1920 to 1930 Timeline

In 1920 Czech novelist, playwright, journalist and translator Karel Capek published R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in Prague. This play, written in Czech except for the title, introduced the word “robot” and explored the issue of whether worker-machines would replace people.

In 1920 Norwegian mathematician Thoraf Albert Skolem of the University of Oslo proved the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, a landmark in mathematical logic.

Skolem's paper was first published as "Logisch-kombinatorische Untersuchungen über die Erfüllbarkeit oder Beweisbarkeit mathematischer Sätze nebst einem Theoreme über dichte Mengen", Videnskapsselskapet Skrifter, I. Matematisk-naturvidenskabelig Klasse 6 (1920) 1–36.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) No. 365. An English translation of Skolem's paper appears in van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel (1967) 254-63.

On August 31, 1920 the first radio news program was broadcast by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

KDKA, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Westinghouse station, transmitted the first commercial radio broadcast.

English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist and pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, published Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process at Cambridge at Cambridge University Press.  In this work Richardson described a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

U.S. Army cryptologist William F. Friedman published The Index of Coincidence and its Applications in Cryptography, Department of Ciphers. Publ 22. Geneva, Illinois, USA: Riverbank Laboratories.

Friedman's report presented the coincidence counting, or index of coincidence method of code-breaking.

Hilary Jenkinson, Deputy Keeper of the British Public Record Office, published A Manual of Archive Administration, Including the Problem of War Archives and Archive Making.

Part II. Origin and Development of Archives and Rules for Archive Keeping, included §1. The Evolution of Archives.

♦ You can download a PDF of this work at the Internet Archive at this link:

http://www.archive.org/details/manualofarchivea00jenkuoft, accessed 01-27-2010.

In 1922 American Army Signal Corps officer and inventor Major General George Owen Squier of Washington, D. C. created "Wired Radio," a service that piped music to businesses and subscribers over wires. Squier, who, in the early 1920s, was granted several US patents related to transmission of information signals, including a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over electrical lines, recognized the potential of this technology for delivering music to listeners without the use of radio, which at the time required fussy and expensive equipment. Squier sold the rights to his information transmission patents to the North American Company utility conglomerate, which created a company named Wired Radio Inc. with the intent to use the technique to deliver music subscriptions to private customers of the utility company's power service.

Squier remained involved in the Wired Radio project. Intrigued by the use of the neologism "Kodak" as a trademark, he took the "mus" syllable from "music" and added the "ak" from "Kodak" to create the name "Muzak" for the service. By the time a workable Muzak system was fully developed, commercial radio had become well established, so the company re-focused its efforts on delivering music to hotels and restaurants. The first actual delivery of Muzak to commercial customers took place in New York City in 1936, two years after Squier's death.

The British Broadcasting Company, the first national broadcasting organization, was formed for radio broadcasting by a group of British telecommunications companies. Its first broadcast from Marconi House in London occurred on November 14, 1922.

On November 4, 1922 British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty Tutankhamum underneath the remains of workmen's huts built during the Ramesside Period. Nearly intact, this was the only virtually undisturbed tomb of an Egyptian pharoah ever found. Known as KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamum in the Valley of the Kings became world famous for the treasure it contained. Excavation was not completed until November 1930.  

The great majority of the incomparable treasures from Tutankhamum's tomb are preserved in Cairo's Egyptian Museum. Through loan exhbitions in other museums, many have been viewed by millions of people around the world.  However, various treasures from the tomb also somehow made their way into other museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leading some to suggest that Carter, who was also an agent for building museum collections, stole certain items from the tomb before turning over all the finds to the Egyptian government.

In 1923, 1927, and 1933 Carter published a three-volume account of the discovery entitled The Tomb of Tut·Ankh·Amen Discovered by the late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter.

On June 12, 2012 a significant portion of Carter's personal papers concerning the discovery remaining with his descendents were offered for sale at auction by Bonham's in London with an estimate of £100,000-150,000.

Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, working at Westinghouse Laboratories in Pittsburgh, patented the iconoscope, the first electronic television camera. His design, however, was incomplete:

"Vladimir Zworykin is also sometimes cited as the father of electronic television because of his invention of the iconoscope in 1923 and his invention of the kinescope in 1929. His design was one of the first to demonstrate a television system with all the features of modern picture tubes. His previous work with Rosing on electromechanical television gave him key insights into how to produce such a system, but his (and RCA's) claim to being its original inventor was largely invalidated by three facts: a) Zworykin's 1923 patent presented an incomplete design, incapable of working in its given form (it was not until 1933 that Zworykin achieved a working implementation), b) the 1923 patent application was not granted until 1938, and not until it had been seriously revised, and c) courts eventually found that RCA was in violation of the television design patented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, whose lab Zworykin had visited while working on his designs for RCA. 

"The controversy over whether it was first Farnsworth or Zworykin who invented modern television is still hotly debated today. Some of this debate stems from the fact that while Farnsworth appears to have gotten there first, it was RCA that first marketed working television sets, and it was RCA employees who first wrote the history of television. Even though Farnsworth eventually won the legal battle over this issue, he was never able to fully capitalize financially on his invention" (http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Colour-television, accessed 12-22-2009).

German electrical engineer and inventor Arthur Scherbius began marketing a mechanical cipher rotor machine based on rotating wired wheels, and called Enigma.

Thousands of the machines are thought to have been produced from the 1920s to the end of World War II, during which the devices were used by the Third Reich to encrypt messages in a form they believed was undecipherable.

On September 11, 2011 a three-rotor Enigma machine in its original wooden box, and dated circa 1939, sold at Christie's London for £133,250.  This was a record price for an Enigma Machine.  The machine had been used in the 2001 film entitled Enigma.

American real estate developer J. C. Nichols built the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.

Designed architectually after Seville, Spain, it was the first suburban shopping center in the world designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile, and the Country Club District, which Nichols developed around the shopping center, is the largest contiguous master-planned community in the United States.

Nichols "called his method 'planning for permanence,' for his objective was to 'develop whole residential neighborhoods that would attract an element of people who desired a better way of life, a nicer place to live and would be willing to work in order to keep it better.' Nichols invented the percentage lease, where rents are based tenants' gross receipts. The percentage lease is now a standard practice in commercial leasing across the United States" (Wikipedia article on J C Nichols, accessed 04-05-2009).

Edward L. Bernays, founder of the public relations industry and double nephew of Sigmund Freud, published Crystallizing Public Opinion in New York through Boni & Liveright. 

Bernays combined the ideas of French sociologist Gustave Le Bon, originator of crowd psychology, with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud , and those of British surgeon and social psychologist Wilfred Trotter, who promoted similar ideas in the anglophone world in his book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.

"Trotter, who was a head and neck surgeon at University College Hospital, London, read Freud's works, and it was he who introduced Wilfred Bion, whom he lived and worked with, to Freud's ideas. When Freud fled Vienna for London after the Anschluss, Trotter became his personal physician, and Wilfred Bion and Ernest Jones became key members of the Freudian psychoanalysis movement in England, and would develop the field of Group Dynamics, largely associated with the Tavistock Institute where many of Freud's followers worked. Thus ideas of group psychology and psychoanalysis came together in London around World War II.

"Bernays' public relations efforts helped to popularize Freud's theories in the United States. Bernays also pioneered the PR industry's use of psychology and other social sciences to design its public persuasion campaigns:

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits." He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the 'engineering of consent'" (Wikipedia article on Edward Bernays, accessed 02-17-2012).

Romanian-German physicist Hermann Oberth published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen in Munich and Berlin at the press of R. Oldenbourg.

This book began as a doctoral thesis on the rocket in interplanetary space which Oberth submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 1922. When the thesis was rejected by the university Oberth paid for its commercial publication. The work was highly influential on the founding in 1927 of the German amateur rocket society, Verein für Raumschiffahrt, to which most of the early German rocketeers belonged, and which became a focal point of early rocketry research.

In his book Oberth set out to prove four propositions: (1) that the technology of the time permitted the building of machines capable of rising above the earth’s atmosphere; (2) that these machines could attain velocities sufficient to prevent their falling back to earth, or even to escape the earth’s gravitational pull; (3) that such machines could be built to carry human beings; and (4) that under certain conditions, their manufacture might be profitable. Oberth demonstrated that a rocket can operate in a vacuum and that it can surpass the velocity of its own exhaust; he also pointed out the superiority of liquid fuels in producing maximum exhaust velocity. He described in detail the designs of a prototypical instrument-carrying rocket and a theoretical space-ship, and developed the first sketchy model of a space station.

