From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1930 to 1940 Timeline

Vannevar Bush of MIT develops the differential analyzer, a large analog computer more accurate than previous devices of this type.

The Library of Congress begins to print Dewey Classification System numbers on library catalogue cards.

French mathematician Jacques Herbrand publishes Thèses. . . 1re thèse. Recherches sur la théorie de la démonstration, printed in Warsaw, Poland.

 “The main product of Herbrand’s short life (he died in a skiing accident [at the age of 23]) was his thesis, in which he found two ways of proving that tautologies are provable. One was based upon a means of matching any quantified formula with a quantifier-free mate and proving that each was derivable; it reversed the handling of quantifications in Principia mathematica, *9, and also its systematic application in the second edition. The other method drew on model theory and normal forms, as developed by Leopold Löwenheim and Thoraf Skolem. A highlight was a result which became known as ‘the deduction theorem’; it took the form that if the premises of a theory were stated as a single conjunction H, then a proposition P was true within it if and only if ‘H ∩ P be a propositional identity’ . . . In effect though not in intention, he clarified some of Bertrand Russell’s conflations and implication and inference, and also removed a standard sloppiness among mathematicians when (not) relating a proof to its theorem. While several proofs were unclear and even defective, the thesis inspired important new lines of research” (Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940 [2000] 550).

Van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic (1967) 525-81.

"In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of thousands of electricity-producing wind turbines were built in the U.S. Just like wind turbines today, they had two or three thin blades, which rotated at high speeds to drive electrical generators. These wind turbines provided electricity to farms beyond the reach of power lines and were typically used to charge storage batteries, operate radios and power a few lights" (Michigan renewable energy, accessed 04-20-2009).

Bob Brown (Robert Carlton Brown) publishes The Readies in an edition of either 150 or 300 copies. Brown's work was an extremely early predictor of the changes that would occur with electronic publishing, and an early proponent of saving space, paper and ink through media more compact than traditional printed books. In the pre-electronic computer era he saw the future primarily in the context of film and microfilm, and in developing more verbally compact means of communication:

"This important manifesto, on a par with André Breton's Surrealist manifestos or Tristan Tzara's Dadaist declarations, includes plans for an electric reading machine and strategies for preparing the eye for mechanized reading. There are instructions for preparing texts as “readies” and detailed quantitative explanations about the invention and mechanisms involved in this peculiar machine.

"In the generic spirit of avant-garde manifestos, Brown writes with enthusiastic hyperbole about the machine's breathtaking potential to change how we read and learn. In 1930, the beaming out of printed text over radio waves or in televised images had a science fiction quality—or, for the avant-garde, a fanciful art-stunt feel. Today, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text-messaging (with its abbreviated language), electronic text readers, and even online books like the digital edition of this volume. Brown's practical plans for his reading machine, and his descriptions of its meaning and implications for reading in general, were at least fifty years ahead of their time.  

"These lines conjure a fantastic, if archaic, alternate world in their exhaustive descriptions of the reading machine’s operations, the details seeming at once quaint, futuristic…and Kindle-esque:

" 'Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box container the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 or million words spill out before his eyes . . . in one continuous line of type . . . . My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead . . . magnifying glass . . . moved nearer or farther from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 point, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him.'

"(Use of the word 'browse,' incidentally, in reference to a graphical interface device rather than perusal in a bookshop or library does not appear again until the late 1980s, with the advent of database browsers.)  

"Brown’s reading machine was designed to 'unroll a televistic readie film' in the style of modernist experiments; the design also followed the changes in reading practices during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein understood that Brown’s machine, as well as his processed texts for it, suggested a shift toward a different way to comprehend texts. That is, the mechanism of this book, a type of book explicitly built to resemble reading mechanisms like ticker-tape machines rather than a codex, produced—at least for Stein—specific changes in reading practices.  

