| 1926 |
 Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references. |
links and notes |
| |
 |
|
| January 7 |
John Logie Baird gives the first demonstration of his television system to a reporter from
the London Evening Standard. |
|
| January 10 |
Premiere of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis in Berlin. |
|
| January 26 |
First public demonstration by Baird of his television system is given to 40 members
of the Royal Institution in London, including a reporter from The Times (report 28 January),
followed by a series of displays for other members of the press. |
This date is frequently incorrectly given as January 27, an error that may have arisen originally from
Baird himself, or his publicist Sydney A Moseley. Baird gives January 27 in a
talk on two New York radio stations in 1931. |
| January |
Baird forms Television Ltd. During the year the company moves to new premises at
Motograph House, Upper St Martin's Lane, London. |
|
| March 3 |
Report of the Crawford Committee is published by UK parliament, recommending the
establishment of the British Broadcasting Corporation as a public service radio organisation. |
â July 14 |
| March |
Radio LL is established with a 1 kW transmitter in the rue de Javel, Paris by Lucien Lévy. |
à 1935 |
| April 16 |
BBC broadcast of a fictitious report by Father Ronald Knox of a riot of the unemployed
in London ‘alarmed people all over the country, although it included such unlikely details as the
roasting alive of a well-known philanthropist in Trafalgar Square’. |
Pre-dates Orson Welles' War of the Worlds (1938) by 12 years |
| May |
Empire Marketing Board, cradle of the documentary film movement, is founded in London. |
|
| July 14 |
Crawford Committee recommendations are accepted and a
British Broadcasting Corporation will be set up. |
|
| July 14 |
BBC forms a committee chaired by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, to advise on
pronunciation. Other members are George Bernard Shaw, Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson, Professor Daniel Jones,
phoneticist A Lloyd James (honorary secretary) and Logan Pearsall Smith (representing the Society for Pure
English, of which Bridges was also a founder). |
à 1929
 Robert Bridges quotation;
Broadcast English pamphlet text |
| July 16 |
Underwater colour photographs taken near the Florida Keys, US, are published in
National Geographic magazine. |
|
| August 2 |
First Vitaphone sound-on-disc film programme is presented by Warner Bros at the Warner
Theatre, New York. The sound is recorded in a 16-inch disc, playing from the centre outwards and rotating
at 33 rpm. It is intended that the films will supplant the live entertainment provided in some theatres
between films. The demonstration film features Mary Astor and John Barrymore. |
|
| August 9 |
Post Office issues licence 2TV to Baird for experimental transmissions, the first
wireless transmission licence for television; later 2TW (Harrow) is also issued. |
|
| August 23 |
Death of film star Rudolph Valentino, aged 31, in the Polyclinic in New York City
provokes mass fan hysteria. |
|
| August 26 |
Premiere of Don Juan, starring John Barrymore and directed by Alan Crosland
for Warner Bros, using the Vitaphone sound system for only synchronous
music and sound effects. Recording of the music track, made by British-born George Groves (1901-1975)
with the 107-member New York Philharmonic Orchestra at the Manhattan Opera House in New York, pioneered
a six-microphone technique to improve the sound balance. Other musical short films formed the first half
of the programme, featuring such performers as Efrem Zimbalist, Roy Smeck and His Hawaiian Serenaders,
Mischa Elman, Marion Talley, Giovanni Martinella and the Metropolitan Opera Company chorus. |
à 1927 |
| August |
Fox Film Company buys 100 acres of land in West Los Angeles to create Fox Hills Studio. About
this time the company establishes a technology research and development department. Fox's Deluxe Laboratories
remain in the headquarters building on 10th Avenue and 45th Street, New York. |
à April 1927 |
| August |
Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK, Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) is created to be
Japan’s national broadcasting organisation. |
|
| September 9 |
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is incorporated in the USA as an offshoot of
the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). |
â November 15 |
| September 27-30 |
An International Motion Picture Congress is organised by the League of Nations'
Committee on Intellectual Co-operation in Paris. A book circulated by
American William Seabury argues that the answer to the problems of the European film industries lies
in access to the US market, rather than in restrictive moves against US imports, which only results in
the production of cheap American imitations. Mostly the American industry does not concur.
