Radio: The First Broadcast

Telegraph and telephone were important predecessors of radio. Samuel Morse developed the telegraph in 1844 and it was a principal means of news and information. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone in 1876 and this invention gave birth to the concept of “broadcasting” i.e. sending of a single message as sound which can be simultaneously received by large numbers of people in different locations. In Germany, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz successfully transmitted electromagnetic waves without any other form of conduction. Hertz’s name is adopted as the measure of all radio frequencies (i.e. MHz-Mega Hertz).

In 1906, De Forest perfected the audio tube, which became the vacum tube, making possible the clear transmission of voice and music. On Xmas eve (1906), Reginald Fessenden made what is generally regarded as the first broadcast. Greater success came with the replacement of Fessenden’s primitive telephone microphone with De Forest’s audio tube, which offered for greater fidelity of sound. A series of broadcasts followed and radio began to gain ground. In 1912, the sinking of the Titanic foregrounded the potential of wireless as a lifesaver when the rescue operation was coordinated by David Sarnoff of Marconi Wireless telegraphy. Much credit for the development of radio as a national entertainment, news and commercial medium goes to David Sarnoff. Sarnoff, as an assistant traffic manager in Marconi Company in 1918 and 1916, recognized the potential of radiotelephony long before others in the field did. He wrote: I have in mind a plan of development which would make Radio a “household utility” in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless. In 1920, Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad began broadcasting phonograph music over a transmitter in his Pittsburgh garage as part of his experiments in radiotelephony. The popularity of Conrad’s broadcasts prompted Westinghouse official to formalize the programming transmitted over station KDKA and stimulated a demand for receivers. The station began on Nov 2, 1920 with a broadcast of the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. People soon flocked to local department stores to buy primitive crystal receivers. Other radio stations were established. A.T and T signed WEAF on the air but sold it to RCA in 1926. Out of that sale came NBC. NBC operated two networks until 1943 when one was sold, which became ABC. Two others, CBC and Mutual also were part of the development of early commercial radio. For noncommercial stations, the National Public radio began regular programming in 1971.

Television: The Most Influential Medium

The word television is a hybrid word, created from both Greek and Latin. Tele- is Greek for "far", while -vision is from the Latin visio, meaning "vision" or "sight". It is often abbreviated as TV or the telly. 3.2.1 History of television The History of television technology can be divided along two lines: those developments that depended upon both mechanical and electronic principles, and those which are purely electronic. From the latter descended all modern televisions, but these would not have been possible without discoveries and insights from the mechanical systems. The operation basis for modern television could be traced to the development of the first workable device for generating electrical signals suitable for the transmission of a scene that people should see. Today's television system could be traced back to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873, and the invention of a scanning disk in 1884 by a German student whose name was Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884. Nipkow's spinning disk design is credited with being the first television image rasterizer. Constantin Perskyi had coined the word television in a paper read to the International Electricity Congress at the International World Fair in Paris on August 25, 1900. Perskyi's paper reviewed the existing electromechanical technologies, mentioning the work of Nipkow and others. The photoconductivity of selenium and Nipkow's scanning disk were first joined for practical use in the electronic transmission of still pictures and photographs, and by the first decade of the 20th century halftone photographs were being transmitted by facsimile over telegraph and telephone lines as a newspaper service. Developments in amplification tube technology later came in 1907. The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of still duotone images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909, using a rotating mirror-drum as the scanner, and a matrix of 64 selenium cells as the receiver. This was advanced by Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Kosma Zworykin in 1911, when they created a television system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit, in Zworykin's words, "very crude images" over wires to the electronic Braun tube (cathode ray tube) in the receiver. Moving images were not possible because, in the scanner, "the sensitivity was not enough and the selenium cell was very laggy".

The Concept and Development of Film and Cinema

What is Film?

Film is a medium of communication which combines visual and audio (audiovisual). It contains the recording of a story, acted by people to make it as close to reality as possible. The Collins English Dictionary defines film as a sequence of images of moving objects photographed by a camera providing the optical illusion of continuous movement when projected onto a screen. History of film is linked up with photography. In 1873 a former California governor, Leland Stanford, hired a well-known photographer, Eadweard Muybridge in order to prove and win a bet that a horse in full gallop had all four feet off the ground. In 1877, Muybridge arranged a series of still camera along a stretch of racetrack. Each still camera took its picture as the horse sprinted. The photographs won Stanford his bet while at the same time, they sparked an idea of motion pictures in Muybridge. This eventually led to the invention of zoopraxiscope by Muybridge. Zoopraxiscope is a machine for projecting slides onto a distant surface. Muybridge met Thomas Edison in 1888 and was inspired by Muybridge segmental action photographs. William Dickson, a scientist with Edison embarked on the task of developing a better system of filming and came up with Kinetograph-a workable motion picture camera in 1889. By 1891, Edison built a crude motion picture studio called “Black Maria”, which started the commercial motion picture industry in America. From Black Maria came a series of very short films, which were shown, on a large contraption called a Kinetoscope. The next advance on film was made by two French men the Lumiere brothers. Auguste and Louis were brothers who worked with their father’s manufacturing photographic plates and film. Using the technology they learnt from Edison’s work, they succeeded in developing a camera much more portable and less cumbersome than Edison’s own that could print and project pictures with a crude yet intermittent motion. The invention was named the cinematogrape-a device that both photographed and projected action. Recognizing the advantage of the cinematographe over his kinetoscope, Edison acquired the patent for an advanced projection developed by U.S. inventor Thomas Armet and Francis Jenkins. The vita scope, as the device was called was premiered in New York City on April 23, 1896, and the American movie business was born. Following this, a Frenchman, Georges Mêlées began making narrative motion pictures in about 1897. He also added special effects to film making. Mêlées most famous film, “A Trip to Moon”, showed a group of scientist and chorus girls launching a rocket to the moon. Some special effects which Mêlées incorporated in the film include the earth rising on the horizon and a trick photography scene of moon people disappearing in smoke. Another brilliant contributor was D.W.Griffith. He introduced innovations such as scheduled rehearsals before final shooting and production based on close adherence to a shooting script. He lavished attention on otherwise ignored aspects of a film such as costume and lighting and used close-ups and other dramatic camera and angles to transmit emotions. He also displayed mastery in his editing techniques of all the films produced by Griffith; he displayed the greatest talent in “The Birth of a Nation” (1914) and in “Tolerance”. In 1927, sound was introduced to motion pictures. This development made possible new genres like musicals. Actors and Actresses now had to really act and film production became much more complicated and expensive. Film flourished even through the Great depression of the 1930s. Profits were plowed back into bigger productions and lavish sound stages. World War II promoted the boom. Then in the 1950s, film met a new competitor- Television.