"In Brown’s Readie, punctuation marks become visual analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (—) that also, by definition, indicate that the sentence was interrupted or cut short. These created a 'cinemovietone' shorthand system. The old uses of punctuation, such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. Reading machine-mediated text becomes more like watching a continuous series of flickering frames become a movie" (Afterward from: The Readies, edited with an Afterward by Craig Saper, Houston: Rice University Press,[2009] accessed 05-23-2010).

Following the "all digital" policy of Rice University Press since it was re-organized in 2006, this edition is available as a free download from their website, or as print on demand from QOOP.com. When I clicked on the purchase button on 05-23-2010, I was given the following purchase options at QOOP.com:

"+Hard Bound Laminate for $25.85

"+Hard Bound - Dust Jacket for $32.35

"+Wire-O for $16.00

"+eBook for $7.00."

Texas Instruments is founded as Geophysical Service. Initially it is the first independent contractor specializing in the reflection seismograph method of exploration of oil fields in Texas.

Kurt Gödel proves the incompleteness and inconsistency of arithmetic, and invents the theory of recursive functions.

IBM manufactures the 601 multiplying punch.

"It read two factors up to eight decimal digits in length from a card and punched their product onto a blank field of the same card. It could subtract and add as well as multiply. It had no printing capacity, so was generally used as an offline assistant for a tabulator or accounting machine."

Congress establishes  the talking-book program, intended to help blind adults who couldn’t read print.

This program was called "Books for the Adult Blind Project." The American Foundation for the Blind developed the first talking books in 1932. One year later the first reproduction machine began the process of mass publishing.

Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon receives U.S. Patent No. 1,838,389 for a "Statistical Machine."

The patent, applied for in 1928, and similar patents obtained in other countries, describe an electronic machine for searching through data encoded on reels of film, using "radiating energy to actuate a recorder when the explored indications upon the search plate and record element are identical, the indications on one of said elements being penetrable by the rays and the indication on the other element being impenetrable by the rays."

Vannevar Bush incorporated technology similar to this in the Rapid Selector machine on which he began development in 1938. The existence of Goldberg's patent prevented Bush from patenting his Rapid Selector. Bush's machine became famous after publication in 1945 of his article, "As We May Think" describing the Memex.

The BBC begins public television broadcasting in England.

By 1935 the transmissions reached only the 2000 homes with television sets within a 35-mile range of Alexandria Palace. Each TV set cost £100—roughly the cost of a small car.

Times New Roman, a serif typeface supervised by Stanley Morison of the English branch of Monotype, and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times, makes its debut in the British newspaper, The Times.

"Morison used an older font named Plantin as the basis for his design, but made revisions for legibility and economy of space. As the old type used by the newspaper had been called Times Old Roman, Morison's revision became Times New Roman and made its debut in the 3 October 1932 issue of The Times newspaper. After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. The Times stayed with Times New Roman for 40 years, but new production techniques and the format change from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004 have caused the newspaper to switch font five times since 1972. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman font.

"Because of its ubiquity, the typeface has been influential in the subsequent development of a number of serif typefaces both before and after the start of the digital-font era. . . .

"Although no longer used by The Times, Times New Roman is still widely used for book typography. It is one of the most successful and ubiquitous typefaces in history." (Wikipedia article on Times Roman, accessed 04-26-2009).

The Biuro Szyfrów ("Cipher Bureau"), the Polish interwar agency charged with both cryptography and cryptanalysis, breaks the German Enigma machine cipher.

Over the next nearly seven years before World War II, the "Cipher Bureau" overcame the growing structural and operating complexities of the plugboard-equipped Enigma, the main German cipher device during the Second World War.

Edwin Howard Armstrong develops wide-band frequency modulation, FM radio, which delivers clearer sound, free of static. 

Armstrong received a patent on wideband FM on December 26, 1933.

