Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

1930-1939 C.E.

  • 1930: Hollywood tightens self-censorship with the Motion Picture Code.
  • 1930: Photo flashbulbs replace dangerous flash powder.
  • 1930: On Broadway, George and Ira Gershwin’s Girl Crazy.
  • 1930: The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook sells the first of 15,000,000 copies.
  • 1930: Lowell Thomas begins first regular U.S. network newscast.
  • 1930: TVs based on British mechanical system roll off factory line.
  • 1930: Most nations use radio to educate. The American School of the Air is U.S. effort.
  • 1930: Movie cartoon character Mickey Mouse gets a comic strip.
  • 1930: U.S. customs officials seize James Joyce’s Ulysses as obscene.
  • 1930: Nancy Drew, the teenage detective, starts 30 novels of sleuthing.
  • 1930: Vannevar Bush’s partly electronic computer can solve differential equations.
  • 1930: Blondie and Dagwood join the daily comics.
  • 1930: Communist Leon Trotsky’s writings are banned in Boston.
  • 1930: José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses will lead to his exile from Spain.
  • 1930: A practical, affordable car radio goes on sale.
  • 1930: From AT&T, high quality insulated phone wire.
  • 1930: Police get a 3-state interconnected teletype hookup.
  • 1930: Grant Wood paints the American Gothic.
  • 1930: Radio station programs for children.
  • 1930: Radio adventure show, The Shadow.
  • 1930: American School of the Air on CBS.
  • 1930: Dashiell Hammett invents the hard-boiled detective with The Maltese Falcon.
  • 1930: Sinclair Lewis becomes the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • 1930: Published photos show Americans the hard times of the Depression.
  • 1930: Broadway gets professional stage lighting.
  • 1930: The March of Time on CBS.
  • 1930: NBC sets up experimental TV transmitter in New York.
  • 1930: Dick and Jane “See Spot Run.” 1930: 12 million U.S. homes have radios.
  • 1930: Hays Office creates Production Code; most Hollywood producers ignore it.
  • 1930: Oscars for 1929, 1930: All Quiet on the Western Front, George Arliss, Norma Shearer.
  • 1930: Also at the movies: The Big House, Bulldog Drummond, Disraeli.
  • 1930: BBC transmits a play by television, 240 lines/sec of resolution.
  • 1931: Dick Tracy arrives in newspaper comics as “Plainclothes Tracy.”
  • 1931: RCA broadcasts experimental TV image of familiar Felix the Cat.
  • 1931: Jenkins Radiovisor uses slotted, spinning wheel to send experimental TV image.
  • 1931: Commercial teletype service.
  • 1931: Annual U.S. radio advertising: $31 million as depression worsens.
  • 1931: Scotch Tape.
  • 1931: Metropolitan Opera broadcasts an entire opera.
  • 1931: Scrabble.
  • 1931: Most popular radio orchestras: Guy Lombardo, Paul Whiteman.
  • 1931: Most popular radio singers: Kate Smith, Rudy Vallee.
  • 1931: New radio singers: Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers.
  • 1931: Radio soap opera: Lum ‘n’ Abner.
  • 1931: Salvador Dali’s painting, Persistence of Memory, shows limp, hanging watches.
  • 1931: At the New York Group Theater, Lee Strasberg introduces method acting.
  • 1931: Popular news commentators: Walter Winchell, Lowell Thomas, H.V. Kaltenborn.
  • 1931: U.S. Radio Commission flexes muscle, orders two Chicago stations off the air.
  • 1931: Bigoted radio priest Charles Coughlin splits with CBS, goes independent.
  • 1931: Effort by black journalist fails to cancel radio program Amos ‘n’ Andy.
  • 1931: In Berlin, lone genius Konrad Zuse invents a computer, but is ignored.
  • 1931: “Hill-and-dale” vertical phonograph record introduced.
