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1925 Chronokey Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references.


links and notes
  Cultural highlights | Predictions made this year  
January 22  American writers and composers testify before a Congressional committee hearing about the radio industry's infringement of their copyrights.  
January 23  Dutch firm Philips Lamps Ltd begins British operations.  
January 24  Solar eclipse is filmed from an airship over Long Island.  
January  Radio station WIL begins broadcasting in St Louis, Missouri.  
February 21  First issue of The New Yorker magazine is published.  
March 4  Inaugural speech of President Calvin Coolidge is broadcast live on 21 US radio stations, the largest 'network' arrangement to date.  
March 18  First international broadcasting convention is organised by the BBC in London. It leads to the formation of the International Broadcasting Union (IBU), surviving until the EBU is formed in 1950.  
March 24  Transmissions begin from radio station KSL in Salt Lake City, Utah.  
March  Gordon Selfridge Jr begins participation in John Logie Baird’s ideas for television.  
April 1  Danish state radio, Danmarks Radio, begins transmissions.  
April 6  Imperial Airways introduces movies on a scheduled flight. The first film shown is First National’s The Lost World.  
April  Victor issues its last acoustically recorded disc and the first all-electric recordings, using the Western Electric Orthophonic system, followed in May by Columbia.  
April  Baird demonstrates his five-line ‘Shadowgraph’ at Selfridge’s department store in London.  
May 6  Baird is granted a British patent for a spiral scanning disc.  
May 16  Commentary on the Kentucky Derby horse race is broadcast by radio station WHAS.  
May 22  Tokyo Broadcasting Station becomes the first Japanese radio broadcaster. Later in the year it moves to Atagoyama and begins regular transmission. > 1934 May 22
•  Warner Bros acquires the Vitagraph Company for $735,000. Vitagraph is valued at $4.2m and has no accumulated debt. Warner uses the newly acquired studio for its experiments in sound film production.  
June 13  C Francis Jenkins gives the first public demonstration of the transmission of 'readily recognizable moving objects' by mechanical television from the Naval radio station NOF at Anacostia to his laboratory, both in Washington DC.  
June 24  First electrical audio recording made by HMV at Hayes, Middlesex, is Feeling Kind o' Blue by Jack Hylton & his Orchestra.  
June 25  Warner Bros forms the Vitaphone Company in partnership with Western Electric to develop and exploit sound-on-disc technology for cinemas. Development work takes place at the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn, New York, under an 11-strong team seconded from Bell Telephone Labs under British-born Stanley S A Watkins (1883-1975). > 1926
June  Television Ltd is formed by J L Baird.  
July 13  Vladimir Zworykin applies for a patent for a television tube adapted from the iconoscope to be suitable for colour imaging. > 1928
July 18  Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is published.  
July 27  BBC’s high power transmitter (5XX at 25kW) opens at Daventry, Northamptonshire.  
August 12  Radio station KMA goes on air from Shenandoah, Iowa.
Radio station WJR starts transmissions from Detroit, Michigan.
 
August  Western Electric Vitaphone equipment is installed at Warner's Vitagraph Studio, a construction that has to be lined with layers of carpet and draperies to deaden sound.  
October  In Nashville, Tennessee, radio station WSM goes on air.  
October  First application for a patent on the transistor is lodged by Dr Julius E Lilienfeld in Canada.  
October  First radio outside broadcast in Japan reports on a parade.  
October 30  John Logie Baird transmits a moving image with grey scale gradations at his workroom in 22 Frith Street, London.  
October 30  Radio station KUT in Austin, Texas goes on air.  
November 1  Dutch broadcasting organisation VARA is formed in Amsterdam.  
November 11  First recordings are made by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five/Seven.  
November 24  Katholieke Radio Omroep (KRO) begins radio transmissions in the Netherlands.  
November 28  A local radio station in Nashville, Tennessee presents a Barn Dance, hosted by 'Solemn Ole Judge' George D Hay and featuring one act—a fiddler called Uncle Jimmy Thompson. After attracting growing audiences and moving to ever larger studios it is renamed Grand Ole Opry in 1927 after moving to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. (The building is not renamed thus until 1967.)  
late  Warner Bros opens a second radio station, WBPI in New York.  