"Armstrong conducted the first large scale field tests of his FM radio technology on the 85th floor of RCA's (Radio Corporation of America) Empire State Building from May 1934 until October 1935. However RCA had its eye on television broadcasting, and chose not to buy the patents for the FM technology.  A June 17, 1936, presentation at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters made headlines nationwide. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. 'If the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds,' noted one reporter. He added that several engineers described the invention 'as one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced' " (Wikipedia article on Edward Howard Armstrong, accessed 07-12-2009).

Armstrong's first paper on FM radio was "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation," presented to the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers on November 6, 1935, and first published in Proceedings of the IRE, 24, no. 5, (1936) 689–740.

IBM markets the first commercially successful electric typewriter, the Electromatic.

IBM produced electric typewriters until 1990.

Wallace J. Eckert commissions from IBM a special model of the 601 multiplying punch that  is "capable of doing direct interpolation, a very unusual feature, especially designed for Eckert by one of IBM's top engineers at Endicott [NY]."

Eckert connected the 601 to a Type 285 Tabulator and a Type 016 Duplicating Punch through a calculation control switch of his own design, forming the first machine to perform complex scientific computations automatically.

Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany systematically destroyed an estimated 100 million books throughout occupied Europe, an act inextricably bound up with the murder of 6 million Jews. By burning and looting libraries and censoring "un-German" publications, the Nazis aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish culture along with the Jewish people themselves. 

Rose (ed.), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2000).

Austrian-German aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger publishes Raketenflugtechnik. 

Sänger's treatise on rocket flight engineering was his thesis for a degree in engineering, which was rejected by the Technical University of Vienna it was "too imaginative." He was allowed to graduate when he submitted a more mundane thesis on the statistics of wing trusses. Raketenflugtechik, which Sänger later had published, was the first study leading to the eventual development of a reusable human-piloted rocket-powered space plane, a concept which evolved into the X-planes and the space shuttle.

Sänger's “Silverbird” concept, which originated in this work, and on which Sänger and his wife (the mathematician Irene Bredt) worked during the 1930s, was a direct ancestor of today’s space shuttle; it was conceived of as “a winged vehicle propelled by a rocket engine burning liquid oxygen and kerosene, capable of reaching Mach 10.0 at altitudes in excess of 100 miles” (Jenkins, Space Shuttle, 1).

Sänger introduced his goals and purposes for the book as follows: 

“By rocket flight is meant here the motion of such a vehicle within the general air space, the propulsive force being provided by a rocket motor. 

“Rocket flight in the narrow sense is taken to be motion in the upper levels of the stratosphere with a speed such that inertial forces arising from the curvature of the path have a marked effect on the lift.

“This type of rocket flight is the next major development from trophospheric flight, which has been the product of the last thirty years; it is also the forerunner of space travel, the greatest technical problem of the present time.

“This forerunner and the installation of a space station* are the noblest tasks of rocketry, but for the present they are still not realizable.

“There are also several directly practical purposes to be served. Rocket flight should especially:

"1. Provide rapid intercontinental travel around the globe with the highest possible terrestrial speeds.

"2. Advance scientific research in certain fields, especially geophysics and astrophysics.

"3. If necessary provide a war weapon of exceptional power.

“These three purposes can now be reckoned as in part technically feasible. The present book is concerned with the technical basis of the realization of this first stage of rocket flight.

“* In cosmonauts’ plans this is a vehicle that revolves around the Earth outside the sensible atmosphere with a speed such that the weight is balanced by the centripetal force. The space station would serve as starting point for flights to even greater heights” (Sänger, Rocket Flight Engineering. Nasa Technical Translation F-223 [1965] 3).

“Between 1932 and 1934, [Sänger] performed a series of pioneering experiments with reinforced cooled liquid rocket motors capable of burning mixtures of gas-oil and liquid oxygen (LOX), achieving thrust levels up to 30kp, pressures up to 50 bars, and exhaust velocities of about 3,000 m/s” (Sänger & Szames, “From the Silverbird to interstellar voyages,” 2). 

