1930 to 1940 Timeline

In 1930 American engineer, educator, and visionary of information management Vannevar Bush of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the differential analyzer, a large analog computer more accurate than previous devices of this type.

In 1930 the Library of Congress began to print Dewey Classification System numbers on library catalogue cards.

In 1930 French mathematician Jacques Herbrand, a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, published his doctoral thesis, Recherches sur la théorie de la démonstration. It was printed in Warsaw, Poland.

 “The main product of Herbrand’s short life (he died in a skiing accident [at the age of 23]) was his thesis, in which he found two ways of proving that tautologies are provable. One was based upon a means of matching any quantified formula with a quantifier-free mate and proving that each was derivable; it reversed the handling of quantifications in Principia mathematica, *9, and also its systematic application in the second edition. The other method drew on model theory and normal forms, as developed by Leopold Löwenheim and Thoraf Skolem. A highlight was a result which became known as ‘the deduction theorem’; it took the form that if the premises of a theory were stated as a single conjunction H, then a proposition P was true within it if and only if ‘H ∩ P be a propositional identity’ . . . In effect though not in intention, he clarified some of Bertrand Russell’s conflations and implication and inference, and also removed a standard sloppiness among mathematicians when (not) relating a proof to its theorem. While several proofs were unclear and even defective, the thesis inspired important new lines of research” (Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940 [2000] 550).

Van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic (1967) 525-81.

"In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands of electricity-producing wind turbines were built in the U.S. Just like wind turbines today, they had two or three thin blades, which rotated at high speeds to drive electrical generators. These wind turbines provided electricity to farms beyond the reach of power lines and were typically used to charge storage batteries, operate radios and power a few lights" (Michigan renewable energy, accessed 04-20-2009).

In 1930 prolific American avant-garde writer Bob Brown (Robert Carlton Brown), published an essay entitled "The Readies" in the international avant-garde journal transition,  issued from Paris, no. 19/20, 167-73, calling for a new reading machine, and new reading material for it called "The Readies."  Brown intended these innovations as ways for literature to keep up with the advanced reading practices of a cinema-viewing public, as epitomized in the then new expression for sound films, "the talkies." The first feature film originally presented as a talkie had been The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927. 

"The word 'readies' suggests to me a moving type spectacle, reading at the speed rate of the day with the aid of a machine, a method of enjoying literature in a manner as up-to-date as the lively talkes. In selecting the "The Readies' as title for what I have to say about modern reading and writing I hope to catch the reader in a receptive progressive mood. I ask him to forget for the moment the existing medievalism of the BOOK (God bless it, it's staggering on its last leg and about to fall) as a conveyer of reading matter. I request the reader to fix his mental eye for a moment on the ever-present future and contemplate a reading machine which will revitalize this interest in the Optical Art of Wrting.

"In our aeroplane age radio is rushing in television, tomorrow it will be commonplace. All the arts are having their faces lifted, painting (the moderns), sculpture (Brancusi), music (Antheil), architecture (zoning law), drama (Strange Interlude), dancing (just look around you tonight) writing (Joyce, Stein, Cummings, Hemingway, transition). Only the reading half of Literature lags behind, stays old-fashioned, frumpish, beskirted. Present-day reading methods are as cumbersone as they were in the time of Caxton and Jimmy-the-Ink. Though we have advanced from Gutenberg's movable type through the linotype and monotype to photo-composing we still consult the book in its original form as the only oracular means we know for carrying the word mystically to the eye. Writing as been bottled up in books since the start. It is time to pull out the stopper.

"To continue reading at today's speed I must have a machine. A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around and attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to. A machine as handy as a portable phonograph, typewriter or radio, compact, minute operated by electricity, the printing done microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll which carries the contents of a book and is no bigger than a typewriter ribbon, a roll like a minature serpentine that can be put in a pill box. This reading film unrolls beneath a narrow magnifying glass four or give inches long set in a reading slit, the glass brings up the otherwise unreadable type to comfortable reading size, and the read is rid at last of the cumbersome book, the inconvenience of holding its bulk, turning its pages, keeping them clean, jiggling hs weary eyes back and forth in the awkward pursuit of words from the upper left hand corner to the lower right, all over the vast confusing reading surface of a page. . . .

"My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead, a chapter read or the happy ending anticipated. The magnifying glass is so set that it can be moved nearer to or father from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 points, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him. Many books remain unread today owing to the unsuitable size of type in which they are printed. A number of readers cannot stand the strain of small type and other intellectual prowlers are offended by Great Primer. The reading machine allows free choice in type-point, it is not a fixed arbitrary bound object but an adaptable carrier of flexible, flowing reading matter. . . .

"The machine is equipped with all modern improvements. By pressing a button the roll slows down so an interesting part can be read lesurely, over and over again if need be, or by speeding up, a dozen books can skimmed through in an afternoon without soiling the fingers or losing a dust wrapper. . . .

"The material advantages of my reading machine are obvious, paper saving by condensation and elimination of waste margin space which alone takes up a fifth or sixth of the bulk of the present-day book. Ink saving in proportion, a much smaller surface needs to be covered. . . Binding will be unnecessary, paper pill boxes are produced at the fraction of the cost of cloth cases. Manual labor will be minimized. Reading will be cheap and independent of advertising which today carries the cost of the cheap reading matter purveyed exclusively in the interests of the advertiser" (167-69).

Brown also intended his device as one way of achieving "The Revolution of the Word," as called for in the manifesto published in issue 16/17 of transition by its editor Eugene Jolas in 1929. Later in 1930 Brown privately published a 52-page pamphlet entitled The Readies in an edition of 150 or 300 copies. The imprint of the pamphlet read Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press. (It is possible that the publishing location was a joke.) The pamphlet represented an expansion with examples given, of Brown's essay from transition, a revised version of which it republished as chapter 3.

Written before anyone imagined electronic computers, and even longer before anyone imagined a hand-held electronic computer, one goal of Brown's vision of new media for reading was saving space, paper and ink through media more compact than traditional printed books. Though he could not foresee how the changes would actually occur, he was also an extremely early predictor of changes to the traditional codex book that would occur sixty years later with electronic publishing. In the pre-electronic computer era Brown, like Emanuel Goldberg and Vannevar Bush, saw the future of of information primarily in the context of film and microfilm, and in developing more verbally compact means of communication. While Goldberg and Bush were focussed on developing more efficient means of information storage and retrieval, Brown was focussed on the creative aspects of new writing and new forms of communication with the reader:

"This important manifesto, on a par with André Breton's Surrealist manifestos or Tristan Tzara's Dadaist declarations, includes plans for an electric reading machine and strategies for preparing the eye for mechanized reading. There are instructions for preparing texts as “readies” and detailed quantitative explanations about the invention and mechanisms involved in this peculiar machine.

