1878 – 1888peared; a mystery that remains unsolved.
1886 New York Herald Tribune installs the fi rst
Linotype machine, the invention of Ottmar
Margenthaler.• (^) Paris: Le Petit Journal becomes fi rst paper to
reach 1 million circulation.
1887 German Emile Berliner working in the US
applies for a patent for the first gramophone
or disc-recorder player. He demonstrated his
invention at the Franklin Institute in Philadel-
phia in the following year. The hand-cranked
gramophone was initially produced as a toy by
Kammerer & Rheinhardt, Germany, using a fi ve-
inch vulcanized rubber disc at an approximate
speed of 70rpm. Electrically operated machines
were marketed by the United States Gramo-
phone Company in Washington in 1894, using
seven-inch records.
• (^) First overseas edition of a newspaper – New
York Herald in Paris.
• (^) The Berliner Gramophone Company of
Philadelphia produced the fi rst shellac records
in 1897. Th is company was also the fi rst to create
a recording studio and record shop. Double-
sided discs were fi rst manufactured in 1904 by
the International Talking Machine Company,
Germany, under the imprint Odeon Records.
• (^) San Francisco: William Randoph Hearst takes
command of his father’s paper, the Examiner,
initiating a career as press baron to out-rival
and out-live all his contemporaries. In 1895 he
bought the New York Journal, which became the
star and exemplar of Yellow Journalism.
• (^) Also in 1887, monotype printing invented in
the US by Tolbert Lanston. Commercially estab-
lished by 1897, the Monotype had the advantage
over Linotype in that it cast each letter sepa-
rately instead of in a compact line, thus making it
easier to correct the text.
1888 George Eastman of Rochester, New York,
produced the first snapshot camera – the
Kodak – for use by the general public. Th is used
pre-loaded paper-roll fi lm. It took 100 circular
pictures 2.5 inches in diameter. Mass produced
by the Eastman Company, Kodak No. 1 proved
an immediate success in the US and worldwide.
• (^) In the same year John Carbutt of Philadelphia
introduced celluoid fi lm. Th is was made from
celluloid sheets one-hundredth of an inch thick,
and obtained from the Celluloid Manufacturing
Company. However, the fi rst celluloid roll fi lm
to be manufactured commercially was another
Eastman coup. Th e Eastman Dry Plate Company
produced roll fi lm for its Kodak cameras, begin-
ning in August 1889. Th e fi rst colour roll fi lm
came much later, and was invented by Robert
Jersey, on 6 December, Edison proceeded to
make history by reciting into the recording
apparatus, ‘Mary had a little lamb’. Th e Edison
Speaking Phonograph Company began produc-
tion in April 1879. Th e tin-foil cylinder provided
so short a duration that public interest in the
Phonograph declined.
• (^) Th e wax-cylinder Graphaphone developed by
Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter was
patented in 1886, to be countered by Edison, his
interest in recording renewed, with the Improved
Phonograph. Edison Laboratories were the fi rst
to record music by an accredited musician, the
boy pianist Josef Hofman, in 1888. Th ere was no
means of duplicating wax discs before 1892.
1878 Th e microphone, demonstrated in London
by Professor David Edward Hughes.
1880 The Radiophone, devised by Charles
Sumner Tainter and Alexander Graham Bell,
successfully transmits speech between the top
of Franklin School, Washington DC, and Bell’s
laboratory on 14th Street.
• (^) Telephony without wires had been the inven-
tion of A.C. Brown of the Eastern Telegraph
Company two years earlier. Reginald Fessenden
produced the fi rst conventional system of radio
telephony capable of transmitting speech across
distances regardless of obstacles between trans-
mitter and receiver. He demonstrated his system
for the fi rst time, over a distance of a mile, 23
December 1900. His words were addressed to
his assistant, ‘Is it snowing where you are, Mr
Th iessen?’
• (^) In UK Titbits founded, followed in 1888 by
Answers – two immensely popular weeklies.
1883 In US, Joseph Pulitzer starts up the New
York World.
1884 Lewis Waterman in the US creates the fi rst
fountain pen.
1885 Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, French-
born but living in the US, projects the first
moving pictures – on to a wall at the Institute for
the Deaf, New York, applying in November 1996
for an American patent for an ‘Apparatus for
producing Animated Pictures’. Th is was granted
in January 1888 but reference to cameras and
projectors was disallowed because of Dumont’s
British patent of 1861 (though this involved an
arrangement of glass plates to form the facets of
a prismatic drum and had nothing to do with the
reproduction of moving images on a screen).
• (^) On the point of going into commercial produc-
tion in 1890, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon,
bound for Paris where it was his intention to
demonstrate his invention to the secretary of
the Paris Opera. He – and his apparatus – disap-