MHP Timelines  Page
*

Prehistoric3500-1BCE1-1099 CE1100-13991400-15991600s1700s

1800s'10-'19'20-'29'30-'39'40-'49'50-'59'60-'69'70-'79'80-'89'90-'99

1900s'10-'19'20-'29'30-'39'40-'49'50-'59'60-'69'70-'79'80-'89'90-'99

2000s

*
Chronological Timeline HomeMedia History Project HomeMHP Connections Pages

20th Century: Third Decade

Gallery
*

Hand-cranked 35 mm
movie camera
192


Press camera
Germany
1925

Chapin's Ruby Green Singing
James Chapin's
Ruby Green Singing,
1928


Twin-lens reflex
camera, Germany
1928

Braque's Still Life: LeJour
Georges Braque's
Still Life:
Le Jour
,
1929


Cineprojector played
sound film or sync
sound, 1929

1920-1929
 
1920
1920: First cross-country airmail flight in the U.S.
1920: Charles Jenkins invents "prismatic rings," precursor to his mechanical TV.
1920: H.G. Wells' The Outline of History.
1920: Transcontinental airmail in the U.S.
1920: German film expressionsim is established with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
1920: Agatha Christie writes first of Hercule Poirot detective novels.
1920: KDKA begins regular schedule, starting the era of radio broadcasting.
1920: German psychiatrist Karl Binding calls for killing those who are "dead weight."
1920: After 21 years, Japanese movie makers start using actresses.
1920: Japan has become the world's second largest book-publishing nation.
1920: Hugh Lofting's charming Story of Dr. Doolittle talks to the animals.
1920: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence depicts callous New York society.
1920: Sound recording is done electrically. "Talkies" will follow.
1920: In England, Marconi creates the first short wave radio connection.
1920: Sinclair Lewis ridicules middle-class America in Main Street.
1920: Start of Négritude, French language anti-colonial literary movement.
1920: U.S. Post Office sets up metered postage.
1920: XWA, Montreal, begins first regularly scheduled North American broadcasts.
1920: The press release.
1920: AT&T, GE, RCA patent agreement permits radio equipment manufacturing.
1920: Nobel Prize in Literature: novelist Knut Hamsun, Norway.
1920: Eugene O'Neill's play, The Emperor Jones, the tale of a black anti-hero..
1920: Stanley and Helen Resor introduce psychological ad research.
 
 
1921
1921: Baseball's World Series is reported by radio.
1921: With Bessie Smith's first record, this decade will see the flowering of the blues.
1921: Quartz crystals keep radio signals from wandering.
1921: The word "robot" enters the language via Karel Capek's play R.U.R.
1921: Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author.
1921: Cleveland Playhouse becomes first U.S. resident professional theater.
1921: D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love examines sexual, psychological relationships.
1921: Western Union begins wirephoto service.
1921: Nobel Prize in Literature to French novelist Anatole France.
1921: Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie opens; will win Pulitzer for drama.
1921: Skywriting.
1921: Dempsey-Carpenter fight widens awareness of broadcasting.
1921: Photographs can be transmitted by wire across the Atlantic.
1921: Arnold Schoenberg develops 12-tone music notation.
1921: Radio becomes family fun as hobbyists turn in headphones for speakers.
1921: Public address amplifiers and loudspeakers are used in military ceremony.
1921: Sergei Prokofiev's opera, The Love for Three Oranges, is performed.
1921: At the movies: Chaplin's The Kid and Valentino's The Sheik.
1921: Many radio licenses are issued. Many radio "firsts," especially sports.
1921: Hendrik Willem Van Loon's The Story of Mankind is widely read.
 