"In the generic spirit of avant-garde manifestos, Brown writes with enthusiastic hyperbole about the machine's breathtaking potential to change how we read and learn. In 1930, the beaming out of printed text over radio waves or in televised images had a science fiction quality—or, for the avant-garde, a fanciful art-stunt feel. Today, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text-messaging (with its abbreviated language), electronic text readers, and even online books like the digital edition of this volume. Brown's practical plans for his reading machine, and his descriptions of its meaning and implications for reading in general, were at least fifty years ahead of their time.  . . .

"Brown’s reading machine was designed to 'unroll a televistic readie film' in the style of modernist experiments; the design also followed the changes in reading practices during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein understood that Brown’s machine, as well as his processed texts for it, suggested a shift toward a different way to comprehend texts. That is, the mechanism of this book, a type of book explicitly built to resemble reading mechanisms like ticker-tape machines rather than a codex, produced—at least for Stein—specific changes in reading practices.  

"In Brown’s Readie, punctuation marks become visual analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (—) that also, by definition, indicate that the sentence was interrupted or cut short. These created a 'cinemovietone' shorthand system. The old uses of punctuation, such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. Reading machine-mediated text becomes more like watching a continuous series of flickering frames become a movie" (Afterward from: The Readies, edited with an Afterward by Craig Saper, Houston: Rice University Press,[2009] accessed 05-23-2010).

After Brown published The Readies authors in the transition circle sent  him pieces intended for publication on the hypothetical machine. In 1931 he self-published these as a 208-page book, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, in an edition of 300 copies also from the Roving Eye Press, but this time from Cagnes-sur-mer. That work, which contained contributions by 42 authors including Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Paul Bowle's first appearance in a book, contained two crude illustrations of a prototype of Brown's reading machine — a wooden contraption that hardly embodied machine-age sleekness; part of it looked a bit like a waffle iron. It is unclear whether Brown's machine ever operated; probably it did not. What matters more are Brown's futuristic ideas.

——————

♦ Following the "all digital" policy of Rice University Press since it was re-organized in 2006, the Rice edition of The Readies was available as a free download from their website, or as print-on-demand from QOOP.com. When I clicked on the purchase button on 05-23-2010, I was given the following purchase options at QOOP.com:

"+Hard Bound Laminate for $25.85

"+Hard Bound - Dust Jacket for $32.35

"+Wire-O for $16.00

"+eBook for $7.00."

In 1930 American physicist, engineer and statistician Walter Andrew Shewhart of Bell Labs published "Economic Quality Control of Manufactured Product, "Bell System Technical Journal IX, No. 2 (April, 1930) 364-89. This paper, and its expansion in book form entitled Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product that Shewhart issued in 1931, represent the first publications on statistical quality control in manufacturing. 

"Shewhart framed the problem in terms of assignable-cause and chance-cause variation and introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. Shewhart stressed that bringing a production process into a state of statistical control, where there is only chance-cause variation, and keeping it in control, is necessary to predict future output and to manage a process economically. Dr. Shewhart created the basis for the control chart and the concept of a state of statistical control by carefully designed experiments. While Dr. Shewhart drew from pure mathematical statistical theories, he understood data from physical processes never produce a 'normal distribution curve' (a Gaussian distribution, also commonly referred to as a 'bell curve'). He discovered that observed variation in manufacturing data did not always behave the same way as data in nature (Brownian motion of particles). Dr. Shewhart concluded that while every process displays variation, some processes display controlled variation that is natural to the process, while others display uncontrolled variation that is not present in the process causal system at all times" (Wikipedia article on Walter A. Shewhart, accessed 01-08-2013). 

In 1939 Shewhart issued Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control . . . With the editorial assistance of W. Edwards Deming. Strangely the book was published in Washington, D.C. by The Graduate School of the Department of Agriculture.  Shewhart and Deming's book was the first work to extend the principles of statistical quality control in industry to the wider realms of science and statistical inference. Shewhart “extended the applications of statistical process control to the measurement processes of science, and stressed the importance of operational definitions of basic quantities in science, industry and commerce . . . [Statistical Method] has profoundly influenced statistical methods of research in the behavioral, biological, and physical sciences, and in engineering” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

Shewhart’s long and fruitful collaboration with the physicist, statistician and consultant W. Edwards Deming began in 1938. It involved work on productivity during World War II and Deming’s championship of Shewhart’s ideas in Japan from 1950 onwards, which was “the catalyst that gave birth to Japan’s industrial efficiency and emphasis on highest attainable quality of manufactured products” (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). Only after Japan successfully adopted Deming's ideas, and set higher standards for manufacturing, did competition motivate American manufacturers to aggressively implement statistical quality control in the United States.

On May 16, 1930 John Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott founded Geophysical Service in Newark, New Jersey. This was the origin of Texas Instruments. Geophysical Service was the first independent contractor specializing in the reflection seismograph method of exploration of oil fields in Texas.

In 1931 Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel published while in Vienna Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der "Principia Mathematica" und verwandter Systeme (called in English "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of 'Principia Mathematica' and Related Systems"). That article dated November 17, 1930, which first appeared in the 1931 volume of Monatshefte für Mathematik, contained Godel's first and second incompleteness theorems. 

van Heijenoort, ed. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book on Mathematical Logic 1879–1931 (1967) 592-617.

In 1931 IBM of Endicott, New York began manufacture of the 601 multiplying punch.

"It read two factors up to eight decimal digits in length from a card and punched their product onto a blank field of the same card. It could subtract and add as well as multiply. It had no printing capacity, so was generally used as an offline assistant for a tabulator or accounting machine."

In 1931 Lázló Biró, a Hungarian newspaper editor frustrated by the amount of time wasted filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous. Working with his brother Georg, a chemist, Biró developed a new tip consisting of a tiny ball that was free to turn in a socket, which would pick up ink from a cartridge as it turned, and then roll to deposit it on the paper. He presented the first production of the ball pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931, and patented it in Paris in 1938. This was the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, still known in England as a "Biro."

"Earlier pens leaked or clogged due to improper viscosity of the ink, and depended on gravity to deliver the ink to the ball. Depending on gravity caused difficulties with the flow and required that the pen be held nearly vertically. The Biro pen both pressurized the ink column and used capillary action for ink delivery, solving the flow problems."

In 1931 the U. S. Congress established the talking-book program, intended to help blind adults who couldn’t read print.

