1945 | Communications, Media
Communications, Media
A Japanese machine-gun bullet kills U.S. war correspondent Ernest Taylor "Ernie" Pyle at age 44 April 18 on a tiny Pacific island near Iwo Jima. Pyle has shared the hardships of the common American foot soldier throughout the war, and his columns and books have brought home to civilians the reality of combat and the long hours in between engagements; radio pioneer Sir John Ambrose Fleming dies at Sidmouth, Devon, April 18 at age 95.
The Congressional Quarterly is founded at Washington, D.C., by Florida journalist Nelson Poynter, 41, and his wife, Henrietta (née Malkiel), 44.
Argentina's military regime charges the editors of six newspapers with conspiring to overthrow the government and arrests them briefly in the fall; among them is La Prensa editor Alberto Gainza Paz (see 1943; 1951).
The London Daily Express creates a worldwide sensation with a front-page story published September 5 under the headline "The Atomic Plague." Australian-born journalist Wilfred (Graham) Burchett, 35, has visitited Hiroshima in defiance of Gen. MacArthur's orders and is the first to report the horrifying effects of radiation and nuclear fallout, which are downplayed by New York Times science reporter William L. (Leonard) Laurence (who will win a Pulitzer prize for his 10 stories on the nuclear program but will turn out to have been paid by the War Department).
Radio: Meet the Press 10/5 on WOR-Mutual with American Mercury magazine publisher Lawrence E. Spivak, 44, moderating a "spontaneous, unrehearsed weekly news conference of the air" produced by onetime fiction writer Martha Rountree, 30. Journalists interview prominent news figures on the show (see television, 1947).
Some 5,000 U.S. homes have television sets—bulky receivers with tiny screens that pick up what little programming is available from the handful of stations in operation. But the world is on the edge of a communications revolution that will see television sets in nearly every home of every developed country (see 1939; 1948).
A telephone answering machine patented by U.S. inventor Edwin L. Peterson employs newly developed wire-recording technology (see 1940; Müller, 1935; Zimmermann, 1948).
Ballpoint pens go on sale October 29 at New York's Gimbel Bros. (see Biro, 1938). The Biro brothers emigrated to Argentina 2 years ago and received financial backing from British financier Henry Martin; he set up a factory in England with Frederick Miles to produce pens that would not leak at high altitudes, Lazlo Biro went to England last year, and he sold 30,000 pens to the Royal Air Force (plus thousands more to the U.S. Army Air Corps). Chicago promotor Milton Reynolds, 53, has seen the Ladislao Biro pen while visiting Buenos Aires on business in June, developed a pen with gravity flow instead of capillary attraction to make it different enough to get around Biro's patents, gone into production October 6, and is producing 70 pens per day. Gimbels quickly sells out at $12.50 each with the initial promise that the pens will write underwater, Reynolds increases production to 30,000 per day, but his pens sometimes leak and their ball points drop out. Some banks suggest that ballpoint pen signatures may not be legal, but the new pens will make it practical to handwrite multicopy business and government forms using carbon paper. The French company Bic will acquire Miles Aircraft and develop a cheaper throwaway pen (see 1950).
Ebony magazine begins publication in November; the black-oriented U.S. picture monthly sells out its initial press run of 25,000 copies. John H. Johnson of Johnson Publishing introduced Negro Digest in 1942 and will introduce Tan in 1950 and Jet in 1951 as he increases his holdings in Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co.
The State Department takes over the Voice of America (VOA) from the Office of War Information December 31 (see 1943). Many VOA services have been reduced or eliminated, Congress has only reluctantly appropriated funds for continued operation, but a committee of private citizens appointed by the State Department and headed by Columbia University professor Arthur McMahon has cautioned that the government could not be "indifferent to the ways in which our society is portrayed to other countries" (see Smith-Mundt Act, 1948).