1922
1922: The radio license floodgates open, but only three frequencies in U.S.
1922: American introduces radio to the Philippines.
1922: Nervous Hollywood censors itself with own film review board, the Hays Office.
1922: Comic Monthly magazine reprint of comic strips foreshadows comic books.
1922: RCA radio-faxes a photo across the Atlantic Ocean in six minutes.
1922: 100,000 radio sets manufactured in U.S.
1922: Paul Klee paints Twittering Machine.
1922: A commercial is broadcast. U.S. radio will be built on "toll broadcasting."
1922: Britain gets its first radio station.
1922: Muzak, developed by George Squier.
1922: Herbert Kalmus introduces two-color Technicolor process for movies.
1922: Joyce's Ulysses develops stream-of-consciousness writing.
1922: T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" considers the sterility of modern life.
1922: Nobel Prize in Literature: dramatist Jacinto Benavente, Spain.
1922: Eugene O'Neill's play The Hairy Ape, a comedy of ancient and modern life.
1922: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus argues that much of philosophy is nonsense.
1922: 15-year-old Philo Farnsworth designs a television "image dissector."
1922: Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha searches for the meaning of life.
1922: German historian Oswald Spengler completes seminal The Decline of the West.
1922: The BBC goes on the air.
1922: Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion examines opinion formation.
1922: Movie tickets sold weekly in the U.S.: 40 million.
1922: Emily Post publishes Etiquette.
1922: The Reader's Digest begins its monthly run.
1922: Germany's UFA produces a film with an optical sound track.
1922: Singers desert phonograph horn mouths for acoustic studios.
1922: Orphan Annie enters the comic pages.
1922: The first portable radio. Experimental car radio.
1922: On a Schenectady, NY, station, the first radio drama is presented.
1922: Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt adds a name to the lexicon of insults.
1922: Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North is the first feature film documentary.
 
 
1923
1923: Argentine poet, critic, short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges' first book.
1923: Vladimir Zworykin patents the first electronic camera tube, the iconoscope.
1923: Ribbon microphones become the studio standard.
1923: Neon signs.
1923: A picture, broken into dots, is sent by wire.
1923: A book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, helps give stature to public relations.
1923: Nobel Prize in Literature to Irish poet W.B. Yeats.
1923: A.C. Nielsen Company begins to measure radio audiences for advertisers.
1923: In the U.S., creation of the National Association of Broadcasters.
1923: Shaw's St. Joan argues that she had to die; the world was not ready for her.
1923: 16 mm nonflammable film makes its debut.
1923: "Jelly Roll" Morton composes jazz.
1923: A speech by President Warren Harding is broadcast.
1923: Half a million radios are sold in U.S., a five-fold increase in one year.
1923: Several radio stations hook up by phone to form a temporary network.
1923: A half million radio sets are manufactured in the U.S.
1923: Harlem's Cotton Club presents all-black entertainment to all-white audiences.
1923: Time, the weekly newsmagazine.
1923: Reversal film eliminates negatives, eases home movie photography.
1923: Novelist Willa Cather and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay win Pulitzer Prizes.
1923: Kodak introduces home movie equipment.
1923: Darius Milhaud's ballet, Creation of the World.
 
 
1924
1924: Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prize novel, So Big.
1924: King George V speech broadcast over BBC radio.
1924: Sean O'Casey's play, Juno and the Paycock.
1924: On Broadway, operettas Rose Marie and The Student Prince.
1924: Low tech achievement: notebooks get spiral bindings.
1924: E.M. Forster's novel about British colonial mentality, A Passage to India.
1924: Herman Melville's 1891 Billy Budd finally published; will lead to opera, film.
1924: Nobel Prize in Literature to Polish epic poet Wladyslaw Reymont.
1924: Eugene O'Neill continues to dominate theater drama with Desire Under the Elms.
1924: Ottorino Respighi composes The Pines of Rome.
1924: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain.
1924: Founding of Simon & Schuster, book publishers.
1924: The Eveready Hour is the first sponsored radio program.
1924: At KDKA, Conrad sets up a short-wave radio transmitter.
1924: E. Howard Armstrong builds first portable radio, a gift to his bride.
1924: The first Walt Disney cartoon, Alice's Wonderland.
1924: Daily coast-to-coast air mail service.
1924: In the U.S., 1,400 stations are broadcasting to 3 million radio sets.
1924: Almost daily sports broadcasts.
1924: Radio hook-ups broadcast Democratic, Republican conventions.
1924: K. Jansky's radio astronomy reports of "star noise" published, ignored.
1924: George Gershwin writes his symphonic jazz Rhapsody in Blue.
1924: Pictures are transmitted between London and New York.
1924: Two and a half million radio sets in the U.S.
1924: All-electric recorder and phonograph are built.
 