Oberth's work became more widely known through its greatly expanded third edition, retitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (1929), which contained over 400 pages compared to the 1923 edition’s 92 pages.

Oberth dedicated the 1929 work to Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, director and writer respectively of Frau im Mond (1929) one of the world’s first serious science fiction films. Oberth served as a consultant on the film, which was the first to present the basics of rocketry to a mass audience, and his income from that project was crucial in allowing him to complete the book.

Wege zum Raumschiffahrt was the first work to receive the REP-Hirsch International Astronautics Prize established in 1928 by French rocketry pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie and André-Louis Hirsch; the prize was awarded annually between 1929 and 1939. The purpose of the prize was to recognize “the best original theoretical or experimental works capable of promoting progress in one of the areas permitting the realization of interstellar navigation or furthering knowledge in a field related to astronautics.” In the epilogue to his book, Oberth acknowledged receipt of the REP-Hirsch Prize and expressed his surprise and gratitude that a French organization “would award such a prize to a German . . . It is encouraging to see that science and education are able to bridge national differences” (p. [424]).

An English translation of Oberth's 1929 book, Ways to Spaceflight, was published by NASA in 1972, and is downloadable from NASA's website.

Thomas J. Watson, president of CTR (Computer Tabulating Recording Corporation), of Endicott, New York, changed the name of the company to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

"Encouraged by George F. Johnson, who saw Endicott as the world's first industrial 'park' with a 'Square Deal' for everyone, IBM began building a factory complex in Endicott just to the east of the Endicott-Johnson factories. The original Bundy building (a Binghamton company) was erected on North Street as early as 1906 and stands to this day. Many of the IBM factory buildings, including Factory #1 and the IBM Schoolhouse, still stand to this day. Endicott was the original location of all IBM manufacturing, research, and development from the early 1920s through World War II" (Wikipedia article on Endicott, New York, accessed 02-18-2012).

In “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed,” Bell System Technical Journal 3 (1924) 324–346, information theorist Harry Nyquist analyzed factors affecting telegraph transmission speed, presenting the first statement of a logarithmic law for communication, and the first examination of the theoretical bounds for ideal codes for the transmission of information.

In 1924 the research organization that would in 1925 be known as Bell Labs developed the first high-fidelity sound recording. It extended the reproducible sound range by more than an octave on the high and low end.

Some of the earliest "talk radio" programs were sermons by Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist and "media sensation," broadcasting on her Four Square Gospel station, KFSG, in Los Angeles. 

Another pioneer of radio evangelism, S. Parkes Cadman, preceded McPherson by a few months.

In 1925 Walter Gifford, president of AT&T, consolidated Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of the American Telephone & Telegraph company (AT&T)  to form Bell Telephone Laboratories. From 1925 to 1966 the physical location of Bell was was 463 West Street in Manhattan.

In 1925 Robert B. Goldschmidt and Paul Otlet published "La Conservation et la diffusion internationale de la pensée" as publication no. 144 of the Institut international de bibliographie (Brussels). This work described their plans for a massive library where each volume existed as master negatives and positives on microform, and where items were printed on demand for interested patrons.

Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in Munich, the first volume of which he dictated in prison to his associate Rudolf Hess after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, November 1923.

One of the most influential books ever published, and possibly the most evil, the publication history, as well as the contents of this work, continue to be intensively reviewed by scholars, and read by people of different political persuasions, including extremists. The Wikipedia article on Mein Kampf contains unusually thorough documentation concerning its publication history.

Though publication of Mein Kampf was banned in some countries in 1947, it continued to sell widely in print in many languages, and according to a New York Times article published in November 2011, it had sold over 70 million copies by 2008.  It was also freely distributed on the Internet.  In 2011, with the pending expiration of its copyright, issues were raised concerning the dangers of allowing this text to circulate freely, and how it might be used to counteract prejudice and Holocaust denial, if that would be possible: 

"In 1947, Austria adopted the Verbotsgesetz — or “Prohibition Act” — banning the Nazi Party and criminalizing the celebration, promotion, or adulation of Nazi ideology; in the 1990s, it was amended to prohibit Holocaust denial. (It was under this law that the English writer David Irving was jailed a few years ago for denying the existence of the gas chambers.) Distributing and displaying Nazi paraphernalia is forbidden here. Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Lithuania — all these countries also criminalize revisionism and restrict various forms of speech and publications about the Holocaust. And for nearly 70 years, the German state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright for “Mein Kampf,” has fought heartily against the book’s publication in any country where it is possible to fight it.  