This program was called "Books for the Adult Blind Project." The American Foundation for the Blind developed the first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing talking books.

On December 29, 1931 Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon in Dresden received U.S. Patent No. 1,838,389 for a photoelectric microfilm selector which he called "Statistical Machine."

Goldberg designed the machine by May 1927. The patent, applied for in 1928, and similar patents Goldberg obtained in other countries, described an electromechanical machine for searching through data encoded on reels of film, using "radiating energy to actuate a recorder when the explored indications upon the search plate and record element are identical, the indications on one of said elements being penetrable by the rays and the indication on the other element being impenetrable by the rays."

"Two prototypes were built at Zeiss Ikon by 1931 and, perhaps, constitute the first successful electronic document retrieval. Microfilm selector technology was known in at least two leading research centers in the U.S.A. (Eastman Kodak and IBM) by 1931 or shortly thereafter and in both cases a direct connection to Goldberg can be shown. This technology was reported at international congresses in 1931 and 1935 and a number of U.S. inventors were working on it by 1938 (e.g. Bryce, H. Davis, Gould, and Morse)" (http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html, accessed 02-20-2012).

Vannevar Bush incorporated technology similar to this in the Rapid Selector machine on which he began development in 1938. The existence of Goldberg's patent prevented Bush from patenting his Rapid Selector. Bush's machine became famous after publication in 1945 of his article, "As We May Think" describing the Memex.

In 1932 the BBC began public television broadcasting in England.

By 1935 the transmissions reached only the 2000 homes with television sets within a 35-mile range of the Alexandria Palace transmitting station. Each TV set cost £100—roughly the cost of a small car.

On October 3, 1932 Times New Roman, a serif typeface supervised by Stanley Morison of the English branch of Monotype, and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times, made its debut in the London newspaper, The Times.

"Morison used an older font named Plantin as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space. As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman, Morison's revision became Times New Roman and made its debut in the 3 October 1932 issue of The Times newspaper. After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. The Times stayed with Times New Roman for 40 years, but new production techniques and the format change from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004 have caused the newspaper to switch font five times since 1972. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman font.

"Because of its ubiquity, the typeface has been influential in the subsequent development of a number of serif typefaces both before and after the start of the digital-font era. . . .

"Although no longer used by The Times, Times New Roman is still widely used for book typography. It is one of the most successful and ubiquitous typefaces in history" (Wikipedia article on Times Roman, accessed 04-26-2009).

In December 1932 the Biuro Szyfrów ("Cipher Bureau") in Warsaw, the Polish interwar agency charged with both cryptography and cryptanalysis, broke the German Enigma machine cipher.

Over the next nearly seven years before World War II, the Polish "Cipher Bureau" overcame the growing structural and operating complexities of the plugboard-equipped Enigma, the main German cipher device during the Second World War.

Edwin Howard Armstrong developed wide-band frequency modulation, FM radio, which delivered clearer sound, free of static. 

Armstrong received a patent on wideband FM on December 26, 1933.

"Armstrong conducted the first large scale field tests of his FM radio technology on the 85th floor of RCA's (Radio Corporation of America) Empire State Building from May 1934 until October 1935. However RCA had its eye on television broadcasting, and chose not to buy the patents for the FM technology.  A June 17, 1936, presentation at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters made headlines nationwide. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. 'If the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds,' noted one reporter. He added that several engineers described the invention 'as one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced' " (Wikipedia article on Edward Howard Armstrong, accessed 07-12-2009).

Armstrong's first paper on FM radio was "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation," presented to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers on November 6, 1935, and first published in Proceedings of the IRE, 24, no. 5, (1936) 689–740.

In 1933 IBM marketed the first commercially successful electric typewriter, the Electromatic.

IBM produced electric typewriters until 1990.

Wallace J. Eckert, who would become founder and Director of the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University (1937-40), commissioned from IBM a special model of the 601 multiplying punch that was capable of doing direct interpolation, a very unusual feature. The punch was especially designed for Eckert by one of IBM's top engineers at Endicott, New York.

Eckert connected the 601 to a Type 285 Tabulator and a Type 016 Duplicating Punch through a calculation control switch of his own design, forming the first machine to perform complex scientific computations automatically.

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring "un-German" publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves. 

Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2000).

Austrian-German aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger published Raketenflugtechnik in 1933. This treatise on rocket flight engineering was Sänger's thesis for a degree in engineering, which had been rejected by the Technical University of Vienna as "too imaginative." Sänger was allowed to graduate when he submitted a more mundane thesis on the statistics of wing trusses. Raketenflugtechnik was the first study leading to the eventual development of a reusable human-piloted rocket-powered space plane, a concept which evolved into the X-planes and the space shuttle.

Sänger introduced his goals and purposes for the book as follows: 

“By rocket flight is meant here the motion of such a vehicle within the general air space, the propulsive force being provided by a rocket motor. 

“Rocket flight in the narrow sense is taken to be motion in the upper levels of the stratosphere with a speed such that inertial forces arising from the curvature of the path have a marked effect on the lift.

“This type of rocket flight is the next major development from trophospheric flight, which has been the product of the last thirty years; it is also the forerunner of space travel, the greatest technical problem of the present time.

“This forerunner and the installation of a space station* are the noblest tasks of rocketry, but for the present they are still not realizable.

“There are also several directly practical purposes to be served. Rocket flight should especially:

"1. Provide rapid intercontinental travel around the globe with the highest possible terrestrial speeds.

"2. Advance scientific research in certain fields, especially geophysics and astrophysics.

"3. If necessary provide a war weapon of exceptional power.

“These three purposes can now be reckoned as in part technically feasible. The present book is concerned with the technical basis of the realization of this first stage of rocket flight.

“* In cosmonauts’ plans this is a vehicle that revolves around the Earth outside the sensible atmosphere with a speed such that the weight is balanced by the centripetal force. The space station would serve as starting point for flights to even greater heights” (Sänger, Rocket Flight Engineering. Nasa Technical Translation F-223 [1965] 3).

Sänger and his associate, Irene Bredt, who later became his wife, intended to publish their continuing researches as a second volume of Raketenflugtechnik.  However, with the advent of World War II, their space vehicle project had to be repurposed for military use if it was to survive. A 900-page report on space vehicles, prepared by the two in 1941, was rejected by the German Research Institute for Aviation due to its size and complexity; Sänger and Bredt reworked this into a shorter 376-page secret report on a long range bomber with a rocket engine, intended to drop a dirty bomb on a U.S. city, issued as the GRIA’s “Secret Command Report” UM 3538. The report entitled Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber was issued in a highly-controlled edition of 100 copies for the Nazi German State Ministry for Aviation in 1944. In 2011 three copies of this original report were recorded worldwide in OCLC, one in the United States.