In 1934 Sänger published the continuation of these studies in "Neuere Ergebnisse der Raketenflugtechnik," Flug: Zeitschr. f. d. gesamte Gebiet der Luftfahrt, Sonderheft 1. This paper contained the results of Sänger’s extensive tests of various rocket engine models in 1933 and 1934, leading up to his 1935 patent for regenerative forced-flow cooling of rocket engines.  

Sänger-Bredt & Engel, “The development of regeneratively cooled liquid rocket engines in Austria and Germany, 1926-42,” Durant & James, eds., First Steps toward Space, 217-46.

Adolf Hitler seizes power in Germany.

The ultra-nationalism and antisemitism of German middle-class, secular student organizations had been intense and vocal for decades. After World War I, most students opposed the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and found in National Socialism a suitable vehicle for their political discontent and hostility.  By 1933 German university students were among the vanguard of the Nazi movement, and many filled the ranks of various Nazi formations.

Also in 1933 Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began the synchronization of culture, to bring the arts in Germany in line with Nazi goals. The German government purged cultural organizations of Jews and others alleged to be politically or artistically suspect.

On April 6, 1933, the German Student Association's Main Office for Press and Propaganda proclaimed a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” to climax in a literary purge or “cleansing” (Säuberung) by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commission articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On April 8 the students association drafted its twelve "theses"—deliberately evocative of Martin Luther—declarations and requisites of a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked “Jewish intellectualism,” asserted the need to “purify” the German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centers of German nationalism. The students described the “action” as a response to a worldwide Jewish “smear campaign” against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.

(Information adapted from the United States Holocaust Museum website).

On this night, in most university towns in Germany, nationalist students march in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit."

The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw "un-German" books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, "fire oaths", and incantations. The students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, "presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture."

"Not all book burnings took place on May 10, as the German Student Association had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place on June 21, the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners." (information and quotations from the United States Holocaust Museum website)

Konrad Zuse, a German mechanical engineer, realizes that an automatic calculator would need only a control, a memory, and an arithmetic unit.

Congress passes the Communications Act. It abolished the Federal Radio Commission and transferred jurisdiction over radio licensing to a new Federal Communications Commission, including in it also the telecommunications jurisdiction previously handled by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

In a paper entitled "Sources of Information on Specific Subjects," (Engineering 137 [1934], 85-6), Samuel C. Bradford publishes Bradford's Law of the "exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search."

American engineer and inventory Laurens Hammond receives patent 1,956,350 for an "Electrical Musical Instrument," and introduces the Hammond Organ Model A the following year.

The Hammond Organ was originally sold to churches as a lower-cost alternative to wind-driven pipe organs, but in the 1960s and 1970s it became a standard keyboard instrument for jazz, blues, rock music and gospel music.

"The original Hammond organ used additive synthesis of waveforms from harmonic series made by mechanical tonewheels which rotate in front of electromagnetic pickups. The component waveform ratios are mixed by sliding drawbars mounted above the two keyboards. Although many different models of Hammond organs were produced, the Hammond B-3 organ is the most well-known type. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the overdriven sound of B-3 (and in Europe, the C-3) organs were widely used in progressive rock bands and blues-rock groups. Although the last electromechanical Hammond organ came off the assembly line in the mid-1970s, thousands are still in daily use.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, musicians began using electronic and digital devices to imitate the sound of the Hammond, because the vintage Hammond organ is heavy and hard to transport. By the 1990s and 2000s digital signal processing and sampling technologies allowed for better imitation of the original Hammond sound" (Wikipedia article on Hammond organ, accessed 08-30-2009).

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the National Archives Act creating the National Archives as an independent agency (48 Stat. 1122), with the Archivist of the United States as its chief administrator. and creating the National Historical Publications Commission (NHPC).

Previously each governmental department maintained its own records, resulting in considerable losses.

