From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1920 to 1930 Timeline

Karel Capek publishes R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in Prague. This play, written in Czech except for the title, introduces the word “robot” and explores the issue of whether worker-machines will replace people.

Norwegian mathematician Albert Skolem proves the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, a landmark in mathematical logic.

Skolem's paper was first published as "Logisch-kombinatorische Untersuchungen über die Erfüllbarkeit oder Beweisbarkeit mathematischer Sätze nebst einem Theoreme über dichte Mengen", Videnskapsselskapet Skrifter, I. Matematisk-naturvidenskabelig Klasse 6 (1920) 1–36.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 365. An English translation of Skolem's paper appears in van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel (1967) 254-63.

The first radio news program is broadcast by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.

KDKA, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Westinghouse station, transmits the first commercial radio broadcast.

Lewis Fry Richardson, an early advocate of the team approach to the solution of large-scale computing problems, publishes Weather Forecasting by Numerical Process, in which he describes a fantasy weather forecast “factory” of sixty-four thousand human computers working in “a large hall like a theatre,” calculating the world’s weather forecasts from meteorological data supplied by weather balloons spaced two hundred kilometers apart around the globe.

U.S. Army cryptologist William F. Friedman publishes The Index of Coincidence and its Applications in Cryptography, Department of Ciphers. Publ 22. Geneva, Illinois, USA: Riverbank Laboratories.

Friedman's report presented the coincidence counting, or index of coincidence method of code-breaking.

Hilary Jenkinson, Deputy Keeper of the British Public Records Office, publishes A Manual of Archive Administration, Including the Problem of War Archives and Archive Making.

Part II. Origin and Development of Archives and Rules for Archive Keeping, includes §1. The Evolution of Archives.

♦ You  download a PDF of this work at the Internet Archive at this link:

http://www.archive.org/details/manualofarchivea00jenkuoft, accessed 01-27-2010.

The British Broadcasting Company, the first national broadcasting organization, is formed for radio broadcasting by a group of British telecommunications companies. Its first broadcast from Marconi House in London occured on November 14.

Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, patents the iconoscope, the first electronic television camera. His design, however, is incomplete:

"Vladimir Zworykin is also sometimes cited as the father of electronic television because of his invention of the iconoscope in 1923 and his invention of the kinescope in 1929. His design was one of the first to demonstrate a television system with all the features of modern picture tubes. His previous work with Rosing on electromechanical television gave him key insights into how to produce such a system, but his (and RCA's) claim to being its original inventor was largely invalidated by three facts: a) Zworykin's 1923 patent presented an incomplete design, incapable of working in its given form (it was not until 1933 that Zworykin achieved a working implementation), b) the 1923 patent application was not granted until 1938, and not until it had been seriously revised, and c) courts eventually found that RCA was in violation of the television design patented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, whose lab Zworykin had visited while working on his designs for RCA. 

"The controversy over whether it was first Farnsworth or Zworykin who invented modern television is still hotly debated today. Some of this debate stems from the fact that while Farnsworth appears to have gotten there first, it was RCA that first marketed working television sets, and it was RCA employees who first wrote the history of television. Even though Farnsworth eventually won the legal battle over this issue, he was never able to fully capitalize financially on his invention" (http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Colour-television, accessed 12-22-2009).

German electrical engineer and inventor Arthur Scherbius  begins marketing a mechanical cipher machine based on rotating wired wheels, and called Enigma.

American real estate developer J. C. Nichols builds the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.

Designed architectually after Seville, Spain, it was the first suburban shopping center in the world designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile, and the Country Club District, which Nichols developed around the shopping center, is the largest contiguous master-planned community in the United States.

Nichols "called his method 'planning for permanence,' for his objective was to 'develop whole residential neighborhoods that would attract an element of people who desired a better way of life, a nicer place to live and would be willing to work in order to keep it better.' Nichols invented the percentage lease, where rents are based tenants' gross receipts. The percentage lease is now a standard practice in commercial leasing across the United States" (Wikipedia article on J C Nichols, accessed 04-05-2009).

Romanian-German physicist Hermann Oberth publishes Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen.

This book began as a doctoral thesis on the rocket in interplanetary space which Oberth submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 1922. When the thesis was rejected by the university Oberth paid for its commercial publication. The work was highly influential on the founding in 1927 of the German amateur rocket society, Verein für Raumschiffahrt, to which most of the early German rocketeers belonged, and which became a focal point of early rocketry research.

In his book Oberth set out to prove four propositions: (1) that the technology of the time permitted the building of machines capable of rising above the earth’s atmosphere; (2) that these machines could attain velocities sufficient to prevent their falling back to earth, or even to escape the earth’s gravitational pull; (3) that such machines could be built to carry human beings; and (4) that under certain conditions, their manufacture might be profitable. Oberth demonstrated that a rocket can operate in a vacuum and that it can surpass the velocity of its own exhaust; he also pointed out the superiority of liquid fuels in producing maximum exhaust velocity. He described in detail the designs of a prototypical instrument-carrying rocket and a theoretical space-ship, and developed the first sketchy model of a space station.