 
1925
1925: Commercial picture facsimile radio service across the U.S.
1925: Der Prozess (tr. As The Trial) by Franz Kafka.
1925: Alban Berg's Wozzek removes tonality from opera.
1925: Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy.
1925: Transcontinental radio hook-up carries Coolidge inaugural to 24 stations.
1925: The Goodyear blimp floats ads through the sky.
1925: Expatriate American poet Ezra Pound begins his Cantos.
1925: John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, a novel of life without meaning.
1925: Random House begins book publication.
1925: Western Electric creates Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc film system.
1925: A British radio broadcast is heard in the United States.
1925: From the new Soviet Union, Dmitri Shostakovich, 1st Symphony
1925: Harold Ross starts The New Yorker.
1925: Electrical recordings go on sale.
1925: Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway.
1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a novel of the tragedy of success.
1925: The New Yorker.
1925: Grand Ole Opry begins in Nashville as "WSM Barn Dance."
1925: Thomas Mofolo's Chaka the Zulu is written in the Sotho language.
1925: Arrowsmith, a novel by Sinclair Lewis of a life devoted to medicine.
1925: Charlie Chaplin's film, The Gold Rush.
1925: Romani (Gypsy) writers union is founded in Soviet Union, then is suppressed.
1925: The first volume of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, written in prison.
1925: Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin establishes film montage technique.
1925: George Bernard Shaw wins Nobel Prize in Literature.
1925: Earl Biggers introduces the fictional detective Charlie Chan.
1925: In London, the demonstration of a televised image. The first image: $
1925: A moving image, the blades of a model windmill, is telecast.
1925: From France, a wide-screen film.
1925: Ben-Hur costs nearly $4 million, an unheard-of price to make a movie.
1925: The first broadcast soap opera: The Smith Family.
1925: John Logie Baird demonstrates the first TV system, using mechanical scanning.
1925: Warner Bros. starts experiments to make "talkies."
 
 
1926
1926: The first featherweight phonograph stylus.
1926: Kodak manufactures 16 mm film stock.
1926: Commercial picture facsimile radio service across the Atlantic.
1926: Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy will sell millions of copies.
1926: Some radios get automatic volume control, a mixed blessing.
1926: The Book-of-the-Month Club starts: cut-rate books by subscription.
1926: A.A. Milne writes of Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh, and Piglet.
1926: The Scholastic Aptitude Exam (SAT) is administered.
1926: In U.S., first 16mm movie is shot.
1926: Weather map is televised experimentally.
1926: Burma Shave signs dot U.S. highways.
1926: Playwright Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars.
1926: Kafka, The Castle.
1926: Charles Jenkins transmits TV signal between cities.
1926: The first radio jingle, for Wheaties.
1926: Sigmund Romberg composes The Desert Song.
1926: Ernest Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises.
1926: Ring Lardner, The Love Nest and Other Stories.
1926: Robert Goddard launches the liquid-fuel rocket.
1926: Paul Henry de Kruif's Microbe Hunters is surprising best seller.
1926: Sinclair Lewis wins Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, refuses it.
1926: Enough Rope, Dorothy Parker's first book of verse.
1926: Rudolf Valentino's funeral hysteria, suicides, show emotional power of film.
1926: Giacomo Puccini's Turandot is produced posthumously.
1926: Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart bring The Girl Friend to Broadway.
1926: Nobel Prize in Literature: novelist Grazia Deledda, Italy.
1926: Martha Graham, barefoot, leads American modern dance movement.
1926: NBC is formed and takes over AT&T Red Network.
1926: Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat will become Broadway musical, hit film.
1926: Don Juan, the first publicly shown "talkie", premieres in New York.
1926: Bell Telephone Labs transmit film by television.
1926: Coin-operated radios in public places, 5 minutes for 5 cents.
1926: Unregulated radio stations drown each other out, beg for government controls.
1926: Poet Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues."
 
 
1927
1927: NBC begins a second radio networks, NBC Blue.
1927: International airmail.
1927: The Literary Guild book club.
1927: BBC commissions a music composer, Gustavu Holst.
1927: CBS is formed. Radio broadcasting is becoming a mass medium.
1927: New U.S. Federal Radio Commission regulates radio transmission, not content.
1927: Electric plugs and single knob tuning make radio more than a hobby.
1927: Live test TV by mechanical scanning, 2" x 2.5", of Herbert Hoover's face.
1927: Advertising locks in as the economic base of U.S. radio broadcasts.
1927: Sinclair Lewis attacks religious hypocrisy in Elmer Gantry.
1927: John Logie Baird sells first recorded TV images, 30-line Phonovisor.
1927: Kafka's novel Amerika is published three years after his death.
1927: The film Napoleon tries wide-screen and multi-screen effects.
1927: Nobel Prize in Literature: philosopher and essayist Henri Bergson, France.
1927: Martin Heidegger's Being and Time will help found modern existentialism.
1927: Philo Farnsworth assembles a complete electronic TV system.
1927: Jerome Kern's Showboat connects Broadway musical with opera.
1927: Jolson's The Jazz Singer is the first popular "talkie."
1927: Movietone offers newsreels in sound.
1927: Hesse's novel Steppenwolf, a fable about the split in human nature.
1927: U.S. Radio Act declares public ownership of the airwaves.
1927: Negative feedback makes hi-fi possible.
1927: Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
1927: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is founded.
1927: In Paris, Marcel Proust completes his 16-volume Remembrance of Things Past.
1927: Two-way AT&T radio phone service, U.S. to London, $75 for 5 minutes.
 