  • 1931: Two-way radio phone service from U.S. to Hawaii.
  • 1931: Radios sit in two of every five U.S. homes.
  • 1931: Metropolitan Opera with Milton Cross begins its long weekly radio engagement.
  • 1931: Electronic TV broadcasts in Los Angeles and Moscow.
  • 1931: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie will become a classic.
  • 1931: Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth looks at peasant poverty in China.
  • 1931: Allen DuMont improves the cathode ray tube.
  • 1931: George Gershwin and George S. Kaufman’s Pulitizer winner, Of Thee I Sing.
  • 1931: Little Orphan Annie will be one of many children’s daily radio programs.
  • 1931: Exposure meters go on sale to photographers.
  • 1931: William Faulkner’s Sanctuary examines Southern aristocracy.
  • 1931: Stephen Vincent Benét, Ballads and Poems, 1915-30.
  • 1931: The Star Spangled Banner becomes U.S. national anthem.
  • 1931: Bell Labs experiment with stereo recording.
  • 1931: Artist Georgia O’Keefe, Red, White, and Blue.
  • 1931: Nobel Prize in Literature: poet Erik Karlfeldt, Sweden.
  • 1931: Oscars, 1930, 1931: Cimarron, Lionel Barrymore, Marie Dressler.
  • 1931: Also at the movies: Min and Bill, Front Page, Trader Horn. City Lights.
  • 1931: NBC experimentally transmits 120-line screen.
  • 1931: Germany manufactures audio tape recorders.
  • 1932: Court ruling allows James Joyce novel Ulysses into U.S.
  • 1932: Allen DuMont secretly develops radar for U.S. Army.
  • 1932: James Hilton’s novel about Shangri-La, Lost Horizon.
  • 1932: Jack Benny goes on the air, the first of many variety comedy shows.
  • 1932: Novelist John Galsworthy wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • 1932: Lindbergh baby kidnapping shows power of radio news to capture listeners.
  • 1932: Walter Winchell goes on the air for NBC Blue.
  • 1932: The Times of London uses its new Times Roman typeface.
  • 1932: Aldous Huxley’s sci-fi classic, the dystopian Brave New World.
  • 1932: Radio patent medicine pitchman “Dr.” Brinkley nearly voted Kansas governor.
  • 1932: Stereophonic sound in a motion picture, Napoleon.
  • 1932: Oscars: Grand Hotel, Wallace Beery and Frederic March (tie), Helen Hayes.
  • 1932: Also at the movies: Laurel and Hardy’s Music Box, documentary Man of Aran.
  • 1932: Zoom lens is invented, but a practical model is 21 years off.
  • 1932: Visagraph translates print into embossed pages so blind can read, see pictures.
  • 1932: Electric-eye enables typesetting machine to scan print without operator.
  • 1932: BBC broadcasts television four days a week.
  • 1932: Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Thin Man, will become movie series.
  • 1932: Ed Sullivan Show on CBS.
  • 1932: NBC allows recorded programs on its owned stations, but not the network.
  • 1932: Herbert Kalmus develops optical and dye 3-color Technicolor process.
  • 1932: Jack Benny and Fred Allen begin their long running radio shows.
  • 1932: Flowers and Trees, first to use 3-color Technicolor, also first Oscar for cartoon.
  • 1932: Noel Coward’s play, Design for Living.
  • 1932: Erskine Caldwell’s novel of rural poverty, Tobacco Road.
  • 1932: For home movies: 8 mm cameras and film.
  • 1932: NBC and CBS allow prices to be mentioned in commercials.
  • 1932: Song “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” foretells swing era.
  • 1932: Radio City Music Hall opens in Manhattan.
  • 1933: The first magazine for men, Esquire.
  • 1933: Multiple-flash sports photography.
  • 1933: U.S. newspapers pressure AP to cut service to radio, start “Press-Radio War.”