The Sänger-Bredt Silverbird (Silbervogel), the designs for which were described in the secret report, was a reusable winged vehicle “propelled by a rocket engine burning liquid oxygen and kerosene, capable of reaching Mach 10.0 at altitudes in excess of 100 miles” (Jenkins, Space Shuttle, p. 1).  The Sänger/Bredt report was "the first serious proposal for a vehicle which could carry a pilot and payload to the lower edge of space" (Wikipedia article on Silbervogel).

In order to realize his concept of a reusable rocket engine, Sänger had to solve the major problem of how to cool the engine. “Between 1932 and 1934, [Sänger] performed a series of pioneering experiments with reinforced cooled liquid rocket motors capable of burning mixtures of gas-oil and liquid oxygen (LOX), achieving thrust levels up to 30kp, pressures up to 50 bars, and exhaust velocities of about 3,000 m/s” (Sänger & Szames, “From the Silverbird to interstellar voyages,” 2).

In 1934 Sänger published these studies in "Neuere Ergebnisse der Raketenflugtechnik," Flug: Zeitschr. f. d. gesamte Gebiet der Luftfahrt, Sonderheft 1. This paper contained the results of Sänger’s extensive tests of various rocket engine models in 1933 and 1934, leading up to his 1935 patent for regenerative forced-flow cooling of rocket engines. This he accomplished by designing a “regeneratively cooled” engine cooled by its own fuel circulating around the combustion chamber. This rocket engine was a lasting feature of the Silverbird design. "Almost all modern rocket engines use this design today and some sources still refer to it as the Sänger-Bredt design" (Wikipedia article on Silbervogel).

“Sänger’s former rocket-powered civilian space transport airplane project now evolved into an Earth-orbiting, single-stage, rocket-powered intercontinental bombing machine with a launch weight of 100 tons . . . It would be propelled by a rocket engine using highly efficient fuels with liquid oxygen used as an oxidizer in a combustion chamber at a pressure of 100 atmospheres and creating 100 tons of thrust” (Myrha, p. 78).

This rocket-powered bomber was designed to attack strategic targets in the United States: New York City, Washington DC, Chicago and the steel-refining plants in Pittsburgh. Page 339 of Sänger and Bredt’s report shows a map of lower Manhattan superimposed with a bull’s-eye and containing calculations of the expected destruction pattern.  

After World War II Sänger emigrated from Germany to France where he worked for the Arsénal de l’Aéronautique. During his time in France “he was the subject of a botched attempt by Soviet agents to win him over. Joseph Stalin had become intrigued by reports of the Silvervogel design and sent his son, Vasily, and scientist Grigori Tokaty to convince [Sänger] to come to the Soviet Union, but they failed to do so. It has also been reported that Stalin instructed the NKVD to kidnap him” (Wikipedia). In 1954 Sänger returned to Germany, where he founded a research center in Stuttgart and earned unwelcome notoriety through his involvement with Egypt’s military buildup in the early 1960s. From 1963 until his death, he was a professor of astronautic technologies at the technical university in Berlin.

An English translation of the Sänger-Bredt report, prepared by the Technical Information Branch of U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in 1946, was also limited to a small number of copies.  A condensed version of the translation was published in 1952. The work was also studied in Russia where a Russian translation was published.

Sänger-Bredt, “The Silver Bird story: A memoir,” in Hall, ed., Essays on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics, vol. 1 (1977), pp. 195-228. Sänger-Bredt & Engel, “The development of regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engines in Austria and Germany, 1926-42,” Durant & James, eds., First Steps toward Space, 217-46. Myrha, Sänger: Germany’s Orbital Rocket Bomber in World War II (2002).

Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C. who in the year 2000 began documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories in operation during the Nazi regime, documented 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, located in German-controlled areas from France to Russia and in Germany from 1933 to 1945. 

In 2009 the Holocaust Memorial Museum began publication of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. The vast encyclopedia would be complete in 7 volumes by 2025. In March 2012 the first two volumes were print: 

"Published by Indiana University Press in association with the Museum, each of the encyclopedia's seven volumes will address a group of sites according to type or subordination so that each volume can stand on its own. In this way, the reader can gain some appreciation for the conditions at a particular site as well as for how the system functioned as a whole. Photographs, charts, and maps will supplement the text.

"OVERVIEW

"VOL. I:

"EARLY CAMPS, YOUTH CAMPS, AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND SUBCAMPS UNDER THE SS-BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MAIN OFFICE (WVHA). Editor: Geoffrey P. Megargee; Foreword: Elie Wiesel. Published June 2009.

"Contains entries on 110 early camps, 23 main SS concentration camps (including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau), 898 subcamps, 39 SS construction brigade camps, and three so-called youth protection camps. Introductory essays provide broader context, while citations and source narratives offer the basis for additional research. The volume is more than 1,700 pages, with 192 photographs and 23 maps. 

"VOL. II:

"GHETTOS IN GERMAN-OCCUPIED EASTERN EUROPE. General Editor: Geoffrey P. Megargee; Volume Editor: Martin Dean; Introduction: Christopher R. Browning. Published April 2012.

Provides a comprehensive account of how the Nazis conducted the Holocaust throughout the scattered towns and villages of Poland and the Soviet Union. It covers more than 1,150 sites, including both open and closed ghettos. Regional essays outline the patterns of ghettoization in 19 German administrative regions. Each entry discusses key events in the history of the ghetto; living and working conditions; activities of the Jewish Councils; Jewish responses to persecution; demographic changes; and details of the ghetto's liquidation. Personal testimonies help convey the character of each ghetto, while source citations provide a guide to additional information. Documentation of hundreds of smaller sites—previously unknown or overlooked in the historiography of the Holocaust—make this an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. 

"VOL. III:

"CAMPS AND GHETTOS RUN BY EUROPEAN STATES AFFILIATED WITH NAZI GERMANY, including camps and ghettos in Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Vichy France. Editor: Joseph White.

"VOL. IV:

CAMPS AND OTHER DETENTION FACILITIES UNDER THE GERMAN MILITARY, including prisoner-of-war camps and military brothels. Co-editor: Rüdiger Overmans; Advisor: Pavel Polian.

"VOL. V:

"CAMPS UNDER THE SS-REICH SECURITY MAIN OFFICE AND THE HIGHER SS AND POLICE LEADERS, including the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, Gestapo prisons, and some categories of forced labor, detention, and transit camps.