Oberth's work became more widely known through its greatly expanded third edition, retitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (1929), which contained over 400 pages compared to the 1923 edition’s 92. 

Oberth dedicated the 1929 work to Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, director and writer respectively of Frau im Mond (1929) one of the world’s first serious science fiction films. Oberth served as a consultant on the film, which was the first to present the basics of rocketry to a mass audience, and his income from that project was crucial in allowing him to complete the book.

Wege zum Raumschiffahrt was the first work to receive the REP-Hirsch International Astronautics Prize established in 1928 by French rocketry pioneer Robert Esnault-Pelterie and André-Louis Hirsch; the prize was awarded annually between 1929 and 1939. The purpose of the prize was to recognize “the best original theoretical or experimental works capable of promoting progress in one of the areas permitting the realization of interstellar navigation or furthering knowledge in a field related to astronautics.” In the epilogue to his book, Oberth acknowledged receipt of the REP-Hirsch Prize and expressed his surprise and gratitude that a French organization “would award such a prize to a German . . . It is encouraging to see that science and education are able to bridge national differences” (p. [424]).

An English translation of Oberth's 1929 book, Ways to Spaceflight, was published by NASA in 1972, and is downloadable from NASA's website.

Thomas J. Watson, president of CTR, changes the name of the company to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

In “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed,” Bell System Technical Journal 3 (1924) 324–346, Harry Nyquist analyzes factors affecting telegraph transmission speed, presenting the first statement of a logarithmic law for communication, and the first examination of the theoretical bounds for ideal codes for the transmission of information.

The research organization that would in 1925 be known as Bell Labs develops the first high-fidelity sound recording. It extends the reproducible sound range by more than an octave on the high and low end.

Some of the earliest "talk radio" programs are sermons by Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist and "media sensation," broadcasting on her Four Square Gospel station, KFSG, in Los Angeles. 

Another pioneer of radio evangelism, S. Parkes Cadman, preceded McPherson by a few months.

Walter Gifford, president of AT&T, consolidates Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of the American Telephone & Telegraph company (AT&T)  to form Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Robert B. Goldschmidt and Paul Otlet publish "La Conservation et la diffusion internationale de la pensée" as publication no. 144 of the Institut international de bibliographie (Brussels).

This work described their plans for a massive library where each volume existed as master negatives and positives on microform, and where items were printed on demand for interested patrons.

David Sarnoff of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) creates the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) for radio broadcasting.

Mathematician and mathematical biologist Vito Volterra publishes "Varizioni e fluttuazioni del numero d'individui in specie animali conviventi" in Mem. R. Acad. Naz. dei Lincei (ser.6) II, 31-113.

This work was translated into English and published in the journal Nature the same year as "Fluctuations in the abundance of a species considered mathematically". In this paper Volterra created the basic equations for two species interactions.

John Logie Baird gives the world's first demonstration of his electromechanical television system to fifty scientists assembled in his attic workshop.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is founded in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Fritz Pfleumer invents magnetic tape for recording sound, coating very thin paper with iron-oxide using lacquer as glue. He sold the rights to AEG in 1932.

English biologist and animal ecologist Charles Sutherland Elton publishes Animal Ecology.

In Animal Ecology Elton integrated the concepts of food chains, pyramids of numbers, and the "niche" into a useful framework for ecology.

James Henry Rand, Jr., merges Rand-Kardex with Remington Typewriters and several other office supply companies to form Remington Rand.

Bell Labs and the U.S. Department of Commerce conduct the first long distance test of television between Washington D.C. and New York City, sending images of Herbert Hoover (soon to be President) over telephone lines.

American inventor Philo T. Farnsworth succeeds in transmitting an image through purely electronic means of a device called an "image dissector."

This was the first all-electronic television.

"When Philo T. Farnsworth was 13, he envisioned a contraption that would receive an image transmitted from a remote location—the television. Farnsworth submitted a patent in January 1927, when he was 19, and began building and testing his invention that summer. He used an "image dissector" (the first television camera tube) to convert the image into a current, and an "image oscillite" (picture tube) to receive it. On this day his tests bore fruit. When the simple image of a straight line was placed between the image dissector and a carbon arc lamp, it showed up clearly on the receiver in another room. His first tele-electronic image was transmitted on a glass slide in his S[an] F[rancisco] lab at 202 Green St" (http://www.timelines.ws/subjects/Television.HTML, accessed 12-22-2009).