The Social Security Act of 1935 requires the U. S. government to keep continuous records on the employment of 26 million individuals.

The first  Social Security Numbers (SSNs) were issued by the Social Security Administration in November 1936 as part of the New Deal Social Security program.

"Within three months, 25 million numbers were issued.

"Before 1986, people often did not have a Social Security number until the age of about 14, since they were used for income tracking purposes, and those under that age seldom had substantial income. In 1986, American taxation law was altered so that individuals over 5 years old without Social Security numbers could not be successfully claimed as dependents on tax returns; by 1990 the threshold was lowered to 1 year old, and was later abolished altogether." (Wikipedia article on Social Security Number, accessed 01-17-2010).

Engineers at AEG develop the Magnetophon K1.

The K1 was the first practical reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder, using magnetic tape invented by Fritz Pfleumer.

The Charga-Plate bookkeeping system, a precursor of the credit card, is utilized during this period and somewhat later.

"It was a 2 1/2" x 1 1/4" rectangle of sheet metal, similar to a military dog tag, that was embossed with the customer's name, city and state (no address). It held a small paper card for a signature. It was laid in the imprinter first, then a charge slip on top of it, onto which an inked ribbon was pressed. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store's files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers" (Wikipedia article on Credit card, accessed 12-26-2008).

Allen Lane founds Penguin Books to bring high quality, paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.

Robert Marshall, chief of recreation and lands for the Forest Service, Aldo Leopold, noted wildlife ecologist and later author of A Sand County Almanac, Robert Sterling Yard, publicist for the National Park Service, Benton MacKaye, the "Father of the Appalachian Trail", Ernest Oberholtzer, Harvey Broome, Bernard Frank, and Harold C. Anderson found The Wilderness Society.

"Since 1935, The Wilderness Society has led the conservation movement in wilderness protection, writing and passing the landmark Wilderness Act and winning lasting protection for 107 million acres of Wilderness, including 56 million acres of spectacular lands in Alaska, eight million acres of fragile desert lands in California and millions more throughout the nation" (The Wilderness Society website).

As head of the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough, England, Robert Watson-Watt publishes a report entitled The Detection of Aircraft by Radio Methods.

"On February 26, 1935 Watson-Watt and [his assistant Arnold] Wilkins demonstrated a basic radar system to an observer from the Air Ministry Committee the Detection of Aircraft. The previous day Wilkins had set up receiving equipment in a field near Upper Stowe, Northamptonshire, and this was used to detect the presence of a Handley Page Heyford bomber at ranges up to 8 miles by means of the radio waves which it reflected from the nearby Daventry shortwave radio transmitter of the BBC, which operated at a wavelength of 49 m (6 MHz). This convincing demonstration, known as the Daventry Experiment, led immediately to development of radar in the UK."

IBM’s German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen, introduces the Dehomag D11 tabulator, the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator, incorporating internal instructions programmed with a plug board.

Kistermann, "The way to the first automatic sequence-controlled calculator: The 1935 DEHOMAG D 11 tabulator," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing XVII (1995): 33-49.

Vannevar Bush begins the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project at MIT.

In a paper called "Instrumental Analysis", he suggested how an electromechanical machine might be built to accomplish Charles Babbage’s goals for the Analytical Engine. This was almost exactly one hundred years after Babbage began designing his Analytical Engine.

In the same paper Bush wrote that four billion punched cards were being used annually in electric tabulating machines. This amounted to ten thousand tons of punched cards.

Alonzo Church publishes his logical proof of the undecidability of arithmetic, using his lambda calculus.

Homer Dudley and a team of engineers at Bell Labs produce the first electronic speech synthesizer, called the Voder.

The Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair by experts who used a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech.

Alan Turing spends more than a year at Princeton University to study mathematical logic with Alonzo Church, who is pursuing research in recursion theory.

Charlie Chaplin writes, directs and stars in the film, Modern Times.