"VOL. VI:

"NON-SS FORCED LABOR CAMPS, including forced labor camps under Organisation Todt, REIMAHG, local labor offices, and private firms.

"VOL. VII:

"OTHER KILLING AND DETENTION FACILITIES, including so-called euthanasia centers, Justice Ministry penal camps, “Germanization” camps for Polish children, and civilian prisons."

" 'The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.  

“ 'We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”  

"The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.  

"Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.  

"The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions."

"The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, 'Germanizing' prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.  

"In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

"Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.  

“ 'You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,' he said. 'They were everywhere.'" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?hp, accessed 03-02-2013).

Adolf Hitler seizes power in Germany.

On April 3, 1933 The New York Times published an article entitled and summarized in sub-headings, as follows: "Emotions Mapped by New Geography: Charts seem to Portray the Psychological Currents of Human Relationships. FIRST STUDIES EXHIBITED. Colored Lines Show Likes and Dislikes of Individuals and of Groups. MANY MISFITS REVEALED. Dr. J.L. Moreno Calculates There Are 10 to 15 Million Isolated Individuals In Nation." The article reported on an interview with Romanian-born Austrian-American psychiatrist, psychosociologist, and group psychotherapy pioneer Jacob L Moreno. This article contained the first reproduction of one of Moreno's sociograms—an early network visualization.

The following year Moreno published a book entitled Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations in Washington, D.C. Apart from its psychiatric and sociological significance, this work contained some of the earliest graphic depictions of social networks— data visualization methods later applied to numerous other disciplines. These images were later called sociograms. For a second edition published in New York in 1953 Moreno revised the title to Who Shall Survive? Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama. 

Lima, Visual Complexity. Mapping Patterns of Information (2011) 75-76.

The ultra-nationalism and antisemitism of German middle-class, secular student organizations had been intense and vocal for decades. After World War I, most students opposed the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and found in National Socialism a suitable vehicle for their political discontent and hostility.  By 1933 German university students were among the vanguard of the Nazi movement, and many filled the ranks of various Nazi formations.

Also in 1933 Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began the synchronization of culture, to bring the arts in Germany in line with Nazi goals. The German government purged cultural organizations of Jews and others alleged to be politically or artistically suspect.

On April 6, 1933, the German Student Association's Main Office for Press and Propaganda proclaimed a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” to climax in a literary purge or “cleansing” (Säuberung) by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commission articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On April 8 the students association drafted its twelve "theses"—deliberately evocative of Martin Luther—declarations and requisites of a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked “Jewish intellectualism,” asserted the need to “purify” the German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centers of German nationalism. The students described the “action” as a response to a worldwide Jewish “smear campaign” against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.

(Information adapted from the United States Holocaust Museum website).

On this night, in most university towns in Germany, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit." The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw "un-German" books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, "fire oaths", and incantations. The students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, "presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture."

"Not all book burnings took place on May 10, as the German Student Association had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place on June 21, the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners." (information and quotations from the United States Holocaust Museum website)

Konrad Zuse, while completing his engineering degree at the Technische Universität Berlin, realized that an automatic calculator would need only a control, a memory, and an arithmetic unit.

Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934,  abolishing the Federal Radio Commission and transferring jurisdiction over radio licensing to a new Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC also received the telecommunications jurisdiction previously handled by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

An oil painting by Pablo Picasso entitled Reading at a Table, preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicted Picasso's 25 year-old lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, sitting at a table reading and wearing a crown of flowers. This "chaste scene" was set at the artist's country home in Le Boisgeloup, in Gisors in the Eure about 63 km from Paris, where, in addition to painting, Picasso produced large-scale sculptures and prepared many etchings.

In a paper entitled "Sources of Information on Specific Subjects," (Engineering 137 [1934], 85-6), British mathematician, librarian and documentalist at the Science Museum in London Samuel C. Bradford published Bradford's Law, also known as  "Bradford's law of scattering" and as the "Bradford distribution," showing the "exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search."

"In many disciplines this pattern [described by Bradford's Law] is called a Pareto distribution. As a practical example, suppose that a researcher has five core scientific journals for his or her subject. Suppose that in a month there are 12 articles of interest in those journals. Suppose further that in order to find another dozen articles of interest, the researcher would have to go to an additional 10 journals. Then that researcher's Bradford multiplier bm is 2 (i.e. 10/5). For each new dozen articles, that researcher will need to look in bm times as many journals. After looking in 5, 10, 20, 40, etc. journals, most researchers quickly realize that there is little point in looking further.

"Different researchers have different numbers of core journals, and different Bradford multipliers. But the pattern holds quite well across many subjects, and may well be a general pattern for human interactions in social systems. Like Zipf's law, to which it is related, we do not have a good explanation for why it works. But knowing that it does is very useful for librarians. What it means is that for each specialty it is sufficient to identify the core publications' for that field and only stock those. Very rarely will researchers need to go outside that set" (Wikipedia article on Bradford's Law, accessed 02-21-2012).

American engineer and inventor Laurens Hammond of Chicago received patent 1,956,350 for an "Electrical Musical Instrument," and introduced the Hammond Organ Model A the following year.

The Hammond Organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to wind-driven pipe organs, but in the 1960s and 1970s it became a standard keyboard instrument for jazz, blues, rock music and gospel music.

"The original Hammond organ used additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series made by mechanical tonewheels which rotate in front of electromagnetic pickups. The component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars mounted above the two keyboards. Although many different models of Hammond organs were produced, the Hammond B-3 organ is the most well-known type. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the overdriven sound of B-3 (and in Europe, the C-3) organs were widely used in progressive rock bands and blues-rock groups. Although the last electromechanical Hammond organ came off the assembly line in the mid-1970s, thousands are still in daily use.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, musicians began using electronic and digital devices to imitate the sound of the Hammond, because the vintage Hammond organ is heavy and hard to transport. By the 1990s and 2000s digital signal processing and sampling technologies allowed for better imitation of the original Hammond sound" (Wikipedia article on Hammond organ, accessed 08-30-2009).

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Archives Act, creating the National Archives as an independent agency (48 Stat. 1122), with the Archivist of the United States as its chief administrator, and also creating the National Historical Publications Commission (NHPC).

Previously each governmental department maintained its own records, resulting in considerable losses.

The Social Security Act of 1935 required the U. S. government to keep continuous records on the employment of 26 million individuals.

The first  Social Security Numbers (SSNs) were issued by the Social Security Administration in November 1936 as part of the New Deal Social Security program.

"Within three months, 25 million numbers were issued.