But now the rationale behind these restrictions is being questioned. While they may have helped limit the widespread distribution of “Mein Kampf” in Europe, repressive tactics of this kind have not aged well in the Internet era. (The book was never fully blocked anyway: in the 1980s, the U.S. Army sold it in some of its “Stars and Stripes” shops across Germany. And libraries often held copies.) Preventing a book’s publication today is largely a symbolic move.  

“Mein Kampf” is widely available, in its entirety, across the Web. It has been a hit in Japan and Turkey in recent years; it has sold briskly in South America and the Middle East; and it has shown up, like a nefarious inspiration, in such ugly places as the rantings of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. By 2008, an estimated 70,000,000 copies had been put into circulation since the book was first published in 1925, according to HatePrevention.org, a consortium of academics and activists. In other words, the restrictions on its publication may have enabled a kind of willful ignorance, a means of not recognizing the continued impact of the book’s ideas on society.  

"And so as Europe faces the end of the copyright on one of the most painful texts of the 20th century, some people now believe that the best course of action is not to extend the ban, but to publish 'Mein Kampf' with extensive annotations that explain how the book was used and what it wrought — that recognize its continued presence. 'Our idea is a zero-censorship effort,' says Philippe Coen, a French attorney at the forefront of HatePrevention.org, which organized the recent conference in Paris. He, like Dreyfus, favors the pedagogical approach to the publication of Hitler’s manifesto" (http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/the-return-of-mein-kampf/?nl=opinion&emc=tyb1, accessed 12-14-2011).

David Sarnoff of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) created the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) for radio broadcasting.

Italian Italian mathematician and physicist, known for his contributions to mathematical biology Vito Volterra of Sapienza – Università di Roma published "Varizioni e fluttuazioni del numero d'individui in specie animali conviventi" in Mem. R. Acad. Naz. dei Lincei (ser.6) II, 31-113.

This work was translated into English and published in the journal Nature the same year as "Fluctuations in the abundance of a species considered mathematically". In this paper Volterra created the basic equations for two species interactions.

On January 26, 1926 Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird gave the world's first demonstration of his electromechanical television system to fifty scientists assembled in his attic workshop at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) was founded in Edinburgh, Scotland.

German-Austrian engineer Fritz Pfleumer invented magnetic tape for recording sound, coating very thin paper with iron-oxide using lacquer as glue. He sold the rights to AEG in 1932.

English biologist and animal ecologist Charles Sutherland Elton published Animal Ecology in London at the press of Sidgwick & Jackson. It appeared as part of a series of textbooks in animal biology edited by Julian Huxley, who contributed a very informative introduction. In this book Elton integrated the concepts of food chains, pyramids of numbers, and the "niche" into a useful framework for ecology.

In 1927 journalist and suicide researcher Hans Rost published one of the more unusual specialized bibliographies: Bibliographie des Selbstmords mit textlichen Einführungen zu Jedem Kapitel.  This bibliography on the literature of suicide considered the subject from many points of view including philosophical, medical, psychological, religious, literary, and artistic, as well as topics like family suicide, mass suicide and euthanasia, from the 15th to 20th centuries. The bibliography listed about 4000 works in thematic chapters, to each of which Rost wrote an introduction. The book included 54 illustrations, which may have represented the first published collection of historical images on suicide. 

Rost's library of suicide literature was acquired by the city library of Augsburg in 1928.  Since 1988 the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Suizidprävention (DGS)(German Association for Suicide Prevention) has presented the Hans Rost Prize for outstanding scientific achievements in suicidology and for outstanding practical solutions toward the prevention of suicide.

American industrialist James Henry Rand, Jr. merged Rand-Kardex with Remington Typewriters and several other office supply companies to form Remington Rand.

On April 7, 1927 newspaper reporters and dignitaries gathered at the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories auditorium in New York City to see the first American demonstration of television. The live picture and voice of Secretary of Commerce (later President) Herbert Hoover were transmitted over telephone lines from Washington, D.C., to New York.  

“Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history,” Hoover said. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

A second telecast followed that day, via radio transmission from Whippany, N.J. The telecasts demonstrated television’s potential as an adjunct to telephone service and as a medium for entertainment.

The live demonstration of television at Bell Labs was filmed, and in February 2013 that short movie was viewable on Facebook at this link:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=116047015077905.

In April 1930 Bell Labs issued a pamphlet entitled Two-Way Television and a Pictorial Account of its Background, documenting the technology involved and the historic demonstration, plus some later developments.  An unusual dust jacket added to the 40-page illustrated pamphlet dramatized the new technology.

On September 7, 1927 American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted an image through the purely electronic means of a device called an "image dissector." This was the first all-electronic television.

"When Philo T. Farnsworth was 13, he envisioned a contraption that would receive an image transmitted from a remote location—the television. Farnsworth submitted a patent in January 1927, when he was 19, and began building and testing his invention that summer. He used an "image dissector" (the first television camera tube) to convert the image into a current, and an "image oscillite" (picture tube) to receive it. On this day his tests bore fruit. When the simple image of a straight line was placed between the image dissector and a carbon arc lamp, it showed up clearly on the receiver in another room. His first tele-electronic image was transmitted on a glass slide in his S[an] F[rancisco] lab at 202 Green St" (http://www.timelines.ws/subjects/Television.HTML, accessed 12-22-2009).

The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences was released in October 1927. The film included sound sequences running about two minutes, and the rest of its dialogue was done through the sound cards of traditional silent films.  However, the commercial impact the synchronized sound was sensational, and the release of The Jazz Singer heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. of Burbank, California with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the movie starred Al Jolson, who performed six songs. The film, written by and staring Jewish Americans, focussed on Jewish-American culture as well as American jazz.

"The story begins with young Jakie Rabinowitz defying the traditions of his devout Jewish family by singing popular tunes in a beer hall. Punished by his father, a cantor, Jakie runs away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage. . . 

"While many earlier sound films had dialogue, all were short subjects. D. W. Griffith's feature Dream Street (1921) was shown in New York with a single singing sequence and crowd noises. It was preceded by a program of sound shorts, including a sequence with Griffith speaking directly to the audience, but the feature itself had no talking scenes.Similarly, the first Warner Bros. Vitaphone features, Don Juan (premiered August 1926) and The Better 'Ole (premiered October 1926), like two more that followed in early 1927, had only a synchronized instrumental score and sound effects. The Jazz Singer contains those, as well as numerous synchronized singing sequences and some synchronized speech: Two popular tunes are performed by the young Jakie Rabinowitz, the future Jazz Singer; his father, a cantor, performs the devotional Kol Nidre; the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, appearing as himself, sings another religious melody. As the adult Jack Robin, Jolson performs six songs, five popular "jazz" tunes and the Kol Nidre. The sound for the film was recorded by British-born George Groves, who had also worked on Don Juan. To direct, the studio chose Alan Crosland, who already had two Vitaphone films to his credit: Don Juan and Old San Francisco, which opened while The Jazz Singer was in production.

"The spoken words that made movie history (over considerable crowd noise) and the opening of "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye)" Problems listening to this file? See media help. Jolson's first vocal performance, about fifteen minutes into the picture, is of "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face," with music by James V. Monaco and lyrics by Edgar Leslie and Grant Clarke. The first synchronized speech, uttered by Jack to a cabaret crowd and to the piano player in the band that accompanies him, occurs directly after that performance, beginning at the 17:25 mark of the film. Jack's first spoken words—"Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet"—were well-established stage patter of Jolson's. He had even spoken very similar lines in a 1926 short, Al Jolson in "A Plantation Act." The line had developed as something of an in-joke. In November 1918, during a gala concert celebrating the end of World War I, Jolson ran onstage amid the applause for the preceding performer, the great operatic tenor Enrico Caruso, and exclaimed, "Folks, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The following year, he recorded the song "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet". In a later scene, Jack talks with his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer, in the family parlor; his father enters and pronounces one very conclusive word. In total, the movie contains barely two minutes worth of synchronized talking, much or all of it improvised. The rest of the dialogue is presented through the caption cards, or intertitles, standard in silent movies of the era" (Wikipedia article on The Jazz Singer, accessed 01-07-2012).

At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Bologna, Italy, mathematician and physicist David Hilbert returned to the second of the twenty-three problems posed in his 1900 paper, asking, is mathematics complete, is it consistent, and is it decidable?