[0038], [0039] |
à 1927 |
| October 4 |
Programme of sound-on-film shorts, made in UK by De Forest Phonofilm Company of Great
Britain, is shown to a paying audience at Empire Cinema, Plumstead, London SE. Included is a film of
Sidney L Bernstein, later head of Granada Group, explaining the system. |
|
| |
Cuban government produces a documentary using the Phonofilm system. |
|
| November 15 |
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is inaugurated in US as a radio network, comprising
24 stations, with a 4½-hour programme hosted from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and involving
feeds from Chicago (opera singer Mary Garden) and Independence, Kansas (Will Rogers). |
à 2003 |
| November 20 |
Test transmissions begin from Radio Fécamp in Normandy, France on 200m. |
à 1929 |
| November 23 |
Baird demonstrates his Noctovisor to members of the Royal Institution at his house,
Swiss Cottage, Box Hill, Surrey; it involves transmission from outside the house of infra-red lights. |
|
| November 27 |
Radio station KXL begins transmissions in Portland, Oregon. |
|
| November |
System of sound film production is demonstrated by Russian inventor P G Tager. |
|
| December 7 |
Victor Talking Machine Company is sold by Eldridge Johnson to two investment banks,
Speyer & Company and J & W Seligman & Company. As principal
shareholder, Johnson gets $28m; other shareholders—including Emile Berliner—get $12m. |
|
| December 17 |
Radio station KYA starts up in San Francisco, California. |
|
| December 23 |
In Portland, Oregon, a second radio station, KEX, goes on air (see also November 27). |
|
| December 25 |
Kenjiro Takayanagi of Hamamatsu Technical High School displays a Japanese character
on a cathode ray tube, probably transmitted from a mechanical scanner. He has been working on television
experiments since 1924. |
à 1928 |
| December |
Magnascope projection system, developed by Paramount, is used at the Rivoli Theatre
for two sequences in Old Ironsides, using a lens that suddenly doubles the image width and height
to 30 ft x 40ft. |
|
| December |
Radio station KUJ goes on air at Walla Walla, Washington. |
|
| end |
Canada has 135,000 households with radio receivers. |
|
| l |
Top five distributors in the UK (by number of films offered): Famous-Lasky
(= Paramount), European (= Universal), Fox, Gaumont and First National (= Warner Bros). Of 749 films
trade shown, only 34 (4.5 per cent) are British. |
|
| l |
Imperial Conference proposes development of an Empire film market to challenge the
Hollywood hegemony. The Empire Film Institute is founded in London. |
|
| l |
Gaumont British Picture Corporation is reconstituted for vertical integration by
amalgamating Gaumont, C M Woolf's distribution interests and Simon Rowson's Ideal Productions, with
investment from the Ostrer Brothers (Isidore, Mark, David, Maurice and Harry). Shepherds Bush
Studios are again enlarged. |
|
| l |
Cecil Hepworth's former studio at Walton-on-Thames is
bought by Archibald Nettlefold (of the English Midlands metal products company) and renamed Nettlefold
Studios. [0019] |
à 1961 |
| l |
Film Producers' Group is set up by the Federation of British Industry. |
|
| l |
Soviet government sets up a US film distribution organisation, Amkino, based in New York.
[0036] |
|
| l |
Hoyts Theatres circuit of 70 screens is formed in Melbourne—with cinemas in New
South Wales and Western Australia—by the merger of Electric Theatres and Hoyts Pictures, the latter
founded by Melbourne dentist Dr Arthur Russell. |
|
| l |
Electrola electric recording technique is developed. |
|
| l |
Investment in US film industry of $1,500m is made during the year, including new
cinema building as well as production. |
|
| l |
United Artists releases the fourth two-strip Technicolor feature, The Black
Pirate, starring Douglas Fairbanks—the last such film until 1929. |
|
| l |
Biocolor cinema circuit (17 cinemas, the UK's fifth largest chain) is bought by a
City finance group including merchant bankers Ostrer Brothers. |
|
| l |
British films account for less than five per cent of screen time in British cinemas. |
|
| l |
Light of Asia, German-Indian co-production made by Himansu
Rai and Franz Osten (Franz Ostermayr, 1876-1956) about the life of Buddha, is the first Indian film to
make an impact in other countries, including being the first distributed commercially in the UK. |
|
| l |
Lotte Reiniger’s Prince Ahmed may be the first feature-length animated
film. Reiniger pioneered the use of cut-out silhouettes in animation. |
|
| l |
Italian fascist government takes over Istituto Luce and
makes screening of its newsreels compulsory in Italian cinemas. |
|
| l |
First film produced in Costa Rica: El Retorno, directed by Romulo Bertoni. |
|
| l |
First feature-length film made in Hong Kong: Hero of the Sea and The
Nameless Hero. |
|
| l |
First Indian film directed by a woman: Bulbule Paristan (The Nightingale
from the Land of Fairies), made by Fatma Begum, wife of the Nawab of Sachien. |
à 1931 March 14 |
| l |
BBC experiments with stereo radio using two transmitters: 2LO in London and 5XX at Daventry. |
|
| l |
BBC Director of Education J C Stobart proposes a wireless university. |
à 1966 |
| l |
Long-wave radio telephony transmissions are demonstrated by the British Post Office
from the new 350kW Rugby transmitter—the world’s most powerful transmitter—to Wroughton,
Essex, using technology developed by the Marconi Company, and by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)
from Rocky Point to Houlton, Maine. |
|
| l |
Facsimile radio transmission service is introduced
commercially between Marconi House, London and New York. Among the first items sent (April 20) is a cheque. |
|
| l |
Microgroove long-playing discs are introduced in the US by the Edison Company. Discs
have 450 grooves per inch and play at 80rpm. Ten-inch discs give 12 minutes’ playing time and
cost $1.75; 12-inch discs give 20 minutes and cost $2.50. The walls between the grooves prove too
fragile and the system does not succeed commercially. |
|
| l |
Music industry magazine Melody Maker is first published in the UK. |
|