At the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Bologna, Italy, mathematician and physicist David Hilbert returned to the second of the twenty-three problems posed in his 1900 paper, asking, is mathematics complete, is it consistent, and is it decidable?

Three years later, the first two of these questions were answered in the negative by Kurt Gödel. Working independently, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and Emil Post published answers to the third question in 1936.

Hilbert's paper was first published in Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici, Bologna 3-10 settembre 1928 (VI) I (1929) 135-41.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 320.

IBM adopts the eighty-column punched card, the standard for about the next fifty years, and one of IBM's most profitable products.

Leslie J. Comrie discovers how to use a commercial accounting machine as a difference engine.

With this technique Comrie reformed the production of the Nautical Almanac.

Leslie J. Comrie uses punched-card machines to calculate the motions of the moon.

This project, in which twenty million holes were punched into five hundred thousand cards, continued into 1929. It was the first use of punched cards in a purely scientific application. (See Reading 4.4.)

Ralph V. R. Hartley publishes “Transmission of Information,” in which he proves "that the total amount of information that can be transmitted is proportional to frequency range transmitted and the time of the transmission."

Hartley's law eventually became one of the elements of  Claude Shannon's  mathematical theory of communication.

Mathematician, physicist, and economist John von Neumann publishes "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele" in Mathematische Annalen, 100, 295–300. This paper "On the Theory of Parlor Games" propounds the minimax theorem, inventing the theory of games.

Television. The World’s First Television Journal, begins publication in England. (See Readings 5.5 and 5.6.)

General Electric (GE) begins regular television broadcasting in the United States with a 24-line system from a station that will become WGY in Schenectady, NY.

Programs were transmitted Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. By the end of 1928 over 15 stations were licensed for TV broadcasting;

William S. Paley takes over the failing United Independent Broadcasters network with its 16 affiliate stations and reorganizes it as the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) for radio broadcasting.

John Logie Baird begins the first experimental television service at the German Post Office using his 30 line mechanical system.

In "Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingrffen intelligenter Wesen," Zeitschrift für Physik 53 (1929) 840-856 physicist Leo Szilard describes a theoretical model that serves both as a heat engine and an information engine, establishing the relationship between thermodynamics (manipulation and transfer of energy and entropy,) and information (manipulation and transmission of bits).

Szilard was one of the first to show that "Nature seems to talk in terms of information" (Seife, Decoding the Universe, 77).

American astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Edwin Hubble publishes "A Relation Between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae," Proceedings National  Academy of  Sciences, 15 (1929) 168-173. 

This was Hubble’s first paper on his discovery that the degree of redshift observed in light coming from a galaxy increased in proportion to the distance of that galaxy from the Milky Way. This became known as Hubble's law on the proportionality of distance and radial velocity of galaxies, indicating an expanding universe.

“Though only six pages in length, Hubble’s first paper on the velocity-distance relation represented a giant step in modern cosmology. . . . In place of a static picture of the cosmos, it seemed to many that the universe must be regarded as expanding, the rate of the mutual recession of its parts increasing with their relative distance” (Christianson, Edwin Hubble, Mariner of the Nebulae, 191, 188-192).

It has been said that Hubble’s discovery made as great a change in man’s conception of the universe as the Copernican revolution 400 years before.

Edwin Albert Link, a former organ and nickelodeon builder, designs and constructs  the Link Trainer, the first flight simulator, as a safe way to teach new pilots how to fly by instruments.

Link used his knowledge of pumps, valves and bellows to create a flight simulator that responded to the pilot's controls and gave an accurate reading on the included instruments.

Link Trainers became famous in World War II and were used by almost every combatant nation. The Link Company became a leader in flight simulation and training.

London antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros. issue Catalogue of Medical Works from the Library of Dr. Nicholaus Pol, Born c1470; Court Physician to the Emperor Maximilian I. Maggs further characterized the 34 items offered in the catalogue as "A remarkable collection of 'Editiones principes' and other early editions of Medical Authors, Classical, Arabian, and medieval from famous early presses of France and Italy in the original Gothic Bindings executed for Dr. Pol".

The asking price for the collection—£2500, even when the pound equalled nearly $5— seems exceptionally reasonable today, considering the optimal significance and quality of the books involved.

The catalogue was bought in its entirely by the Cleveland Medical Library and it is preserved in the Howard Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University.

"Through a clerical error, Dr. Harvey Cushing did not receive a copy of the catalogue, but his nephew Dr. Edward H. Cushing of Cleveland did. He promptly persuaded President Vinson of Western Reserve University to cable for the collection and hold it until the Cleveland Medical Library Association could raise the money. This was soon supplied by a donor who asked to be nameless, and the collection came to rest in the Cleveland Medical Library as a memorial to Mr. Charles H. Bingham" (http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/books/pol.html, accessed 08--02-2009).