1932 – 19491939–45 Second World War.
1939 US: William C. Huebner introduces photo-
setting of type.• (^) Premiere of Gone with the Wind.
1940 UK: statutory newsprint rationing intro-
duced; ended 1956.
1941 Release of Orson Welles’ fi lm masterpiece
Citizen Kane, based on the life and lifestyle
of American media baron William Randoph
Hearst.
• (^) USSR: Tamara Lobova becomes fi rst woman to
shoot a feature fi lm, Suvarov, released in January.
• (^) John Logie Baird demonstrates 3D television
in colour, a 500-line system, 18 December, at
Sydenham.
• (^) Th e Communist Daily Worker is suppressed in
the UK.
1944 Automatic digital computer, by American
Howard Aiken, is followed in the next year by
the electronic computer invented in the US by J.
Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly.
1945 BBC launches the Light Programme,
now Radio 2; and the following year, the Th ird
Programme, now Radio 3.
1946 Th e Southwestern Bell Telephone Company
of St Louis, US, off ers the fi rst commercial car
phone service.
1947 Polaroid camera introduced by Edwin Land,
US.
• (^) Soviet Union: first 3D colour feature film,
Robinson Crusoe, directed by A.N. Andreyevsky.
Special spectacles were not required.
• (^) US: Private Commission on Freedom of the
Press, founded by publisher Henry Luce and
chaired by the chancellor of the University of
Chicago, Robert Hutchens, to ‘examine areas
and circumstances under which the press of the
United States is succeeding or failing; to discover
where freedom of expression is or is not limited,
whether by government censorship, pressure
from readers or advertisers or the unwisdom of
its proprietors or the timidity of its management’.
Th e Commission report broached, formally for
the fi rst time, the concept of social responsibility
and listed criteria for its fulfi lment.
1947–9 First UK Royal Commission on the Press
- the Ross Commission.
1948 Th e Universal Declaration of Human Rights
is adopted by the United Nations Assembly in
Paris, 10 December.
• (^) NBC of America screens first TV Western
series, Hopalong Cassidy, starring Bill Boyd.
1948 Bell Telephone Company scientists John
Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley
introduce the fi rst transistor.
1949 Xerography invented by Chester Carlson,
Fifth Symphony. However, the radiograms
required to play the long-player were expensive
in a time of acute recession and the venture was
not a success. Th e LP did not come into its own
until 1948 when Columbia issued microgroove
records developed by Peter Goldmark – vinylite
discs with a playing time of 23 minutes per side,
and 224–300 grooves to the inch.
1932 Stereophonic cinema sound patented by
French film-makers Abel Gance and André
Debrie. Gance’s eight-hour silent 1927 epic
Napoléon Bonaparte was re-edited with added
dialogue and sound-eff ects, and screened at the
Paramount Cinema, Paris, in 1935. Warner Bros’
House of Wax (1953) was the fi rst feature fi lm
with complete stereo sound.
• (^) The first stereophonic disc recordings are
made by Arthur Keller of the Bell Telephone
Laboratories. Made on wax masters at 78rpm,
they were not produced commercially but were
demonstrated at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933.
Th e fi rst stereo discs to be manufactured for sale
were produced by Emory Cork of Stamford, US,
in 1957.
1933 Chief of the German Navy’s Signals Research
Department, Dr Rudoph Kühnold produces
the first working radar system. Radar in the
UK was the brainchild of Robert Watson-Watt,
superintendent of the radio research laboratory
at Ditton Park. Experiments with radar in Febru-
ary 1935 led to the establishment of a number of
air-defence radar stations which were to prove
critical in the Second World War (1939–45).
1934 Th e Emitron electronic camera is an advance
on the system developed by Shoenberg in 1931.
In the following year Shoenberg inaugurated the
405-line system and on 1 November 1936 the
EMI–Marconi system became standard as the
BBC television service began operation from
Alexander Palace.
1935 Berlin: fi rst television mobile unit comes into
operation, employed at the opening of the Berlin
TV station of the Reichs Rundfunk, 22 March.
Th e fi rst mobile units in the UK, designed by
T.C. Macnamara, were used in the BBC’s fi rst
major outside broadcast, of the Coronation, May
1937.
1936 First full-length animated fi lm, Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs from the Disney Studios.
1938 Russian hypnotist, sculptor and journalist Lazlo
Biró constructed a prototype ball-point pen with
quick-drying ink. Having acquired British rights,
Biró began manufacture in a disused RAF hangar
in 1944. In 1953 Baron Bic, in France, introduced the
fi rst ‘throwaway’ ball-point. In the UK priced at 1
shilling, sales during 1959 totalled 53 million.