In his final silent-film appearance Chaplin portrayed his Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the industrialized world in which assembly lines dehumanize work and robots replace people. The film is also a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression — conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. The movie also starred Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Stanley Sandford and Chester Conklin,

Konrad Zuse applies for a patent on his electromagnetic, program-controlled calculator, called the Z1. 

Zuse built the machine in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin. It had 30,000 parts.

The Z1 was the first freely programmable, binary-based calculating machine ever built, but it did not function reliably, and it was destroyed in World War II. Zuse's patent application is the only surviving documentation of Zuse's prewar work on computers.

Between 1986 and 1989 Zuse and three associates created a replica of the Z1, which is preserved in the Deutsche Technikmuseum.

Alan Turing publishes On Computable Numbers, a mathematical description of what he calls a universal machine that can, in principle, solve any mathematical problem that can be presented to it in symbolic form.

Turing modeled the universal machine processes after the functional processes of a human carrying out mathematical computation. (See Reading 7.1.)

Alonzo Church calls Alan Turing’s universal machine a Turing Machine. (See Reading 7.2.)

Independently of Alan Turing, Emil Post develops a mathematical model of computation that is essentially equivalent to the Turing machine. "Intending this as the first of a series of models of equivalent power but increasing complexity he titles his paper Formulation 1. This model is sometime's called "Post's machine" or a Post-Turing machine."

The Society of American Archivists is founded.

Believing that war with Germany is inevitable, Alan Turing builds in a Princeton University machine shop an experimental electromechanical cryptanalysis machine capable of binary multiplication.

At Princeton University  Alan Turing and John von Neumann have their first discussions about computing and what will later be called “artificial intelligence” (AI).

Leslie J. Comrie founds Scientific Computing Service in London. It is the first independent scientific computing service bureau in the world. (See Reading 4.5.)

Claude Shannon, in his master’s thesis entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, submitted to MIT on August 10, 1937, and published in a revised and abridged version in 1938, shows that the two-valued algebra developed by Boole can be used as a basis for the design of electrical circuits.

This thesis became the theoretical basis for the electronics and computer industries that will developed after World War II. Shannon wrote the thesis while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As examples of circuits that could be built using relays, Shannon appended to the thesis theoretical descriptions of "An Electric Adder to the Base Two," and "A Factor Table Machine." The "Factor Table Machine" was not included in the published version. Shannon's thesis was later characterized as the most significant master's thesis of the 20th century, (See Reading 12.1.)

Shannon's thesis was first published in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 57 (1938) 713-23.

George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Labs in New York City, builds a binary adder out of a few light bulbs, batteries, relays and metal strips cut from tin cans on his kitchen table.

This device was similar to a theoretical design described by Claude Shannon in his master's thesis. Stibitz's "Model K" (for “Kitchen”) was the first electromechanical computer built in America.

Howard Aiken drafts a proposal for an automatic calculating machine and joins with IBM to produce the Automatic Sequence Controllec Calculator (ASCC). Later known as the Harvard Mark I, the completed electromechanical calculating machine will eventually weigh five tons.

John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, plans the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), a special-purpose electronic computer.

Konrad Zuse completes his Z1 mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment.

Independently of Claude Shannon, Zuse developed a form of symbolic logic to assist in the design of the binary circuits. With Helmut Schreyer, he began work on the Z2.

H. G. Wells publishes a book of essays and speeches entitled World Brain which includes an essay entitled "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia."

This essay first appeared in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937. Another essay entitled "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" described Wells' vision for

". . .a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49)

Wells believed that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that

"any student, in any part of the world, would be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica" (p. 54).

Vannevar Bush begins development of the Rapid Selector machine for information retrieval from rolls of microfilm. He will publish a general description of the aims of this machine in his 1945 article, As We May Think.

Chester F. Carlson invents xerography, originally called electrophotography.

