| 1943 |
 Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references. |
links and notes |
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Cultural highlights | Predictions made this year |
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| January 3 |
First television message about a missing person is made in New York. |
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| January 10 |
First edition of The Better Half quiz show on Mutual radio network in US. |
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| January |
US military's Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) has 21 stations operational. [0054] |
> end |
| March 29 |
BBC begins broadcasting to Austria. |
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| March |
UK introduces the Cinematograph Film Control Order to allow the Board of Trade to ration increasingly scarce film stock. [0074] |
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| May 7, 15:00 |
 Transmissions begin from Fernsehsender Paris, a television service on 441 lines using the occupied French facilities, with a studio in a former family residence at 9 rue Cognacq-Jay and another in the former Magic City in rue de l'Université. The service is for German soldiers in Parisian hospitals and military premises. |
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| May 13 |
German occupation orders all radio receivers in the Netherlands to be surrendered. |
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| June 1 |
 British film actor-producer Leslie Howard is killed when the aircraft in which he is returning from a lecture tour in Spain and Portugal is shot down over the Bay of Biscay. |
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| June 5 |
US government commissions the University of Pennsylvania to conduct 'research and development of an electronic numerical integrator and computer and delivery of a report thereon' on a six-month contract with $61,700 funding from US Army Ordnance. The contract is extended nine times by 1946 and by completion costs a total of $486,804.22. The end product is the ENIAC computer. |
Colossus December 8
ENIAC 1945 |
| June 10 |
Laszlo Biró patents his ball-point pen in South America. The British government buys up the rights to make pens for RAF aircrews. |
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| July 4 |
BBC begins broadcasting to Japan. |
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| September |
British government sets up a committee under Lord Hankey to prepare plans for a future television service ‘to at any rate the larger centres of population within a reasonable period after the war’. The only private witness heard is John Logie Baird. |
> 1945 |
| September |
Decca Records signs a deal with the American Federation of Musicians to pay royalties of up to five cents a record to the AFM benevolent fund for unemployed musicians. |
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| September |
Germany's last remaining active television transmitter, at Witzleben, being used only for a hospital service for war wounded, is destroyed by Allied bombing. |
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| • |
Howard Hughes releases Jane Russell film The Outlaw without Hays Office approval; it is withdrawn but reissued in 1946. |
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| • |
Oklahoma!, which opened on Broadway on March 31, is the first stage show to have its music score recorded in its entirety and released as an album, selling at $5. Released by Decca, within two years it sells half a million copies on 78 rpm discs and achieves even greater sales in LP form. Although it had opened on the New York stage in autumn 1942, recording was delayed by the ban on recording by the American Federation of Musicians. |
> 1949 |
| November |
J L Baird gives a lecture on 3-D colour television to 600 people (a record attendance) at the Institute of Radio Engineers, London. |
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| December 8 |
Colossus, the first programmable computer, is delivered to Bletchley Park, Britain's ultra-secret cryptanalysis headquarters. Built by a team headed by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Centre at Dollis Hill, north London, it incorporates 1,500 valves (vacuum tubes). |
< June 5 |
| December 23 |
Engelbert Humperdinck's opera Hansel and Gretel is televised complete from WRGB Schenectady, New York. |
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| December 31 |
Television pictures are first projected successfully by the Eidophor large-screen system. The technology has been under development since 1939 at the Technical Physical Department of the Federal Institute of Technology, headed by Dr Fritz Fischer. |
> 1944 |
| end |
US military's Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) now has 306 stations operational in 47 countries. [0054] |
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| • |
English by Radio teaching service is started by the BBC. |
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| • |
Over 1m radio receivers are confiscated in the Netherlands by the German occupation to prevent listening to the BBC and Dutch government-in-exile broadcasts. |
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| • |
The War Office supplies the first mobile radio transmitters and specially selected personnel to run stations for British armed services in North Africa. British Forces Broadcasting Stations begin to create a network throughout the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Indian subcontinent, and, following the landings in Italy and Normandy, across Europe. |
> 1960 |
| • |
MSS midget disc recorders are introduced for BBC war correspondents. Wire recorders are used on the Italian front. |
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| • |
First French-language talkie made in Canada is A la croisée des chemins (At the cross roads). |
< First English-language talkie 1929 |
| • |
Kismet (Fate), directed by Gyan Mukerji (1909-1956) for Bombay Talkies and Ranjit Movietone, opens at the Roxy Cinema in Calcutta; it sets a record of over three years' run for a film in the same cinema. |
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| • |
There are now 60 drive-in cinemas in the US. |
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| • |
General Tire and Rubber Company acquires the Yankee radio network in New England. |
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| • |
In response to the 1941 ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), RCA sells its Blue radio network to Edward Noble for $8m. |
> 1945 |
