-
1851 - The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company is founded
in Rochester, New York, which will become Western Union -- the first electronic
message service (also offering the service of delivered Telegrams.) -
1861 - Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line -- providing fast,
coast-to-coast communications during the U.S. Civil War. -
1866 - Christopher Latham Sholes of Danville, PA and his colleagues, Carlos Glidden and
Samuel Soulé developed the first practical typewriter (and the QWERTY keyword.) -
1873 - The Remington Arms company signs a deal to market Sholes' Typewriter under their
name; later they merge with the Rand company to form Remington-Rand. -
1891 - The International copyright agreement is adopted between major countries
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1892 - The first "million-seller" song hit (sold via sheet music) was "After The Ball" by Charles K. Harris, who was both its composer and publisher.
-
1895 - The Lumiere Brothers use (piano) music with a motion picture program (of
short subjects) for the first time at a Dec. 28th -screening at the Grand Café in Paris -
1896 - An orchestra is used with (silent) motion pictures for the first time in April in London
-
1897 - Shellac gramophone disks developed by Emile Berliner - speeds will vary on discs
issued by companies in different countries (80 rpm was used on some British recordings)
The film is co-produced by Rouben Mamoulian with Kenneth MacGowan's "Pioneer
Pictures Corporation", and is distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. -
1897 - Guglielmo Marconi is granted his first British patent for wireless telegraphy.
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1900 - Eldredge Johnson perfects first system of mass duplication of pre-recorded flat disks.
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1902 - April 16 - "The Electric Theater" in Los Angeles is opened by Thomas L. Tally: the
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1906 - RCA Victor's "Victrola" model record player is introduced. It has a variable turntable
speed control to accomodate the wide range of phonograph records produced at that
time; Victor's speeds ranged from 71 - 76 rpm. Columbia was producing discs as 80rpm.
Some British disks even rotated between 66rpm - 90rpm; Although U.S. phonograph
manufacturers agreed in 1928 to standardize on the rate of 78.26 rpm, it still took
decades for mo -
1908 - The first double-sided phonograph records are introduced by Columbia. Soon its
competitors follow suit; Prior to this time, all records had sound only on one side;
the back side was a blank (un-grooved) side. -
1912 - Charles "Doc" Herrold begins the first regular public radio broadcasting of voice and
music from his "wireless telegraph college" in San Jose, California; He calls it "The
Herrold Station" and transmits to audiences from San Jose to San Francisco. -
1912 - Disk recordings overtake cylinders in the popular market. Columbia drops cylinders
-
1913 - Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky produce the first "feature-length" film called
"The Squaw Man" -
1914 - Western Union introduces the first consumer charge card.
-
1916 - AT&T engineer C. G. Hensley got the idea for the loudspeaker when he thought about
what would happen if he made a telephone receiver really big. -
1921 - The first automatic "record changer" turntable is patented for a stack of 78's.
-
1924 - Dutch-born Iwan Surrerier (a Pasadena, CA resident) re-designs his rear-projection
device for home viewing movies (invented in 1917 -- called a "Moviola") into a
machine to make film editing easier, and sold his first one to Douglas Fairbanks. -
1935 - AEG/Telefunken exhibits the first magnetic tape recorder in Germany.
-
1936 - Billboard magazine publishes its first chart of top-selling records.
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1936 - The West Coast "Don Lee" chain of radio stations joins the Mutual Network on
December 29 giving Mutual a coast-to-coast reach -
1937 - Christmas Night on the NBC Radio Network - The NBC Symphony Orchestra premiere
broadcast begins a 17-year run under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. -
1937 - Christmas Night on the NBC Radio Network - The NBC Symphony Orchestra premiere
broadcast begins a 17-year run under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. -
1938 - The CBS radio network debuts the "CBS World News Round-Up" on March 13th
anchored by broadcast journalist Robert Trout. -
1939 - National radio hit advertising jingle "Pepsi-Cola Hits The Spot" is written by
Eric Siday and Ginger Johnson, adapted from the tune of an 18th-century
English hunting song titled "John Peel". Johnson-Siday would write early
advertising jingles, and then Siday would form the first electronic jingle
company "Identitones" using early analog synthesizers in the 1960s. -
.
1939 - Electronic television demonstrated at the Chicago Worlds Fair by RCA / NBC; the
number of horizontal scan lines of early electronic TV systems varied from 500 to
750 with DuMont systems having the highest resolution around 750. -
1940 - Regular FM Radio broadcasting begins in New York City.