Xerography did not become a commercial success until the wide adoption of the xerographic copier first introduced in 1949.

French poet, playwright, actor and director Antonin Artaud publishes Le Théâtre et son Double. He describes theatre as" 'la réalite virtuelle', a virtual reality 'in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy's visionary internal dramas.' "  This is considered the first published description of virtual reality.

The Bettmann Archive, founded in New York in 1936 by Otto Bettmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, contains 15,000 images.  Bettmann later characterized this time as "the beginning of the visual age."

By 1980, the year before Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus-Thomson Organization, the archive contained 2,000,000 images, carefully selected for their historical value, mainly under the five categories of world events, personalities, lifestyles, advertising art, and art and illustrations.

In 1984 the Kraus-Thomson Organization acquired the extensive United Press International (UPI) collection, containing millions of worldwide news and lifestyle photographs taken by photographers working for United Press International, International News Photos, Acme Newspictures, and Pacific and Atlantic.

In 1995 Corbis, a company controlled by Bill Gates, bought the Bettmann Archive.

"Beginning in 1997, Corbis spent five years selecting images of maximum historical value and saleability for digitization. More than 1.3 million images (26% of the collection) have been edited and 225,000 have been digitized. Because of this effort, more images from the Bettmann Archive are available now than ever before.

"In 2002, the Archive was moved to a state-of-the-art, sub-zero film preservation facility in western Pennsylvania. The 10,000-square-foot underground storage facility is environmentally-controlled, with specific conditions (minus -20°C, relative humidity of 35%) calculated to preserve prints, color transparencies, negatives, photographs, enclosures, and indexing systems" (http://www.corbis.com/BettMann100/Archive/Preservation.asp, accessed 01-17-2010).

A Hungarian newspaper editor frustrated by the amount of time wasted  filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, Lazlo Biro creates a pen with a tiny ball in its tip that is free to turn in a socket. As the pen moves along the paper its ball rotates, picking up viscous ink from the ink cartridge and depositing it on the paper. This was the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, still known in England as a "Biro."

"Earlier pens leaked or clogged due to improper viscosity of the ink, and depended on gravity to deliver the ink to the ball. Depending on gravity caused difficulties with the flow and required that the pen be held nearly vertically. The Biro pen both pressurized the ink column and used capillary action for ink delivery, solving the flow problems."

Polish Cipher Bureau mathematician and cryptologist Marian Rejewski designs the bomba, or bomba kryptologiczna  ("bomb" or "cryptologic bomb,") a special-purpose machine for breaking German Enigma-machine ciphers.

Orson Wells and the Mercury Theatre broadcast over CBS radio H. G. Wells' 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.

The broadcast was heard by 6,000,000 people, some of whom believed that the story of the invading Martians was real. To the extent that a large number of people were deceived, this may be one of the earliest examples of mass hysteria induced by electronic media.

On this night, called Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, 92 Jews are murdered, and 25,000–30,000 are arrested and deported to concentration camps. More than 200 Synagogues are destroyed along with tens of thousands of Jewish businesses and homes. It marks the beginning of the Holocaust.

John Atanasoff begins work on his special-purpose ABC machine, the earliest electronic digital computer. It will never be properly operational.

IBM starts construction on Aiken ’s Harvard Mark I.

Konrad Zuse completes his Z2 machine. It uses the same kind of mechanical memory as the Z1 but uses 800 relays in the arithmetic and control units. .

"Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges publishes an essay entitled La bibliotheca total (The Total Library). This "traced the infinite-monkey concept back to Aristotle's Metaphysics. Explaining the views of Leucippus, who held that the world arose through the random combination of atoms, Aristotle notes that the atoms themselves are homogeneous and their possible arrangements only differ in shape, position and ordering. In De Generatione et corruptione (On Generation and Corruption), the Greek philosopher compares this to the way that a tragedy and a comedy consist of the same "atoms", i.e., alphabetic characters. Three centuries later, Cicero's De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) argued against the atomist worldview:

" 'He who believes this may as well believe that if a great quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, composed either of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.'