December 21  Premiere of Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin is held in Moscow.  
December  First ‘ball-by-ball’ commentary on a cricket match is given by L G Watt from Sydney Cricket Ground of a match between Australia and The Rest Test Trial for 2FC Sydney. The producer is H P Williams, who later becomes first general manager of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Routine broadcasting of cricket commentaries begins in Australia.  
December  Licensing arrangement between Lee De Forest and Theodore Case is cancelled.  
December  HMV issues the first electrically recorded symphony.  
December  Radio station KFH opens at Wichita, Kansas.  
•  Of 625 films released in the UK, 577 are American, 25 European, 23 British—the latter only five per cent of the total.  
•  UK exports 1.02m feet of film to the USA. < 1913
•  London Art Photo Company of Rangoon makes Dana Pratap, the first Burmese feature film.  
•  Paramount Pictures is formed by the merger of Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players and the Chicago-based exhibitor Balaban & Katz. The new company establishes itself in French exhibition by building or acquiring cinemas, including the Paramount-Palace. > 1927 December
•  British National Films buys 40 acres of land at Elstree and builds a studio. Two of the firm’s partners, W Schlesinger and American producer J D Williams, disagree on policy and John Maxwell provides finance in return for control of the business.  
•  Bell & Howell introduces the first 16mm spring-driven portable camera, the Eyemo.  
•  Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match-girl) is produced by Ufa in Berlin with a dialogue and sound-on-film track throughout, made in collaboration with the Swiss firm Tri-Ergon AG.  
•  American studios rescue the Germany film giant Ufa from financial collapse in return for distribution guarantees for MGM and Paramount films. Ufa films are to be distributed in the US. The decline in the volume of German film production is reversed only temporarily.  
•  Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is produced at Ufa Studios, Neubabelsberg. It costs $1.5m, takes 310 days and 60 nights to shoot and employs 36,000 extras. The original German version is 16 reels long—over three hours—but for the US release by Paramount it is cut to nine reels (90 minutes), the characters are re-named and some of the captions are toned down.  
•  By taking a 42 per cent share of the German cinema market, American films exceed the share of German films for the first time. [0036]  
•  Eastman Kodak acquires rights to a two-colour additive film process developed by F Berthou of Société du Film en Couleurs Keller-Dorian. > 1928 July
•  US has 20,000 cinemas; UK 4,000 cinemas and an estimated 20m admissions a week.  
•  The Film Society is formed in London by Adrian Brunel, Ivor Montagu, etc. It is to have an important role in establishing film as a serious art form.  
•  BBC broadcasts a radio concert conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty from the Free Trade Hall, Manchester in stereo. The right channel is broadcast on 5XX, the left channel on all other stations.  
•  C F Jenkins in US demonstrates wireless transmission and reception of the image of a slowly revolving model windmill.  
•  Eight sponsored concerts are broadcast by the BBC, the sponsors being mainly newspapers or periodicals.  
•  English-language commercial radio programme is broadcast from Radio Paris (transmitter at Eiffel Tower), sponsored by Selfridges department store but with no advance publicity. The known UK audience is three people.  
•  First regular broadcast radio programmes in Norway are started by private company Kringskastingsselskapet, licensed to broadcast in the Oslo area.  
•  1,654,000 radio receivers are in use in the UK.  
•  Commercial operation to relay wireless by cable opens in the UK.  
•  Oscar Barnack builds the first Leica camera.  
•  Columbia Graphophone Company of the UK acquires all issued capital of US Columbia, its erstwhile parent.  
•  Dynamic loudspeaker is designed by Rice and Kellogg.  
•  First all-electric record player is developed by the new AT&T research laboratories, headed by Joseph P Maxfield. It is licensed for marketing and introduced on the US market by Brunswick-Balke-Collender as the Panatrope and then by Victor as the Orthophonic Victrola. The technology forms the basis of the Vitaphone sound-on-disc film system.  
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