  • 1933: Radio stations fight back with own reporters; UP, INS continue radio service.
  • 1933: Erskine Caldwell writes another best seller, God’s Little Acre.
  • 1933: Nazis use “big lie” technique in mass media propaganda.
  • 1933: The first King Kong sends the giant ape up the new Empire State Building.
  • 1933: Franz Werfel’s best known novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
  • 1933: The Lone Ranger arrives. He and Tonto will ride the radio waves until 1954.
  • 1933: Russian émigré Ivan Bunin wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • 1933: O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness, a comedy from the playwright of tragedies.
  • 1933: Singing telegrams.
  • 1933: Starting long radio runs: Ma Perkins; Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy..
  • 1933: In just 90 minutes over special line, CBS reports attempted assassination of FDR.
  • 1933: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels employ power of radio to influence the masses.
  • 1933: FDR begins radio Fireside Chats, bypasses hostile newspapers.
  • 1933: Oscars for 1932, 1933: Cavalcade, Charles Laughton, Katharine Hepburn.
  • 1933: Also at the movies: 42nd Street, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
  • 1933: Philo Farnsworth displays electronic television.
  • 1933: Nazis begin burning of books.
  • 1933: In Detroit, The Long Ranger is on the air.
  • 1933: Dorothy Day founds The Catholic Worker, supports pacifism, social causes.
  • 1933: The first real comic book, Funnies on Parade, on the newsstands.
  • 1933: Despite title, Gertrude Stein is author of Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
  • 1933: Drive-in movie theater opens in Camden, New Jersey.
  • 1933: The Breakfast Club begins its radio run on NBC Blue.
  • 1934: Mary Poppins, a children’s book by P.L. Travers.
  • 1934: A bookseller’s catalogue is devoted to detective fiction.
  • 1934: On NBC: The Aldrich Family.
  • 1934: Laurens Hammond builds an electric organ to replace the pipe organ.
  • 1934: Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, banned in U.S., is published in Paris.
  • 1934: Associated Press starts wirephoto service.
  • 1934: Tender is the Night, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
  • 1934: Radio phone service from U.S. to Japan, but plagued by fading, interference.
  • 1934: The jitterbug dance craze.
  • 1934: Wurlitzer and Seeburg make eye-catching jukeboxes.
  • 1934: On Broadway, Cole Porter’s musical, Anything Goes.
  • 1934: James Hilton’s novel about a beloved teacher, Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
  • 1934: Robert Graves’ novel, I, Claudius, describes excesses of ancient Rome.
  • 1934: International Telecommunication Union merges telegraph, radio groups.
  • 1934: International agreement assigns broadcast spectrum.
  • 1934: Catholic Legion of Decency pressures Hollywood to adopt Production Code.
  • 1934: In Germany, a mobile television truck roams the streets, catches Nazi rally.
  • 1934: In Scotland, teletypesetting sets type by phone line.
  • 1934: “High fidelity” records are advertised.
  • 1934: Bumper stickers appear on automobiles.
  • 1934: Oscars: It Happened One Night, and its stars, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert.
  • 1934: Also at the movies: The Thin Man, Of Human Bondage.
  • 1934: William Saroyan catches eyes with “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
  • 1934: Arnold Toynbee publishes the first of 12 volumes of A Study of History.
  • 1934: Federal Radio Commission becomes Federal Communications Commission
  • 1934: Benny Goodman on NBC’s Let’s Dance starts big band swing era on radio.
  • 1934: Flash Gordon docks on the comic pages. The movie serial follows in two years.
  • 1934: Terry and the Pirates, including the Dragon Lady, battle in a comic strip.
  • 1934: Nobel Prize in Literature: playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello, Italy.
  • 1934: Mutual Broadcasting System becomes fourth U.S. radio network.
  • 1934: Playwright Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour.
  • 1934: Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, one of more than 80 novels.
  • 1934: Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, translated into English.