"Before 1986, people often did not have a Social Security number until the age of about 14, since they were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income. In 1986, American taxation law was altered so that individuals over 5 years old without Social Security numbers could not be successfully claimed as dependents on tax returns; by 1990 the threshold was lowered to 1 year old, and was later abolished altogether." (Wikipedia article on Social Security Number, accessed 01-17-2010).

Engineers at AEG developed the Magnetophon K1. The K1 was the first practical reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder, using magnetic tape invented by Fritz Pfleumer.  It was first demonstrated at the Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin (International radio exhibition Berlin, aka 'Berlin Radio Show') in 1935.

The Charga-Plate bookkeeping system, a precursor of the credit card issued by Charga-Plate Group, Inc. New York, was utilized during this period and somewhat later.

"It was a 2 1/2" x 1 1/4" rectangle of sheet metal, similar to a military dog tag, that was embossed with the customer's name, city and state (no address). It held a small paper card for a signature. It was laid in the imprinter first, then a charge slip on top of it, onto which an inked ribbon was pressed. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store's files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers" (Wikipedia article on Credit card, accessed 12-26-2008).

Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in London to bring high quality, paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.

Musicians Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes developed Kodachrome, the first color transparency film. Kodachrome 16mm movie film was released for sale in 1935, and in 1936 Kodachrome 35mm still and 8mm movie film were released. To some it was the best slide and movie film ever produced.

Kodak produced the film and the chemical required to develop it from 1935 to 2009, by which time digital photography had, for all intents and purposes, replaced film photography.

According to the The New York Times, the last remaining roll of Kodachrome was developed on at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas on December 30, 2010.

On January 21, 1935 Robert Marshall, chief of recreation and lands for the Forest Service, Aldo Leopold, noted wildlife ecologist and later author of A Sand County Almanac, Robert Sterling Yard, publicist for the National Park Service, Benton MacKaye, the "Father of the Appalachian Trail", Ernest Oberholtzer, Harvey Broome, Bernard Frank, and Harold C. Anderson founded The Wilderness Society.

"Since 1935, The Wilderness Society has led the conservation movement in wilderness protection, writing and passing the landmark Wilderness Act and winning lasting protection for 107 million acres of Wilderness, including 56 million acres of spectacular lands in Alaska, eight million acres of fragile desert lands in California and millions more throughout the nation" (The Wilderness Society website).

As head of the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough, England, Robert Watson-Watt published a report entitled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.

"On February 26, 1935 Watson-Watt and [his assistant Arnold] Wilkins demonstrated a basic radar system to an observer from the Air Ministry Committee the Detection of Aircraft. The previous day Wilkins had set up receiving equipment in a field near Upper Stowe, Northamptonshire, and this was used to detect the presence of a Handley Page Heyford bomber at ranges up to 8 miles by means of the radio waves which it reflected from the nearby Daventry shortwave radio transmitter of the BBC, which operated at a wavelength of 49 m (6 MHz). This convincing demonstration, known as the Daventry Experiment, led immediately to development of radar in the UK."

IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen (Dehomag) introduced the Dehomag D11 tabulator, the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator, incorporating internal instructions programmed with a plug board.

Kistermann, "The way to the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator: The 1935 DEHOMAG D 11 tabulator," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing XVII (1995): 33-49.

Engineer Vannevar Bush began the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project at MIT. In a paper called "Instrumental Analysis", he suggested how an electromechanical machine might be built to accomplish Charles Babbage’s goals for the Analytical Engine. This was almost exactly one hundred years after Babbage began designing his Analytical Engine.

In the same paper Bush wrote that four billion punched cards were being used annually in electric tabulating machines. This amounted to ten thousand tons of punched cards.

American mathematician and logician Alonzo Church of Princeton published his logical proof of the undecidability of arithmetic, using his lambda calculus.

Between 1936 and 1939 electronic and acoustic engineer Homer Dudley and a team of engineers at Bell Labs produced the first electronic speech synthesizer, called the Voder ("Voice Operation DEmonstratoR").

The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay, by experts who used a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech.

Mathematician Alan Turing spent more than a year at Princeton University to study mathematical logic with Alonzo Church, who was pursuing research in recursion theory.

In Los Angeles Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in the film, Modern Times.

In his final silent-film appearance Chaplin portrayed his Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the industrialized world in which assembly lines dehumanize work and robots replace people. The film is also a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression — conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie also starred Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin.

Konrad Zuse applied for a patent on his electromagnetic, program-controlled calculator, called the Z1. 

Zuse built the machine in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. It had 30,000 parts.

The Z1 was the first freely programmable, binary-based calculating machine ever built, but it did not function reliably, and it was destroyed in World War II. Zuse's patent application is the only surviving documentation of Zuse's prewar work on computers.

Between 1986 and 1989 Zuse and three associates created a replica of the Z1, which is preserved in the Deutsche Technikmuseum, Berlin.

English mathematician Alan Turing published On Computable Numbers, a mathematical description of what he called a universal machine— an astraction that could, in principle, solve any mathematical problem that could be presented to it in symbolic form.

Turing modeled the universal machine processes after the functional processes of a human carrying out mathematical computation. (See Reading 7.1.)

Mathematician and logician Alonzo Church of Princeton called Alan Turing’s universal machine a Turing Machine. (See Reading 7.2.)

Independently of Alan Turing, mathematician and logician Emil Post of the City College of New York developed a mathematical model of computation that was essentially equivalent to the Turing machine. Intending this as the first of a series of models of equivalent power but increasing complexity, he titled his paper Formulation 1. This model is sometime's called "Post's machine" or a Post-Turing machine."

In 1936 H. G. Wells issued a pamphlet of 32 pages entitled The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia, publishing a lecture he had delivered at The Royal Institution on November 20, 1936. The lecture was republished in the United States in the April 1937 issue of Harpers Magazine.  

In 1938 Methuen publishers issued a volume of Wells's essays and speeches on this theme entitled World Brain. In this book his 1936 speech was renamed simply "World Encyclopedia."  The 1938 book included an essay entitled "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia." This essay first appeared in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Another essay in the book entitled "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" described Wells' vision for

". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49)

Wells believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that

"any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica" (p. 54).

In his ideas for a "mental clearing house" Wells was probably influenced by "Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House.

Pages 72-73 of World Brain reproduced an early information graphic entitled "Knowledge Correlated through a World Encyclopaedia."

♦Aspects of Wells's vision were eventually realized on the Internet through the Wikipedia in ways that Wells could not have imagined. 

Börner, Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know (2010) 25ff.

The Society of American Archivists was founded.

