A C Clarke 1930

1930

A radio telephone terminal at the
Post Office International Telephone Exchange Building
in London (c.1930)
		1930 Film producer Louis Blattner, designs the first recorder using magnetised tape instead of wire. Called the Blathnerphone, based on the German patents of Dr Kurt Stille. It is originally employed to synchronise sound to film at Elstree Studios in London.
1931 The first experimental microwave link set up across the English Channel by STC (UK) and LMT (France) in 1931
		1931, July CBS inaugurate the first regular schedule of TV broadcasting in the US. The following year, CBS provides TV coverage of the presidential election for the first time.
1931, September 17. RCA-Victor launch the first 331/3 rpm LPs and gramophones, at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York. The first record - Beethoven's Fifth - is conducted by Leopold Stokowski. It is the first time a complete orchestral piece is issued on a standard long-playing record.
Edison's signature and quote		1931, October 18. Death of Edison.
1932 RCA demonstrate a television receiver with a cathode-ray picture tube.		RCA's 60-line experimental transmission received on Zworykin's kinetoscope (c.1929-30).
Vannevar Bush		1932 Vannevar Bush of MIT completes a mechanical computer called the differential analyser, which does calculus using rotating gears and shafts.
1933 First drive-in cinema opens in Camden, New Jersey.
Birdman: Marconi's transmitting and receiving apparatus installed in the observer's cockpit of the Scotland Yard autogyro. The receiver is immediately below the dashboard and the transmitter, which is worked by the morse key strapped to the observer's leg, can be seen above his left hand. This machine is used for traffic control at the Derby and other important events.		1933 Edwin H. Armstrong [see 1917], in collaboration with US physicist Michael Pupin (1858-1935), develops, and files the first patent for, the FM method of radio broadcasting. FM - frequency modulation - means the transmitted signal is made to modulate the frequency of the carrier wave. This means that FM is static-free and capable of high-fidelity sound reproduction. Despite its advantages, FM did not get off the ground until after World War II. An advantage of FM is the 'capture effect' which enables another, slightly weaker, interfering carrier on the same frequency as a wanted carrier to be rejected. These and many other of Armstrong's inventions were universally adopted but brought him little satisfaction. A contentious and litigious man, he was forever engaged in lawsuits, and eventually took his own life in a fit of depression.
1934 Imperial and International Communications Ltd change their name to Cable and Wireless Limited. This company was formed five years before out of a merger between Eastern Telegraph's submarine cable and Marconi's wireless businesses.		Original Cable and Wireless logo featuring Mercury
Konrad Zuse and his Z2 'computer'. It read it's programs from punched tape, for which Zuse used discarded 35mm movie film.		1934 Trainee civil engineer Konrad Zuse (1910-) begins building two primitive digital 'computers', which he names Z1 and Z2, to help him in laborious calculations. These stored numbers in binary form. The German Aeronautical Research Institute in Berlin sponsored Z3, which was used to calculate the vibration of airframes under stress. Z4 was built and used at an aeronautical institute in Gottingen. As Russian troops advanced on the city, it was removed and hidden in a nearby village, where it was discovered by Allied troops. From 1950-55, it was used by the Federal Technical University in Zurich, Switzerland for aerodynamic calculation. Zuse later established a small computer manufacturing company, and his Z22 was one of the first computers to use transistors. His company was taken over by Siemens and Zuse returned to research. Incidentally, Zuse was a friend of Werner von Braun (1912-77), the German rocket engineer who developed the V1 and V2 rockets during World War II and subsequently worked for NASA in the USA.
1934 The first commercially sponsored radio programmes are broadcast from the newly-established Radio Luxembourg.
		1934, March The Marconi Company formally agree to establish a joint venture with EMI - the Marconi-EMI Television Company. This provides a marriage of technology between EMI's high-definition TV system, using an electronic scanner and their Emitron camera, and Marconi's VHF transmitter and aerial design.
1935 International Business Machines introduce the IBM 601, a punch-card machine with an arithmetic unit based on relays. It is capable of doing a multiplication in one second. About 1500 of these machines are produced and are used in both scientific and commercial computation.
		1935 As scientific adviser to the Air Ministry in 1940, Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (1892-1937) has a major influence on the rapid development of radar.
1935, March 22 The Nazi Party in Germany announce the opening night of the world's first regular TV service. In fact, it was just a 90-minute broadcasting demonstration, showing a blurred view of speeches by Hitler and others proclaiming the miracle of television. The Nazis were aiming to create a propaganda coup by beating the BBC, which had announced plans to launch a regular high-definition TV service earlier that same year. The following year, the Nazis built the first real TV station in order to broadcast the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Most Germans became aware of TV for the first time as a result. Berlin itself had 28 Fersestuben - public television parlours - which showed eight hours of live transmissions from the games daily. Very few Germans had their own TV sets. Mass-market manufacture of the 'people's television receiver' - the E-1 Volksfernseher - had just begun when war broke out and production was halted.
