1961 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

The U.S. radar station Texas Tower #4 goes down in a storm January 15 about 70 miles off the coast of New York and New Jersey. Part of the Early Warning Detection System, the 3,200-ton structure was floated into position in the summer of 1957, and although it was built to withstand waves up to 60 feet high and winds of up to 125 miles per hour it has become unstable, most of its crew has been removed while workmen filled its 300-foot legs with sand and concrete, but all 27 men on the rig are lost.

Journalist Dorothy Thompson dies of a heart attack at Lisbon January 31 at age 66.

Lynn, Mass.-born physicist Elias Snitzer, 36, of American Optical Corp. publishes a paper that pioneers transmission of signals by means of fiber optics (see Bell's Photophone, 1880; Kapany, 1956). European and U.S. engineers and scientists have used bent-glass rods to illuminate body cavities for purposes of medical examination; Snitzer theorizes that a single-mode fiber only 0.005 inch thick with a much thinner core could carry light with only one wave-guide mode, and while such a fiber will serve well enough for medical instruments it has a light loss of one decibel per meter. His fiber and erbium-doped amplifier will nevertheless lead to a widespread replacement of copper wires with glass fibers (see Kao, 1964).

Britain's Westward Television begins broadcasting April 29, Border Television September 1, Grampion Television September 30 (for northern Scotland). Parliament authorizes BBC to establish a self-contained, distinctive world service and to extend its broadcasting hours for the production of more educational programs for adults.

U.S. television programming is a "vast wasteland," says Milwaukee-born FCC chairman Newton N. (Norman) Minow, 35, in a May 9 address to the National Association of Broadcasters convention at Washington, D.C. "I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air, and stay there. You will see a vast wasteland—a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families . . . blood and thunder . . . mayhem, violence, sadism, murder . . . private eyes, more violence, and cartoons . . . and, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending" (see Britain, 1962).

Radio pioneer Lee De Forest dies at Hollywood, Calif., June 30 at age 87, having seen television become a commercial success despite the doubts he expressed in 1926.

The Helvetica typeface introduced by Swiss designers Edouard Hoffman and Max Meidinger is a deliberately anonymous font that will be widely used by European modernists.

IBM introduces the Selectric typewriter designed by Boston-born architect Eliot F. (Fette) Noyes, 51 (see computer, 1955; electric typewriter, 1908). It has a moving "golf ball" cluster of interchangeable type, will be linked in 1964 to a magnetic tape recorder that permits automated, individually addressed original copies of any letter, and by 1975 will account for an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the electric typewriter market (see 1991; word processor, 1974).

The Vincent Astor estate sells Newsweek magazine to the Washington Post, whose president Philip L. Graham, now 46, is the son-in-law of the late Eugene Meyer (see 1937).