Mass Media

1889: William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, commissioned by Thomas Alva Edison, builds the first motion-picture camera and names it the Kinetograph.

1890: George W. Johnson, first recordings by the first successful African American recording artist.

1891: Printing presses can now print and fold 90,000 4-page papers an hour. Diazotype invented (print photographs on fabric).

1892: 4-color rotary press invented.

1893: The radio has been the first device to allow for mass communication. It has enabled information to be transferred far and wide, not only nationally wide but internationally as well. The development of the radio began in 1893 with Nikolai Tesla’s demonstration of wireless radio communication in St. Louis, Missouri. His work laid the foundation for those later scientists who worked to perfect the radio we now use.

1894: Len Spencer and the Imperial Minstrels, first series of recorded recreations of a contemporary minstrel show.

1904: The first comic book is made.

1905: The first movie theater opens in Pittsburgh, Pensilvania

1908: William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, first recordings of campaign speeches by presidential candidates.

1917: Original Dixieland Jazz Band, first widely-popular recordings of “jazz”.

1920: First transmission of AM radio was sent out by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

1920: first collage radio station on Oct. 14, 1920

1920- John Baird came up with an idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television.

1923- Charles Jenkins invented a mechanical television system called radiovision which transmitted the earliest moving silhouette images. Radiovisor was a mechanical scanning-drum device manufactured by the Jenkins Television Corporation.

1924: Duke Ellington, first recordings by the great composer/bandleader.

1935: Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, first recordings by the highly popular swing band.

1940: Jan. 1st, The Western Electric Telephone were in almost every North American Home when they were released. It was very durable and simple to repair. This phone was commonly found in the color black, with only ten number keys.

1940: Woody Guthrie, first recordings by the folk icon.

1946: Hank Williams, first recordings by the country icon.

1947: In 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Este Ray Mann filed a United States patent request for an invention they described as a "cathode ray tube amusement device." (CRT) The gaming device was never marketed nor sold to the public. (AKA video game)

1960: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho terrifies audiences and becomes one of the year's most successful films, as well as one of the most memorable psychological thrillers.

1964: Red Desert makes spectacular use of the recently perfected zoom lens, which increases the optical mobility of a shot and its expressive capacities.

1965: The Sound of Music premieres. An instant hit, the film was one of the top-grossing films of and remains one of film's most popular musicals.

1965: Jan. 1st, The Trim-line Telephone had a lighted dial and a thick, curved plastic casing. The phone had both a mouthpiece and earpiece, the dial was between these two things. This phone also had a plug and jack.

1968: The motion picture rating system debuts with G, PG, R and X.

1970: Video gaming would not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s.

1980: 1980s is when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public.

1984: Domain Name System (DNS) introduced To Internet

1986: Guglielmo Marconi was awarded the official patent for the radio by the British Government in 1986.

1994: Internet celebrates 25th anniversary

1998: Microsoft releases Windows 98. Months later the government orders Microsoft to change its Java virtual machine to pass Sun's Java compatibility test.