 
1928
1928: The teletype machine makes its debut.
1928: In Germany, Fritz Pfleumer creates audio tape: magnetic powder on paper, film.
1928: Daven mechanical TV disc can scan 3 standards: 24, 36, and 48 lines/sec.
1928: Charles Jenkins heralds future of television as "radio movies."
1928: Television sets are put in three U.S. homes, programming begins.
1928: General Electric builds a television set with a 3-inch x 4-inch screen.
1928: Baird invents a video disc to record television.
1928: Gershwin's tone poem, An American in Paris.
1928: Maurice Ravel composes his best known work, Bolero.
1928: Anthropologist Margaret Mead startles readers with Coming of Age in Samoa.
1928: First Oscars: Wings, Emil Jannings, Janet Gaynor.
1928: Also at the movies: 7th Heaven, Chaplin's The Circus.
1928: Nobel Prize in Literature: novelist Sigrid Undset, Norway.
1928: O'Neill's play, Strange Interlude.
1928: Decline and Fall, first of Evelyn Waugh's satiric novel about British upper crust.
1928: Stephen Vincent Benet writes the Pulitzer winning poem, "John Brown's Body".
1928: Home radios use ordinary electric current instead of batteries.
1928: Disney adds sound to cartoons; Steamboat Willie introduces Mickey Mouse.
1928: In an experiment, television crosses the Atlantic.
1928: The newest dance craze: the Charleston.
1928: The Oxford English Dictionary, begun in 1858, is finished: 15,487 pages.
1928: Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover will be banned for years over sex content.
1928: In Schenectady, N.Y., the first scheduled television broadcasts.
1928: Amos �n' Andy broadcasts to huge audiences. Even movies are interrupted.
1928: Syndication of recorded shows begins with Amos �n' Andy.
1928: Times Square gets moving headlines in electric lights.
1928: IBM adopts the 80-column punched card.
1928: Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht stage The Threepenny Opera.
 
 
1929
1929: Erich Maria Remarque's pacifist novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.
1929: Hollywood makes its first original musical, The Broadway Melody.
1929: In London, the first TV station is built, experimental transmission only.
1929: Sinclair Lewis' novel, Dodsworth explores the pain adultery can bring.
1929: Founding of the Vienna Circle and its theory of logical positivism.
1929: Experiments begin on electronic color television.
1929: The Museum of Modern Art opens in New York.
1929: Oscars: The Broadway Melody, Warner Baxter, Mary Pickford.
1929: Telegraph ticker sends 500 characters per minute.
1929: The first 4-color comic publication, The Funnies, but not quite a comic book.
1929: Ship passengers can phone relatives ashore.
1929: Brokers watch stock prices soar, crash on an automated electric board.
1929: Something else new: the car radio. But you have to stop to mount an antenna.
1929: Zworykin demonstrates the kinescope cathode ray tube for TV receivers.
1929: Phonograph manufacturers phase out hand-cranked models.
1929: German novelist Thomas Mann awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1929: Popeye the Sailor and Tarzan swing into the comic strips.
1929: Television studio is built in London.
1929: Bell Labs produces color TV mechanically.
1929: 24 frames/second established as sound motion picture camera standard.
1929: The film Hallelujah introduces post-synchronization.
1929: Thomas Wolfe's novel, Look Homeward, Angel, desperation to leave small town.
1929: Les Paul, age 14, creates forerunner of the electric guitar.
1929: William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury: a family falls apart.
1929: Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms extends his reputation.
1929: Winston Churchill completes 4-volume The World Crisis, about WW I.
1929: Air mail is flown from Miami to South America.
1929: The Vienna Circle publishes philosophical manifesto, A Scientific World-View.
1929: Bertrand Russell shocks tradition with Marriage and Morals.


*search the Project
 
Sources for the timeline and accompanying information.

Copyright © Irving Fang and Kristina Ross, 1995-1996. All rights reserved.