Believing that war with Germany is inevitable, Alan Turing built in a Princeton University machine shop an experimental electromechanical cryptanalysis machine capable of binary multiplication.

At Princeton University mathematicians Alan Turing and John von Neumann had their first discussions about computing and what would later be called “artificial intelligence” (AI).

Leslie J. Comrie founded Scientific Computing Service in London. It was the first independent scientific computing service bureau in the world. (See Reading 4.5.)

Elektro, a robot built by the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corporation in its Mansfield, Ohio facility between 1937 and 1938, was seven feet tall and weighed 265 pounds.  Humanoid in appearance, he (it) could walk by voice command, speak about 700 words (using a 78-rpm record player), smoke cigarettes, blow up balloons, and move his head and arms. Elektro became the most famous robot of the 1930s.

Elektro's body consisted of a steel gear, cam and motor skeleton covered by an aluminum skin. His photoelectric "eyes" could distinguish red and green light. He was on exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair and reappeared at that fair in 1940, with "Sparko", a robot dog that could bark, sit, and beg.

"Elektro toured North America in 1950 in promotional appearances for Westinghouse, and was displayed at Pacific Ocean Park in Venice, California in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also appeared as "Thinko", in Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), which starred Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld. In the 1960s, his head was given to a retiring Westinghouse engineer and his body was sold for scrap." (Wikipedia article on Elektro, accessed 02-21-2012).

Remarkably Elektro seems to have survived the scrap heap, and in 2012 was reportedly being restored for the Mansfield Memorial Museum.

Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted to MIT on August 10, 1937, and published in a revised and abridged version in 1938, showed that the two-valued algebra developed by Boole could be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits.

This thesis became the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that were developed after World War II. Shannon wrote the thesis while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As examples of circuits that could be built using relays, Shannon appended to the thesis theoretical descriptions of "An Electric Adder to the Base Two," and "A Factor Table Machine." The "Factor Table Machine" was not included in the published version.

Shannon's thesis was later characterized as the most significant master's thesis of the 20th century, (See Reading 12.1.)

Shannon's thesis was first published in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938) 713-23.

George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Labs in New York City, built a binary adder out of a few light bulbs, batteries, relays and metal strips cut from tin cans on his kitchen table.

This device was similar to a theoretical design described by Claude Shannon in his master's thesis. Stibitz's "Model K" (for “Kitchen”) was the first electromechanical computer built in America.

Howard H. Aiken of Harvard University drafted a proposal for an automatic calculating machine and joins with IBM to produce the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). Later known as the Harvard Mark I, the completed electromechanical calculating machine eventually weighed five tons.

John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, planned the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose electronic computer.

Konrad Zuse completed his Z1 mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment.

Independently of Claude Shannon, Zuse developed a form of symbolic logic to assist in the design of the binary circuits. With Helmut Schreyer, he began work on the Z2.

In 1938 Vannevar Bush of MIT began development of the Rapid Selector machine for information retrieval from rolls of microfilm. He published a general description of the aims of this machine in his 1945 article, As We May Think.

American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney Chester F. Carlson invented xerography, originally called electrophotography in Astoria, Queens, New York. Xerography did not become a commercial success until the wide adoption of the xerographic copier first introduced in 1949.

French poet, playwright, actor and director Antonin Artaud, working in Paris, published Le Théâtre et son Double. Artaud described theatre as" 'la réalite virtuelle', a virtual reality 'in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy's visionary internal dramas.' "  This is considered the first published description of virtual reality.

The Bettmann Archive, founded in New York in 1936 by Otto Bettmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, contained 15,000 images by 1938.  Bettmann later characterized this period of time as "the beginning of the visual age."

By 1980, the year before Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus-Thomson Organization, the archive contained 2,000,000 images, carefully selected for their historical value, mainly under the five categories of world events, personalities, lifestyles, advertising art, and art and illustrations.

In 1984 the Kraus-Thomson Organization acquired the extensive United Press International (UPI) collection, containing millions of worldwide news and lifestyle photographs taken by photographers working for United Press International, International News Photos, Acme Newspictures, and Pacific and Atlantic.

In 1995 Corbis, a company controlled by Bill Gates, bought the Bettmann Archive.

"Beginning in 1997, Corbis spent five years selecting images of maximum historical value and saleability for digitization. More than 1.3 million images (26% of the collection) have been edited and 225,000 have been digitized. Because of this effort, more images from the Bettmann Archive are available now than ever before.

"In 2002, the Archive was moved to a state-of-the-art, sub-zero film preservation facility in western Pennsylvania. The 10,000-square-foot underground storage facility is environmentally-controlled, with specific conditions (minus -20°C, relative humidity of 35%) calculated to preserve prints, color transparencies, negatives, photographs, enclosures, and indexing systems" (http://www.corbis.com/BettMann100/Archive/Preservation.asp, accessed 01-17-2010).

Polish Cipher Bureau mathematician and cryptologist Marian Rejewski designed the bomba, or bomba kryptologiczna  ("bomb" or "cryptologic bomb,") a special-purpose machine for breaking German Enigma-machine ciphers.

Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre in New York broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.

The broadcast was heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believed that the story of the invading Martians was real. To the extent that a large number of people were deceived, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media.

On this night in Germany, called Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, 92 Jews were murdered, and 25,000–30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. More than 200 Synagogues were destroyed along with tens of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes. This marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

In Germany the Reichsministerium fur Volksaufklaerung und Progaganda published the Liste des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums. This list of "damaging and undesirable writing" included authors, living and dead, whose works were banned from the Reich because of their Jewish descent, pacifist or communist views, or suspicion thereof.

John Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa, began work on his special-purpose ABC machine, the earliest electronic digital computer. It was never properly operational.

IBM started construction of Howard Aiken ’s Harvard Mark I electromechanical computer in Endicott, New York.

Konrad Zuse completed his Z2 machine in Berlin. It used the same kind of mechanical memory as the Z1, but used 800 relays in the arithmetic and control units. 

In 1939 Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires published an essay entitled La bibliotheca total (The Total Library), describing his fantasy of an all-encompassing archive or universal library.
In Borges' work this universal library was created, remarkably, by an abstract device that produced a random sequence of letters and symbols, ad infinitum. In his essay Borges

"traced the infinite-monkey concept back to Aristotle's Metaphysics. Explaining the views of Leucippus, who held that the world arose through the random combination of atoms, Aristotle notes that the atoms themselves are homogeneous and their possible arrangements only differ in shape, position and ordering. In De Generatione et corruptione (On Generation and Corruption), the Greek philosopher compares this to the way that a tragedy and a comedy consist of the same "atoms", i.e., alphabetic characters. Three centuries later, Cicero's De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) argued against the atomist worldview:

" 'He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.'