-
1941 - The National Television Standards Committee adopts the "NTSC standard" of
525 interlaced horizontal scan lines for all U.S. commercial television broadcasts
and just under 30 frames per second consisting of two interlaced fields. -
1941 - ASCAP feuds with radio networks, which spawns the birth of a rival U.S. Performance
Royalty collection/distribution organization -- Broadcast Music, Incorporated -- BMI -
1942 - James Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians (AF of M) Union begins a
"recording ban" from Aug., 1942 - Nov., 1944 to force record companies to pay royalties,
which starts the decline of the big-band era in favor of vocal groups and "crooner" vocalists -
1942 - James Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians (AF of M) Union begins a
"recording ban" from Aug., 1942 - Nov., 1944 to force record companies to pay royalties,
which starts the decline of the big-band era in favor of vocal groups and "crooner" vocalists -
1945 - The American Broadcasting Network officially begins on June 14 -- when it takes over
the NBC Radio "Blue" Network. Announcements for awhile identified it as the "Blue
Network of the American Broadcasting Company" or the "American Blue Network." -
1946 - Captured German magnetic tape recorders brought to the United States which are copied
for commercial use by A. M. Polikoff who founds AMPEX (he added "EX" for excellence.) -
1947 - Dec 16 - Bell Laboratories assembles the world's first transistor (a "point contact" type
so-called because two pointed metal contacts pressed the surface of a semiconductor.) -
1947 - Jan 22 - The FCC approves the first commercial television station West of the Mississipi at a
subsidiary of Paramount Pictures - call letters are changed to KTLA - over channel 5
(formerly it was experimental TV station W6XYZ on channel 4, and later on channel 5.) -
1947 - The FCC approves regularly-scheduled commercial television broadcasting, following
the wartime "interruption", on seven East Coast television stations. -
1948 - The first cable TV systems appear (called Community Antenna TeleVision systems,
or CATV) for carrying television signals by wire into areas that are geographically remote. -
1948 - The Audio Engineering Society (The AES) is formed.
-
1948 - The commercial 33 1/3 LP (Long Playing) microgroove (1-mil) disc is introduced by Dr.
Peter Goldmark of Columbia Records; the first LP disk is released; it is 10" Columbia
record #4001 performed by classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin. -
1949 - RCA Victor responds to the LP by developing large-hole 45 rpm phonograph records;
Although the effort failed to kill LPs, RCA's 45s eventually had the unintended
consequence of replacing 78s as the preferred media format for singles. -
1951 - The "CBS Eye" network logo debuts on September 10, 1951, designed by network art
director William Golden. An animated version debuted on the air on October 17th. -
1951 - CBS television broadcast the first color TV program to five cities on June 25th; the CBS
color system was not compatible with black & white signals as was the RCA system
deve1951 - The first ID jingle company to "sing-over" pre-recorded backgrounds - PAMS, Inc. is
formed in Dallas, Texas by former radio studio musician Bill Meeks on August 20, 1951. -
1951 - The first episode of "I Love Lucy" aired on Monday, October 15th on the CBS
Television Network, filmed with three cameras simultaneously in front of a
"live" audience on the General Service Studio soundstage. -
1952 - The Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) is formed in order
to facilitate technical standardization of phonograph recording & reproduction;
It invited engineers from U.S. record companies to discuss proposed standards
including a pre-emphasis equalization curve that would optimize the performance
of playback systems in attenuating unwanted surface noise and rumble, etc. -
1952 - Coast-to-coast network TV is a reality via telephone company coaxial cables.
-
1953 - RCA proposes to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) that it
adopt RCA's "New Orthophonic" recording characteristic as its standard to define
equalization crossover points and rolloff characteristics for records. But the
RIAA doesn't officially endorse this standard for 3 more years (1956), and it
would take four more years (until 1957) for the last U.S. manufacturer to change
their "equalization" curves to the RI -
1954 - On March 25, the first color television sets rolled out of the RCA Victor factory
in Bloomington, Indiana; (The model CT-100 had a 12-inch screen, and a suggested
retail price of $1000. A total of 5,000 model CT-100 sets were made.) -
1955 - NBC debuts a weekend radio network format called MONITOR on Sunday, June 12th,
a creation of Pat Weaver, who also created NBC's Today and Tonight Shows. -
1955 - Larger 12" LP's overtake 10" LP's as the preferred size for long-playing records.
-
1956 - Ampex Co. of Redwood City, CA demonstrates the first videotape system in February
-
1957 - Compatible Stereo disks and record players are offered for sale (33 1/3 and 45rpm.)
-
1960 - Sony introduces the first "solid-state" TV set, using transistors instead of vacuum tubes.
