential only after Austrian-born chemist Franz Seech in California develops a viscous fluid with a dye that forms a film on any surface when exposed to air (see 1945).

The Italian women's magazine Grazia begins publication at Verona. Publisher Arnoldo Mondadori, now 48, has acquired Italian rights to Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse ("Topolino") and his organization will grow in the next 30 years to employ 3,000 people as circulation of his news magazine Epoca, published since 1915, grows to nearly 400,000.

Paris-Match has its beginnings July 7 as industrialist Jean Prouvost buys the sporting magazine Match, revamps it along the lines of Henry Luce's U.S. photo weekly LIFE, and in 3 months increases its circulation from 80,000 to 450,000. It will be renamed Match de la guerre in September of next year and quickly increase circulation to 1.4 million (see 1949).

Picture Post begins publication at London October 1. British publisher Edward G. W. (George Warris) Hulton, 32, and Stefan Lorant have modeled the photo weekly on Henry Luce's LIFE (see 1936) and it will continue until 1957.

Tennessee-born Atlanta Constitution sports editor Ralph (Emerson) McGill, 40, becomes executive editor; he will campaign in his editorials against political corruption and racial injustice, singling out the Ku Klux Klan as a special target while other Southern editors hold their tongues.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, 22, begins a daily column July 5 that will continue 6 times per week for more than 57 years, pounding it out with two fingers on a Royal typewriter as the Sacramento-born Caen becomes "Mr. San Francisco" in the minds of his many avid readers, coining such terms as "Baghdad-by-the-Bay" and (later) "Berserkeley."

Harvard's first nine Nieman Foundation journalists begin their year at the university under terms of the will left by the late Milwaukee Journal founder Lucius W. Nieman, who died in 1935. Nieman left his 55 percent interest in the newspaper-radio company to his wife, Agnes, and a niece, specifying that it should be sold to those "who will carry out the ideals and principles which I have always attempted to maintain and support during my lifetime" rather than simply to the highest bidder. Agnes died some 6 months later, bequeathing about $1 million to Harvard "to promote and elevate the standards of journalism in the United States and educate persons deemed especially qualified for journalism." Successor Hugh J. Grant established a unique employee-ownership plan that was drafted in mid-May of last year. The Nieman Fellows have been chosen from 309 applicants in 44 states; they may study whatever they like, and the first ones include Dorchester, Mass.-born Boston Globe editorial writer Louis M. Lyons, 41; he will remain with the program as assistant curator, succeed Archibald MacLeish as curator in 1946, and continue until his retirement in 1964.

"Superman" debuts in the June issue of Action Comics. Cleveland cartoonists Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, both 24, developed their superhuman Clark Kent newspaperman hero while in high school and have finally sold it to Detective Comics, Inc., which publishes the first "Superman" episode, paying the two young men $10 per page to give them an income of $15 each per week. "Superman" will appear in newspapers beginning in the early 1940s and be the basis of radio and television serials and endless merchandise spinoffs, but Detective Comics has acquired all rights, and "Superman's" originators will derive little financial reward until the syndicators agree late in 1975 to provide them with pensions.

Cartoonist E. C. Segar dies at Santa Monica, Calif., October 13 at age 43. The "Popeye" character that he introduced in 1929 continues; Postal Telegraph founder Clarence H. Mackay dies at New York November 12 at age 64.

Radio passes magazines for the first time as America's chief advertising medium.

CBS stations broadcast The War of the Worlds October 30 and give a dramatic demonstration of the power of radio. Orson Welles's Mercury Theater of the Air presents a live radio version of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel, and its "news" reports of Martian landings in New Jersey are so realistic that near-panics occur in many areas despite periodic announcements that the program is merely a dramatization (by New York-born lawyer-turned-playwright Howard Koch, 35).