  • 1934: FCC is created to regulate U.S. broadcasting and telecommunication.
  • 1934: Half of the homes in the U.S. have radios.
  • 1934: Surrealist painter René Magritte, The Human Condition.
  • 1934: From Cincinnati, WLW broadcasts nationally with 500,000 watts of power.
  • 1934: Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, and the rest of Dogpatch in the newspapers.
  • 1934: Soviet Union makes a television broadcast.
  • 1935: Alcoholics Anonymous and its well-publicized 12-step program.
  • 1935: Albert Einstein co-invents first automatic light adjustment camera.
  • 1935: Germany begins TV programming with 180-line resolution.
  • 1935: BBC chooses electronic television over mechanical after six-month trial.
  • 1935: New Fun Comics begins the creation of original comic book cartoons.
  • 1935: Film Becky Sharp exhibits improved three-color Technicolor system.
  • 1935: George Gershwin’s jazz opera, Porgy and Bess, debuts on Broadway.
  • 1935: Playwright Robert Sherwood, The Petrified Forest.
  • 1935: In England, Penguin Press sells paperbacks.
  • 1935: First telephone call made around the world.
  • 1935: Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River continues semi-autopbiographical tale.
  • 1935: Howard Armstrong introduces FM radio, but its real future is 15 years off.
  • 1935: German single lens reflex roll film camera synchronized for flash bulbs.
  • 1935: IBM’s electric typewriter comes off the assembly line.
  • 1935: Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom introduces disk jockeys.
  • 1935: T.S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral.
  • 1935: On radio: Fibber McGee and Molly.
  • 1935: U.S. radio stations win “Press-Radio War” started by newspapers.
  • 1935: Two plays from Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing.
  • 1935: Demagogues on U.S. radio: Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith.
  • 1935: All-electronic VHF television comes out of the RCA lab.
  • 1935: Kodachrome is the first successful amateur color film.
  • 1935: Your Hit Parade starts long NBC run, sponsored by Lucky Strike..
  • 1935: In Nazi Germany, magnetic tape and Magnetophone recorder are developed.
  • 1935: Oscars: Mutiny on the Bounty, Victor McLaglen, Bette Davis.
  • 1935: Also at the movies: The Informer, Naughty Marietta, Ruggles of Red Gap.
  • 1935: Sponsors develop, control U.S. radio programs.
  • 1935: Philosopher Goerge Santayana’s only novel, The Last Puritan, popular success.
  • 1935: Nobel Prize in Literature: no award.
  • 1935: Two-way speaker system becomes a standard for cinemas.
  • 1935: Tweeter and woofer reduce loudspeaker distortion.
  • 1935: John Steinbeck attains reputation with Tortilla Flat, stories about California.
  • 1935: Our Oriental Heritage, the first of Will Durant’s 15 volumes of history.
  • 1936: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! examines Southern attitudes toward race.
  • 1936: A.C. Nielsen acquires M.I.T. audimeter.
  • 1936: Gang Busters starts radio run on CBS.
  • 1936: Electronic speech synthesizer mimics human speech.
  • 1936: American playwright Eugene O’Neill wins Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • 1936: John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
  • 1936: H.V.Kaltenborn broadcasts a Spanish Civil War battle live.
  • 1936: Sergei Prokofiev composes Peter and the Wolf, beloved by children.
  • 1936: Electric guitars.
  • 1936: On radio: The Green Hornet.
  • 1936: Dale Carnegie’s best seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
  • 1936: An actor, Eddie Albert, is hired to write, produce and star in television dramas.
  • 1936: Irish law bans advertising any birth control devices.
  • 1936: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; may be most popular novel ever.
  • 1936: Robert Benchley’s humorous essays, My Ten Years in a Quandary.
  • 1936: Pulitzer awarded for Broadway play, You Can’t Take It with You.
  • 1936: BBC starts world’s first regular television service, three hours a day.