"Borges follows the history of this argument through Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Swift, then observes that in his own time, the vocabulary had changed. By 1939, the idiom was 'that a half-dozen monkeys provided with typewriters would, in a few eternities, produce all the books in the British Museum.' (To which Borges adds, 'Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would suffice.') Borges then imagines the contents of the Total Library which this enterprise would produce if carried to its fullest extreme:

" 'Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page' " (Wikipedia article on Infinite Monkey Theorem, accessed 05-25-2009).

During World War II Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller of Geigy Pharmaceutical discovers the high efficiency of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as a contact poison against several athropods.

During World War II DDT was used with great effect among both military and civilian populations to control mosquitoes spreading malaria and lice transmitting typhus, resulting in dramatic reductions in the incidence of both diseases.

In 1948 Müller received the Nobel Prize in Biology and Medicine for this discovery, which is thought to have saved the lives of over 21,000,000 people worldwide. After the war, DDT was made available for use as an agricultural insecticide, and its production and use skyrocketed with unexpected disastrous effects upon the environment. 

As a result of the 1962 book, Silent Spring, by American marine biologist and nature writer, Rachel Carson, noticed in this database, the disastrous consequences of DDT began to be understood by politicians and the public, and DDT was eventually banned in the United States in 1972.

George Stibitz and Samuel Williams of Bell Telephone Labs begin construction of the Complex Number Calculator (later known as the Bell Labs Model I).

This machine was called “the first electromechanical computer for routine use.” It used telephone relays and coded decimal numbers as groups of four binary digits (bits) each.

The Biuro Szyfrów ("Cipher Bureau"), the Polish interwar agency charged with both cryptography and cryptanalysis, reveals Poland's Enigma-decryption techniques and equipment, which it had achieved using the bomba device, to the French and British. 

Poland thereby made possible the western Allies' vitally important decryption of Nazi German secret communications (Ultra) during World War II.

"Up to July 25, 1939, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years without telling their French and British allies. On December 15, 1938, two new rotors, IV and V, were introduced (three of the now five rotors being selected for use in the machine at a time). As Rejewski wrote in a 1979 critique of appendix 1, volume 1 (1979), of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, "we quickly found the [wirings] within the [new rotors], but [their] introduction [...] raised the number of possible sequences of drums from 6 to 60 [...] and hence also raised tenfold the work of finding the keys. Thus the change was not qualitative but quantitative. We would have had to markedly increase the personnel to operate the bombs, to produce the perforated sheets (60 series of 26 sheets each were now needed, whereas up to the meeting on July 25, 1939, we had only two such series ready) and to manipulate the sheets."

"Harry Hinsley suggested in British Intelligence . . . that the Poles decided to share their Enigma-breaking techniques and equipment with the French and British in July 1939 because they had encountered insuperable technical difficulties. Rejewski refuted this: "No, it was not [cryptologic] difficulties [. . .] that prompted us to work with the British and French, but only the deteriorating political situation. If we had had no difficulties at all we would still, or even the more so, have shared our achievements with our allies as our contribution to the struggle against Germany^{' " (Wikipedia article on Bomba (cryptography), accessed 12-21-2008).}

Germany invades Poland. World War II begins.

Britain and France declare war on Germany.

Alan Turing reports to the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley, England.

Konrad Zuse’s associate, Helmut Schreyer, writes a memorandum concerning the Z2, Rechnische Rechenmachine (unpublished at the time), in which he also says it would be possible to build a computer with vacuum tubes that would process “10,000 operations per second.”

In Germany the Reichsministerium fur Volksaufklaerung und Progaganda publishes the Liste des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums. This list of "damaging and undesirable writing" includes authors, living and dead, whose works are banned from the Reich because of their Jewish descent, pacifist or communist views, or suspicion thereof.