Three years later, the first two of these questions were answered in the negative by Kurt Gödel. Working independently, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and Emil Post published answers to the third question in 1936.

Hilbert's paper was first published in Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici, Bologna 3-10 settembre 1928 (VI) I (1929) 135-41.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 320.

IBM adopted the eighty-column punched card, the standard for about the next fifty years, and one of IBM's most profitable products.

Astronomer and mechanical computation pioneer Leslie J. Comrie working in London discovered how to use a commercial accounting machine as a difference engine.

With this technique Comrie reformed the production of the Nautical Almanac.

Working in London, astronomer and pioneer of mechanical calculating Leslie J. Comrie used punched-card machines to calculate the motions of the moon.

This project, in which twenty million holes were punched into five hundred thousand cards, continued into 1929. It was the first use of punched cards in a purely scientific application. (See Reading 4.4.)

In 1998 information theorist Ralph V. R. Hartley of Bell Labs published “Transmission of Information,” in which he proved "that the total amount of information that can be transmitted is proportional to frequency range transmitted and the time of the transmission."

Hartley's law eventually became one of the elements of Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication.

Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, economist and polymath John von Neumann then working at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, published "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele" in Mathematische Annalen, 100, 295–300. This paper "On the Theory of Parlor Games" propounded the minimax theorem, inventing the theory of games.

Having introduced the first feature-length part-talkie film, The Jazz Singer in 1927,  the following year Warner Brothers introduced the first all-talking feature film, Lights of New York, directed by Bryan Foy.  "The film, which cost only $23,000 to produce, grossed over $1,000,000. It was also the first film to define the crime genre. The enthusiasm with which audiences greeted the talkies was so great that by the end of 1929, Hollywood was producing sound films exclusively" (Wikipedia article on Lights of New York (1928 film), accessed 06-04-2012). Lights of New York was shot at 24 frames per second, which became the industry standard.

Television. The World’s First Television Journal, began publication in London. (See Readings 5.5 and 5.6.)

General Electric (GE) began regular television broadcasting in the United States with a 24-line system from a station that became WGY in Schenectady, New York.

Programs were transmitted Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. By the end of 1928 over 15 stations were licensed for TV broadcasting;

William S. Paley took over the failing United Independent Broadcasters network with its 16 affiliate stations and reorganized it as the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) for radio broadcasting.

Scottish engineer and inventor John Logie Baird began the first experimental television service at the German Post Office using his 30 line mechanical system.  In this system Sound and vision were initially sent alternately, and only began to be transmitted simultaneously from 1930.

In "Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingrffen intelligenter Wesen," Zeitschrift für Physik 53 (1929) 840-856 Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor working at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Leo Szilard described a theoretical model that served both as a heat engine and an information engine, establishing the relationship between thermodynamics (manipulation and transfer of energy and entropy,) and information (manipulation and transmission of bits).

Szilard was one of the first to show that "Nature seems to talk in terms of information" (Seife, Decoding the Universe, 77).

In 1929 American astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Edwin Hubble of the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California published "A Relation Between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae," Proceedings National  Academy of  Sciences, 15 (1929) 168-173. 

This was Hubble’s first paper on his discovery that the degree of redshift observed in light coming from a galaxy increased in proportion to the distance of that galaxy from the Milky Way. This became known as Hubble's law on the proportionality of distance and radial velocity of galaxies, indicating an expanding universe.

“Though only six pages in length, Hubble’s first paper on the velocity-distance relation represented a giant step in modern cosmology. . . . In place of a static picture of the cosmos, it seemed to many that the universe must be regarded as expanding, the rate of the mutual recession of its parts increasing with their relative distance” (Christianson, Edwin Hubble, Mariner of the Nebulae, 191, 188-192).

It has been said that Hubble’s discovery made as great a change in man’s conception of the universe as the Copernican revolution 400 years before.

Edwin Albert Link of Binghamton, New York designed and constructed  the Link Trainer, the first flight simulator, as a safe way to teach new pilots how to fly by instruments.

Link used his knowledge of pumps, valves and bellows to create a flight simulator that responded to the pilot's controls and gave an accurate reading on the included instruments.

Link Trainers became famous in World War II and were used by almost every combatant nation. The Link Company became a leader in flight simulation and training.

London antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros. issued Catalogue of Medical Works from the Library of Dr. Nicholaus Pol, Born c1470; Court Physician to the Emperor Maximilian I. Maggs further characterized the 34 items offered in the catalogue as "A remarkable collection of 'Editiones principes' and other early editions of Medical Authors, Classical, Arabian, and medieval from famous early presses of France and Italy in the original Gothic Bindings executed for Dr. Pol".

The asking price for the collection—£2500, even when the pound equalled nearly $5— seems exceptionally reasonable today, considering the optimal significance and quality of the books involved.

The catalogue was bought in its entirely by the Cleveland Medical Library and it is preserved in the Howard Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University.

"Through a clerical error, Dr. Harvey Cushing did not receive a copy of the catalogue, but his nephew Dr. Edward H. Cushing of Cleveland did. He promptly persuaded President Vinson of Western Reserve University to cable for the collection and hold it until the Cleveland Medical Library Association could raise the money. This was soon supplied by a donor who asked to be nameless, and the collection came to rest in the Cleveland Medical Library as a memorial to Mr. Charles H. Bingham" (http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/books/pol.html, accessed 08--02-2009).

In 1929 American book designer and typographer Bruce Rogers, then on a sojourn in London, and the Lanston Monotype Corporation of London first published the Centaur types, and and new cutting of the Arrighi Italic types designed by Frederick Warde in a 14-page small folio type specimen printing of a text by Alfred W. Pollard entitled The Trained Printer and the Amateur: and the Pleasure of Small Books. To this brief text Rogers prefixed a "Printer's Note." Pollard's essay was followed by type specimens of Centaur from 72 point to 10 point. The cover in 72 point Centaur read: New Series of the Centaur Types of Bruce Rogers and the Arrighi Italics of Frederick Warde. Cut by Monotype and here first used to print a paper by Alfred W. Pollard.

Regarding the development of Centaur Rogers wrote in his "Printer's Note":

"The type known as 'Montaigne,' for which I had been largely responsible, had met his [Pollard's] warm approbation; for in those days we all liked heavier and cruder types than our reconsideration of the matter now leads some of us to prefer. It may be that I reacted earlier than most from the types made popular in the nineties by the so-called revival of printing; at any rate the Montaigne type soon seemed to me unsatisfactory, and I began to consider means for improving upon it; but for one reason or another it was nearly ten years later that actual work upon a refinement of it was accomplished, in the type which is now known as 'Centaur.'

"In the meantime I had had the good fortune to come into possession of a copy of Jenson's 'Eusebius' of 1470, supposedly the first of the folios printed in his Roman letter, and the only one I have ever seen in which his type appears in all its delicate crispness of cutting and casting—a marvel of accuracy for those times.

"When portions of the clearest page in my copy were enlarged to about five times the original size I was at once struck by the pen-like characteristics of the lower-case letters; so with a flat pen cut to the width of the heavier lines, I wrote on the photographic print as rapidly as I could, thus preserving the proportions, at least, of Jenson's own characters. Being but an indifferent calligrapher many of my letters were rather crudely done, but I selected those that seemed to be the most successful and touched them up somewhat with pen and brush; and these, with capitals drawn with a pointed pen over photographs of the originals, served as models for the first cutting of the Centaur type.

"The close approximation to Jenson's type attained by these means leads me to hazard the theory that Jenson, having been director of the mint at Tours, was probably quite conversant with the roman capital forms; but when he embarked in the printing business at Venice and needed a model for his lower-case letters he selected what seemed to him the finest humanistic writing at hand and copied it as faithfully as possible with graver and punch.

"It will be seen that no claim for originality can be put forward for my type; neither is it an accurate reproduction of Jenson's letter. Having no reputation to maintain as a designer of type I have endeavoured only to produce a clear and legible letter that may be used in printing either ancient or modern works without attracting undue attention to itself."

Besides the specimen in printed wrappers, Rogers also issued a few copies in a buckram binding with a special gilt Centaur design and the letters "Centaur & Arrighi" stamped on the upper cover. The copy of that version in my library has the original printed wrappers of the regular specimen bound in.

Using his Centaur types during his London sojourn Rogers designed two of his greatest masterpieces: the T. E. Lawrence translation of Homer's Odyssey printed by Emery Walker Ltd in 1932, and the Oxford Lectern Bible (1935).