  • 1936: Berlin Olympics are televised closed circuit.
  • 1936: In U.S., daily test broadcasts of 300-line cathode ray TV.
  • 1936: Philco demonstrates 345-line TV with transmission of 7 miles.
  • 1936: Republican National Committee invents negative radio campaign soundbites.
  • 1936: Bell Labs invents a voice recognition machine.
  • 1936: In Mexico City, Diego Rivera completes the mural, The History of Mexico.
  • 1936: Oscars: The Great Ziegfeld, Paul Muni, Luise Rainer.
  • 1936: Also at the movies: Modern Times, Our Gang’s Bored of Education.
  • 1936: The March of Time is honored for its newsreels.
  • 1936: Henry Havelock Ellis completes monumental Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
  • 1936: Life magazine is published; introduces photo essays.
  • 1936: CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, goes in the air.
  • 1936: BASF/AEG audio tape recording of a live concert.
  • 1936: Inside Europe is first of a series of Inside books by John Gunther.
  • 1936: 33 million radio sets in the U.S.
  • 1936: Rodgers and Hart’s musical, On Your Toes, with “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.”
  • 1936: In England, a symphony concert is tape recorded.
  • 1936: Co-axial cable connects New York to Philadelphia.
  • 1936: Fanny Brice introduces radio audiences to Baby Snooks.
  • 1936: Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen introduces Charlie McCarthy to radio listeners.
  • 1936: Porky Pig joins the animated cartoon barnyard.
  • 1936: Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers” describes a general purpose computer.
  • 1937: George Stibitz of Bell Labs invents the electrical digital calculator.
  • 1937: John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men, tragedy of two drifters in California.
  • 1937: Decades of exposé reporting finally pay off with passage of child labor law.
  • 1937: Sarnoff hires Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to lead new NBC Symphony.
  • 1937: BBC transmits final mechanical television program.
  • 1937: Oscars: The Life of Emile Zola, Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer.
  • 1937: Also at the movies: Dead End, Good Earth, Lost Horizon, Captains Courageous.
  • 1937: The first full-length animated film, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
  • 1937: Pulse Code Modulation points the way to digital transmission.
  • 1937: Film One Hundred Men and a Girl puts nine music channels on one track.
  • 1937: The forerunner of the Minox spy camera, with fingernail-size negative.
  • 1937: NBC sends mobile TV truck onto New York streets.
  • 1937: One of Agatha Christie’s best, Death on the Nile.
  • 1937: NBC has 111 affiliate stations; CBS has 105.
  • 1937: The Shadow, weekly network radio drama; will appear until 1954.
  • 1937: Pablo Picasso paints the Guernica, showing the horrors of war.
  • 1937: Artist Georges Braque, Woman with a Mandolin.
  • 1937: FCC sets channel aside for TV broadcasts.
  • 1937: Crash of the zepplin Hindenburg is captured on a recording, then broadcast.
  • 1937: More than half of all American homes now boast a radio.
  • 1937: Chester Carlson invents the photocopier, Xerography process.
  • 1937: NBC refuses government talk on venereal disease.
  • 1937: Look magazine starts; will run until 1971.
  • 1937: Radio soap opera, The Guiding Light.
  • 1937: British testers judge electronic television superior to mechanical.
  • 1937: Nobel Prize in Literature: novelist Roger du Gard, France.
  • 1937: J.R.R. Tolkien opens up a fantasy world with The Hobbit.
  • 1937: On Broadway, Rodgers and Hart, Babes in Arms and I’d Rather Be Right.
  • 1937: Karen Blixen, under pseudonym Isak Dinesen, writes Out of Africa.
  • 1937: Theodore Geisel, “Dr. Seuss,” begins writing, illustrating books for children.
  • 1938: Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize play, Our Town.
  • 1938: Churchill completes 4-volume biography of ancestor, Duke of Marlborough.
  • 1938: Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities argues for old values in modern society.
