1901 – 1924opened on Sunset Boulevard by David Horsley.
1912 Foundation, initially as the Herald, of the
Daily Herald.
1913 Th e British Board of Film Censors, formed
in 1912 by the Kinematograph Manufacturers’
Association, begins operation.
1914 Price of Th e Times reduced to one penny.• (^) First full-length feature film in colour, The
World, the Flesh and the Devil, shown to the trade
in February, and opened at the Holborn Empire
in April. Kinemacolor was a two-colour system.
Gaumont Chronochrome (1914) produced three
colours, but three-colour processing was costly
and slow in development.
• (^) Technicolor successfully produced, in 1932, the
Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees; while the fi rst
feature-length fi lm in Technicolor was Rouben
Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp, released in 1935.
1914–18 First World War.
1915 UK: Daily Express bought by Max Aitken,
Lord Beaverbrook, for 17,500.
1916 Film, Th e Battle of the Somme – fi rst-ever
war documentary.
• (^) Clydeside workers are supported in their
refusal to make munitions by the Labour paper
Forward. It is suppressed.
1918 UK: first Film Society, the Stoll Picture
Theatre Club, opens with a presentation by
Baroness Orczy of Th e Laughing Cavalier.
1919 UK: Arthur Mee founds the Children’s
Newspaper.
1920 The Marconi Company begins radio
transmission from its Chelmsford works on 19
January. On 15 June Dame Nellie Melba gives a
30-minute recital, from Chelmsford, sponsored
by Lord Northcliffe. Her fee was 1,000. In
November transmissions from Chelmsford were
suspended on the grounds that they interfered
with radio communication to aircraft and ships.
Broadcasts resumed from Marconi’s Station
2MT at Writtle, February 1922. 2MT was the
fi rst regular broadcasting station in the UK.
1922 Marconi’s new station 2LO broadcasts from
Marconi House in the Strand, London. Along
with three other radio stations, 2LO was merged
into what was to become the British Broadcast-
ing Company Ltd., created in December 1922,
licensed to broadcast from January 1923.
1923 First programme of sound-on-fi lm produc-
tion at Berlin’s Alhambra cinema using the
Tri-Ergon process developed by Joseph Engl,
Joseph Massolle and Hans Voght. In the US Lee
De Forest’s Phonofi lm process is demonstrated
to the fi rst paying audience, at the Rialto Th eater
in New York.
1924 UK: Sykes Committee Report on Broad-
met with the same lack of interest as America
itself entered the war.
1901 Marconi transmits messages by wireless
telegraph from Cornwall to Newfoundland.
1902 Canadian-born Reginald Fessenden of the
US introduces the fi rst radio-telephone; makes
the fi rst transmission of speech by wireless.
• (^) UK: Arthur Pearson founds the Daily Express.
• (^) Alfred Harmsworth founds the Daily Mirror.
1906 Fessenden makes the fi rst radio broadcast,
using the 420-foot-high radio mast of the
National Electric Signalling Company’s radio
station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. On 24
December the programme began with Fessen-
den playing Gounod’s ‘O, Holy Night’ on the
violin, followed by him singing and reciting from
St Luke’s Gospel. Th e fi rst gramophone record to
be broadcast came next, a recording of Handel’s
‘Largo’. Th e transmission ended with Fessenden
wishing his listeners a happy Christmas. The
audience for the broadcast turned out to be ships’
operators within a fi ve-mile radius. Fessenden’s
second broadcast, on New Year’s Eve, in better
atmospheric conditions, was received as far
away as the West Indies.
• (^) In the UK the first radio broadcast came in
the following year – from the radio room of
HMS Andromeda. It was initiated by Lieutenant
Quentin Crauford RN and transmitted to other
ships at Chatham. News of the broadcast was
not made known, for the Admiralty saw the
possibilities of radio in military use, in particular
as aiding communication between submarines
and shore and other vessels.
1907 First regular experimental broadcasts
conducted by Lee De Forest’s Radio Telephone
Company from the Parker Building, New
York. Two years later De Forest introduced his
mother-in-law Harriet Stanton Black to listen-
ers. She gave the world’s fi rst broadcast talk; her
theme was women’s suff rage.
• (^) Lord Northcliff e purchases Th e Times.
• (^) In UK foundation of National Union of Jour-
nalists (NUJ).
• (^) First patent, in London, Berlin and St Peters-
burg of all-electric television cathode-ray tube
receiver, by Russian Boris Rozing. On 9 May 1911
Rozing succeeded in transmitting by wireless
over distance ‘a distinct image ... consisting of
four luminous bands’.
1909 In US, National Board of Censorship of
Motion Pictures established.
1911 UK Copyright Act requires copies of all
British publications to be supplied to the British
Museum and to fi ve other copyright libraries.
• (^) First Hollywood studio, the Nestor Studio,