-
1961 - FM Stereo radio broadcasting begins and FM slowly starts to gain respect.
-
1962 - Multitrack analog tape recording starts being used in recording studios
-
1963 - Ivan Sutherland does his M.I.T. Doctoral Thesis on Interactive Computer Graphics
creating a "Sketchpad" program using an interactive light pen instead of a mouse;
which leads to the first practical uses of interactive graphics on computers. -
1963 - Compact stereo tape cassettes and players are developed by Phillips.
-
1964 - The 8-track stereo tape cartridge is developed for automobile use by Lear
-
1966 - The "Dolby-A" professional noise reduction system is used in some recording studios
-
1968 - The "Dolby-B" noise reduction system is introduced for consumer reel-to-reel and
cassette tape recorders. -
1969 - The FCC requires cable TV systems with more than 3500 subscribers to include
locally-originated programming -
1969 - The FCC requires cable TV systems with more than 3500 subscribers to include
locally-originated programming -
1975 - NBC's weekend radio format MONITOR is cancelled after nearly 20 years --
It's final broadcast airs on Sunday, January 26th. -
1976 - Garrett Brown invents the gyroscopic Steadicam, a motion picture camera stabilizer
mount, worn by the cameraman himself, first used in the movie "Rocky." -
1979 - The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", is the first hip-hop record to reach Top 40 radio
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1981 - The MTV Music TV Cable Network debuts on the air at Midnight, August 1st.
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1982 - The digital Compact Disc (CD) is introduced by a Japanese conglomerate.
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1983 - The first CD titles are released in the US in June (12 CBS, 15 Telarc, 30 Denon.)
-
1984 - The (128K) Apple Macintosh personal computer debuts with a Graphical User Interface
advertised as "the computer for the rest of us", expected sales of 50,000 the first month
at $2495, the industry (and Apple) is surprised when 75,000 orders pour in...perhaps
due in part to a novel TV ad aired during the Football Superbowl game. -
1985 - Adoption of the CD starts taking a huge bite out of LP sales, causing them to drop 25%
-
1986 - The Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) announces on June 19 that
CDs have overtaken LP sales in the U.S. -
1994 - Personal computers outsell TV sets for the first time in the United States.
-
1996 - The DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) increases capacity of digital storage of audio and video
on a CD (Compact Disc) medium; can store on to 4.7 GigaBytes per side; double-sided
disks are possible though rare... -
1999 - The Mutual Broadcasting System is a victim of consolidation -- absorbed into Westwood
One-CNN Radio on April 18, ending 65 years as an independent radio network. -
2000 - March 10 -- the so-called "Internet Bubble" burst leading to a recession/shakeout
of the inflated technology industry, as reality started to replace "irrational exuberance -
2000 - Consumer DVD recorders were introduced at the Comdex Consumer Electronics
show in Las Vegas priced at $1000, but by the 2001 show came down to around $500;
these video recorders can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes of video and multimedia content -
2000 - Internet music-swapping site "Napster" is created, and alarms the recording industry
which mounts a massive campaign to shut it down despite First Amendment concerns. -
2000 - Digital electronic books (E-Books) become a small part of the publishing industry, and
several competing companies attempt to introduce the standards for them. -
2000 - The first year recording sales actually declined -- record industry blames online music
swapping as the cause and tried to advance digital copy protection schemes -
2001 - DVD video disk players outsell VHS video cassette recorder/players for the first time.
-
2001 - Intel announces a breakthrough in the speed of computer processing chips that will make
computers several THOUSAND times faster; first systems expected to be sold in 2007 -
2001 - Reminiscent of VHS/Betamax, an alternate standard for consumer DVD writable disks
is introduced to thwart piracy called DVD+RW (as opposed to original DVD-RW);
Microsoft is among the chief proponents of DVD+RW; Apple remains with DVD-RW -
2001 - Napster is forced to "filter out" content due to RIAA lawsuit; hints at fees to come
other free peer-to-peer software including Gnutella are developed to take Napster's place -
2003 - Apple Computer introduces a downloadable music service via its iTunes music application,
which proved that people would pay 99-cents-per-tune to download music legally in the
wake of peer-to-peer free (but illegal) file swapping -
2005 - Retailers Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Circuit City announce they will stop selling
VHS Video Cassette tapes since DVD's are now the medium of choice for most consumers -
2006 - February 22 - Apple Computer's online music store integrated into its iTunes software
and iPod hardware, sold it's one-billionth song on this date, proving that digital music
can be accepted by the public when distributed across a network in a virtual form, as
opposed to inscribed only in discrete tangible media.