  • 1938: Jean-Paul Sartre writes his absurdist first novel, Nausea.
  • 1938: Strobe lighting.
  • 1938: Information Please! on NBC Blue.
  • 1938: John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry argues his view of epistemology.
  • 1938: Baird demonstrates live TV in color.
  • 1938: Imported from Argentina: the tango.
  • 1938: Radio broadcasts can be taped and edited.
  • 1938: Aaron Copland composes Billy the Kid.
  • 1938: 50 million radio sets in the U.S.
  • 1938: President Roosevelt creates a cheap mail rate category for books.
  • 1938: Robert Sherwood stages Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a Pulitzer Prize winner.
  • 1938: Nobel Prize in Literature: American Pearl Buck for novels of Chinese peasants.
  • 1938: Surprise U.S. radio hit: Information Please.
  • 1938: Oscars: You Can’t Take it with You , Spencer, Tracy, Bette Davis.
  • 1938: Also at the movies: Boys Town, Jezebel, Angels with Dirty Faces, Pygmalion.
  • 1938: The first of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia religious allegories.
  • 1938: Two Hungarian brothers named Biro invent practical ballpoint pen in Argentina.
  • 1938: CBS World News Roundup ushers in modern newscasting.
  • 1938: DuMont markets electronic television receiver for the home.
  • 1938: Orson Welles’ radio drama, The War of the Worlds, panics thousands.
  • 1938: From Krypton, Superman lands in Action Comics #1.
  • 1938: The Grand Ole Opry radio show is now nationally famous.
  • 1938: More than 80 million movie tickets (65% of population) sold in U.S. each week.
  • 1939: Mechanical television scanning system abandoned.
  • 1939: Karen Horney’s New Ways in Psychoanalysis dismisses Freudian “penis envy.”
  • 1939: Era of jazz composers, including “Satchmo” Armstrong and “Duke” Ellington.
  • 1939: The Man Who Came to Dinner, Broadway hit by Kaufman and Hart.
  • 1939: AC bias control improves tape recorded sound.
  • 1939: Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Goodbye to Berlin; it will lead to Cabaret.
  • 1939: New York World’s Fair shows TV to the public; FDR is first president on TV.
  • 1939: Both houses of U.S. Congress get radio broadcasting galleries.
  • 1939: If Superman can do it, why not Batman?
  • 1939: NBC starts first regular daily electronic TV broadcasts in the U.S.
  • 1939: Katherine Anne Porter’s short story collection, Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
  • 1939: Lillian Hellman’s play, The Little Foxes.
  • 1939: I Love a Mystery on NBC.
  • 1939: Blondie and Dagwood move from comic strip to CBS.
  • 1939: Raymond Chandler’s first detective novel, The Big Sleep.
  • 1939: Air mail service across the Atlantic.
  • 1939: U.S. radio networks pledge minimum of horror, excitement in war coverage.
  • 1939: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, joins the Christmas festivities.
  • 1939: Nobel Prize in Literature: novelist Frans Sillenpää, Finland.
  • 1939: Baseball game is televised: Princeton vs. Columbia.
  • 1939: Young Doctor Malone joins radio soap opera lineup on NBC Blue.
  • 1939: Lost Horizon is first novel published in paperback.
  • 1939: Many TV firsts: sports coverage, variety show, feature film.
  • 1939: Oscars: Gone with the Wind, Robert Donat, Vivien Leigh.
  • 1939: Also at the movies: The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
  • 1939: Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake may be the most complex novel ever written.
  • 1939: The wire recorder is invented in the U.S.
  • 1939: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, describes Dust Bowl migration.
  • 1939: Multiphone expands jukebox choices from 20 tunes to 170 using phone lines.
  • 1939: Radio brings the public first reports of World War II events.
  • 1939: Western Union introduces coast-to-coast fax service.
  • 1939: Pocket Books enters paperback market.