"Borges follows the history of this argument through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, then observes that in his own time, the vocabulary had changed. By 1939, the idiom was 'that a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.' (To which Borges adds, 'Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.') Borges then imagines the contents of the Total Library which this enterprise would produce if carried to its fullest extreme:

" 'Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page' " (Wikipedia article on Infinite Monkey Theorem, accessed 05-25-2009).

During World War II Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller of J. R. Geigy AG in Basel discovered the high efficiency of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as a contact poison against several athropods.  Throughout the war DDT was used with great effect among both military and civilian populations to control mosquitoes spreading malaria and lice transmitting typhus, resulting in dramatic reductions in the incidence of both diseases.

In 1948 Müller received the Nobel Prize in Biology and Medicine for this discovery, which is thought to have saved the lives of over 21,000,000 people worldwide. After the war, DDT was made available for use as an agricultural insecticide, and its production and use skyrocketed with unexpected disastrous effects upon the environment. 

As a result of the 1962 book, Silent Spring, by American marine biologist and nature writer, Rachel Carson, the disastrous consequences of DDT began to be understood by politicians and the public, and DDT was eventually banned in the United States in 1972.

In 1939 British physicist, x-ray crystallographer, molecular biologist, historian and sociologist of science John Desmond Bernal published The Social Function of Science in London. This pioneering sociological study work contained two large folding information graphics. The first was one of the first attempts at a "map of science." It divided science into physical, biological, and social sectors and distinguished between fundamental and technical research.

Börner, Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know (2010) 11.

In 1939 George Stibitz and Samuel Williams of Bell Labs in New York City began construction of the Complex Number Calculator (later known as the Bell Labs Model I). This machine was called “the first electromechanical computer for routine use.” It used telephone relays and coded decimal numbers as groups of four binary digits (bits) each.

The Biuro Szyfrów ("Cipher Bureau"), the Polish interwar agency charged with both cryptography and cryptanalysis, revealed Poland's Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, which it had achieved using the bomba device, to the French and British. 

Poland thereby made possible the western Allies' vitally important decryption of Nazi German secret communications (Ultra) during World War II.

"Up to July 25, 1939, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years without telling their French and British allies. On December 15, 1938, two new rotors, IV and V, were introduced (three of the now five rotors being selected for use in the machine at a time). As Rejewski wrote in a 1979 critique of appendix 1, volume 1 (1979), of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, "we quickly found the [wirings] within the [new rotors], but [their] introduction [...] raised the number of possible sequences of drums from 6 to 60 [...] and hence also raised tenfold the work of finding the keys. Thus the change was not qualitative but quantitative. We would have had to markedly increase the personnel to operate the bombs, to produce the perforated sheets (60 series of 26 sheets each were now needed, whereas up to the meeting on July 25, 1939, we had only two such series ready) and to manipulate the sheets."

"Harry Hinsley suggested in British Intelligence . . . that the Poles decided to share their Enigma-breaking techniques and equipment with the French and British in July 1939 because they had encountered insuperable technical difficulties. Rejewski refuted this: "No, it was not [cryptologic] difficulties [. . .] that prompted us to work with the British and French, but only the deteriorating political situation. If we had had no difficulties at all we would still, or even the more so, have shared our achievements with our allies as our contribution to the struggle against Germany^{' " (Wikipedia article on Bomba (cryptography), accessed 12-21-2008).}

In March 2011 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. You cannot grasp the scale of the Holocaust until you visit Birkenau, especially— a giant factory of death capable of processing 20,000 people per day. The impact of the Holocaust was still reverberating in my head in April 2011 when I wrote this database entry. Needing to understand more, I read Richard Rhodes' book, Masters of Death, from which the horrifying wider scope of the Holocaust, unfolded in my consciousness, and from which I quote: 

“The notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps have come to typify the Holocaust, but in fact they were exceptional. The primary means of mass murder the Nazis deployed during the Second World War was firearms and lethal privation. Shooting was not less efficient than gassing, as many historians have assumed. It was hard on the shooters’ nerves, and the gas vans and chambers alleviated the burden. But shooting began earlier, continued throughout the war and produced far more victims if Slavs are counted, as they must be, as well as Jews. ‘The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen,’ writes sociologist Michael Mann. ’During its short twelve years (overwhelmingly its last four) it killed approximately twenty million unarmed persons. . . . Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occurred well into the sequence. . . . Slavs, defined as Untermenschen were the most numerous victims—3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs.’ Even among Jewish victims, Daniel Goldhagen estimates, ‘somewhere between 40 and 50 percent’ were killed ‘by means other than gassing, and more Germans were involved in these killings in a greater variety of contexts than in those carried out in the gas chambers’ ” (Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death. The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust [2002] 156-157).

In tracing and documenting the crimes committed by the SS summarized in these statistics Rhodes does not intend in any way to diminish the incredible losses suffered by the Jews, nor to blur the particular focus of the Nazis' Final Solution on the Jews. His exploration of SS crimes exposes a scope of criminality that is wider, almost beyond comprehension.

Germany invades Poland. World War II begins.

The day that German troops marched into Poland German Jew Alfred Wiener opened the Jewish Central Information Office in London.  This library, which was later called the "oldest holocaust museum," functioned during World War II as a private intelligence service, and Wiener was paid by British government departments for keeping them informed of developments in Germany.

In 1919 Wiener was a high-ranking official in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, CV). As early as 1925 he identified the Nazi Party as the chief danger to the Jews of Germany and to German society as a whole. In 1933, Wiener fled Germany for Amsterdam. Together with Prof. David Cohen, he set up the Jewish Central Information Office, collecting and disseminating information about events happening in Nazi Germany. In 1939 Wiener transferred the library to London, and Wiener made the resources available to the British and other governments' intelligence departments, and the international press, especially the BBC. The library soon became known as "Dr Wiener's Library" and the name was adopted. After the end of World War II, the library used its extensive collections on National Socialism and the Third Reich to provide material to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and for bringing war criminals to justice.

In December 2011 the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide moved to 29 Russell Square, a revovated Georgian townhouse flanked by the Birkbeck College history department and the School of Orient and African Studies at the University of London.

Britain and France declare war on Germany.

English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist Alan Turing reported to the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley, England.

Konrad Zuse’s associate, Helmut Schreyer, wrote a memorandum concerning the Z2, Rechnische Rechenmachine (unpublished at the time), in which he also stated thast it would be possible to build a computer with vacuum tubes that would process “10,000 operations per second.”