		1936 The BBC begins a regular 405-line monochrome TV service from Alexandra Palace, London. It is agreed that both Marconi-EMI and the Baird Television Company should provide broadcasts from Alexandra Palace on alternate weeks, to see whose system works best. The minimum standard set is 240 lines. Baird's system reaches this but Marconi-EMI use their electronic camera tube to produce a sharper 405-line image. These broadcasts create a strong demand for TV in other cities and pressure to develop intercity links.
1936-39 Spanish Civil War.
Alan Turing Illustration by Joe Currie		1936, August 28. Mathematician Alan Turing (1912-54), while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, completes a paper which, although an exercise in highly abstract logic, is also the first exposition of the principles of a modern computer. The paper is entitled On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Entscheidungs is German for decision. The basic question the problem poses is how to decide what is true.
1936 George Harold Brown invents the turnstile antenna for television broadcasting.
		1936 The US Federal Communications Commission adopts a TV system of 441 lines.
1937 US mathematician and educator Claude E. Shannon (b. 1916 ) publishes his master's thesis at MIT. It provides a theoretical basis for the entire set of operations that will be designed into digital computers. The following year, he publishes A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits, a founding document of the mathematical theory of information. [see 1949]		Claude E. Shannon
		1937 Alec Reeves, a British scientist, then working in the Paris laboratories of Le Mate´riel Te´le´phonique, patens the principle of Pulse Code Modulation of digitally encoded signals and thus initiates a development that revolutionizes the transmission, switching, recording and processing of voice, fax, data and video signals. PCM protects signals against noise and interference and by its use of a defined digital format enables differing types of signals to be assembled into a common multiplex, i.e. an integrated services digital network (ISDN).
Marvin Camras		1937 US electrical engineer Marvin Camras develops a prototype wire recorder. In a subsequent brilliant career in the field of electronic communications, he obtains more than 500 patents, including one for a magnetic coating used in all kinds of recording tape, high frequency bias controls, and stereophonic sound.
		1937, May 12. First live journalistic reporting on television, by the BBC, at the coronation of King George VI.
1937, July 20. Death of Marconi in Rome. All radio stations, the world over, mark the event by closing down for two minutes.
		1937-42 John V. Atanasoff, then a physics professor at Iowa State College, builds the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC), with Clifford E. Berry, a graduate student, who collaborates with him from 1939 onwards. This is not the first digital computer but it is the first computer to employ vacuum tubes, and to carry out computer operations and digital arithmetic. Atanasoff's pioneering work is recognised only in 1973, an incidental result of a US court case over the validity of the ENIAC patent. [See 1945, November].
		1938 The first FM radio transmitter in the US is installed by General Electric. FM is adopted for US police patrol radios the following year.
1938 Hungarian journalist, hypnotist and sculptor Laszlo Biró (1899-1985) builds a prototype of the first ballpoint pen. He moves to Argentina in 1940, where he develops his invention, patenting it on 10th June 1943.
Chester Carlson The first Xerox		1938 American law student Chester Carlson (1906-68) invents xerography, the first method of photocopying, with his colleague Otto Kornei. They patent it two years later. Xerography comes from the Greek and means 'dry writing.' The first copy, made on 22nd October, read: 10.-22.-38. ASTORIA. They had set up their lab in the back of a beauty parlour in the Astoria section of Queen's, New York. Carlson had great difficulty convincing anyone of its commercial value. Finally, in 1947, he signed an agreement with the Haloid Co., who launched the first Xerox machine on 22nd October 1948. The following year the company became the Xerox Corporation. The royalties on his invention made him a millionaire.
1938 George Harold Brown develops the vestigial sideband filter for use in television transmission, doubling the horizontal resolution of television pictures at any given bandwith.
		1938, October 31 Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre stage a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds - and terrify a nation.
		1939 Bill Hewlett and David Packard (1912-96) found the company that bears their names, in a garage in Palo Alto, California, with $538 in cash. Their first commercial success comes with an audio oscillator - a device for measuring sound waves - which they sell to Walt Disney for use in the production of Fantasia. [see 1996]
1939 David Sarnoff, President of RCA, announces the launch of the company's first commercial TV set, at New York's World's Fair. It has a 30cm (12in) screen and sells for $625. The same year, NBC show the first live sports on TV - the Princeton v Columbia baseball game, from Baker Field in New York City. Later that year they also broadcast the first prizefight to be seen on TV, between Lou Nova and Max Baer at Yankee Stadium.		The RCA Victor television receiver. The 23cm (9in) Kinescope reproduced images 14x18cm (5 1/2 x 71/2) in for direct viewing
1939-45 World War II