1901 to 1925

This page of the timeline covers -

• 1905
• 1910
• 1915
• 1920

     1901

first electric typewriter, the Blickensderfer

first UK cinema opens

one millionth phone installed by Bell network in US

Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams

Meccano sets in UK

Gillette introduces double-edged safety razor

Marconi sends radio signal across Atlantic

establishment of Australian Commonwealth

16,000 staff of Postmaster-General (PMG) Dept account for 90% of new federal bureaucracy

22,310 telephone subscribers in Australia (79% in capital cities)

     1902

US Navy installs radio telephones aboard ships

Percival v Wright

photoelectric scanning used for image transfer

invention of the Teddy Bear

Sombart's Der Moderne Kapitalismus

national syndication of comic strips in US begins when Hearst licenses strips to other newspapers

Trans-Pacific telephone cable connects Canada, New Zealand and Australia

     1903

London Daily Mirror illustrates only with photographs

G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica

Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics

New Zealand Wireless Telegraphy Act

James' The PhD Octopus

     1904

telephone answering machine

Louis Cartier devises wristwatch for Alberto Santos-Dumont

James' The Golden Bowl

photograph transmitted by wire in Germany

first mass-market comic books

first edition of Chicago Manual of Style

death of Joseph Pulitzer

double-sided phonograph disk

Potter's The Tale of Benjamin Bunny

Weber's The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism

Russo-Japanese War signals end of European hegemony?

     1905

colour pages business directory

juke box invented

Foster Brewing and Carlton Brewery merge to form Carlton & United Breweries (CUB)

Hollerith restructures holdings as the Tabulating Machine Company

Australian Wireless Telegraphy Act regulates local airwaves

first radio message sent from New Zealand to Australia

first edition of the Universal Decimal Classification

     1906

offset press

224,000 miles of railway in US

Peat Marwick begins to provide management consulting

Ives & Myrick insurance agency founded

first classical music radio broadcast

de Forest and von Lieben invent three-element vacuum tube

Paul Otlet proposes standardised microfiche for documentation

Dunwoody and Pickard build crystal-&-cat's-whisker radio

animated cartoon film

San Francisco earthquake

Fessenden invents wireless telephony

experimental sound-on-film motion picture

experimental radio transmissions at Queenscliff, Victoria and Devonport, Tasmania by the Marconi Company

Geneva Convention

Commonwealth Parliament passes Australian Industries Preservation Act to encourage competition

     1907

Bell & Howell develop a film projection system

Lumiere brothers invent still colour photography process

electric washing machine - The Thor

United Press International (UPI) founded

sale of Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks banned on Canadian trains

Melbourne to Sydney telephone trunk line

est 1,027,348 miles of land telecommunications lines across the globe

est 233,823 miles of submarine cable across the globe (39,072 government and 194,751 private sector)

Italy's telephone companies nationalised

Bakelite discovered by Leo Baekeland

     1908

Ford's Model T

Grahame's The Wind in the Willows

Harvard Business School founded

first death of an airplane passenger

American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) founded

electric iron and toaster patented

enabling legislation for private limited liability companies (PLLC) in UK

Munsterberg's On the Witness Stand

AT&T gains control of Western Union in US

UK Joint Select Committee on Lotteries & Indecent Advertisements

     1909

radio distress signal saves 1,700 lives after ships collide

first broadcast talk (on votes for women)

pianos reach maximum market penetration in UK households at one per ten people

800 million postcards sold in England

Borel's dactylographic monkey

     1910

Amalgamated Wireless Australia (AWA) formed

first live opera broadcast

US Census Bureau claims that 81% of professional typists are female

HL Gantt's Work, Wages & Profits

Ehrlich's Salvarsan

Eastern Rate Case in US

610,000 miles of railways across the globe

     1911

UK and Australian Copyright Acts provide protection for author's lifetime plus 50 years

American Tobacco Company controls 92% of world's tobacco business, just a bit more than Microsoft's share of the browser market in early 2001

Flint arranges merger of Tabulating Machine Company, Computing Scale Company and International Time Recording Company to form Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) (later renamed IBM)

James Powers forms Powers Accounting Machine Company, precursor of Sperry Rand

Photoplay magazine launched - first movie fan magazine and supposed "genesis of celebrity culture"

Pantaleoni’s Considerazioni sulle proprieta di un sistema di prezzi Politici

Nicholas Murray Butler hails creation of limited liability company as "greatest single discovery of modern times", outweighing electricity

National Telephone Co in UK nationalised at cost of £12.5m (9,000 employees, 1,500,000 miles of wire and 1,565 exchanges)

100,000 Australian telephone connections

first Myer store in Bourke St, Melbourne

patents registered by USPTO reach 1 million mark

Buenos Aires Convention on Literary & Artistic Copyrights

     1912

sinking of the Titanic

Singer is seventh largest company in world by market capitalisation

Mises' The Theory of Money & Credit

Schilovsky's Gyrocar

Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica

US passes law to control radio stations

first neon sign

first airmail

first automatic telephone exchange in Australia

federal government establishes Coastal Radio Service

     1913

portable phonograph

Henri Marie La Fontaine wins Nobel Prize

Pujo Committee report in US

US Federal Reserve System established

est 34% of British households own a phonograph

first newspaper crossword puzzle

Eastern Telegraph Company in UK transmits 64 million words

AT&T divests Western Union under Kingsbury Agreement

Erector sets in US

Federal Reserve Act in US

     1914

radio message is sent to an airplane

Arthur Andersen founded

Commonwealth imposes death duties

35mm still camera

Boston Wire Stitcher introduces first modern stapler

American Audit Bureau of Circulations formed

ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers) founded

first transcontinental telephone call in US

Melbourne to Adelaide telephone trunk

first G & J Coles store in Collingwood

Northern Electric Manufacturing merges with Imperial Wire & Cable Company to form Northern Electric Company in Canada (44% held by Western Electric, 50% by Bell Canada)

     1915

wireless radio service connects US and Japan

radio-telephone carries speech across Atlantic

Commonwealth introduces personal income tax and tax on undistributed company profits

BHP commissions steelworks at Newcastle

Birth of a Nation

electric loudspeaker

Powers introduces printing tabulator

Steelcase 'Modern Efficiency Desk'

     1916

Sarnoff envisages radio as "a household utility"

cameras get optical rangefinders

radios get tuners

Commonwealth entertainment tax

US railways peak at 254,000 miles of track

AT&T has 19,800 miles of line

     1917

Graham Act in US sanctions reduced competition in telecommunications

Bowman and others v Secular Society Ltd

photocomposition begins

Wente's condenser microphone

Capek uses term "robot" in Opilek

Trans-Australian Railway from South Australia to Perth

     1918

shooting stops in 'War to End All Wars'

Independent News Service v. Associated Press case in US

first regular airmail service: Washington to New York

Beaverbrook founds Sunday Express

first direct radio message from UK to Australia received at AWA's Wahroonga facility

Eastern Telegraph Company in UK transmits 180 million words

English Electric Co formed through merger of Dick Kerr, Willans & Robinson, Phoenix Dynamo Manufacturing and UK Siemens Bros

Commercial Bank of Australia buys National Bank of Tasmania

National Bank of Australasia absorbs Colonial Bank of Australasia

     1919

rotary dial telephones

Phillips v Brooks Ltd

Eccles & Jordan's flip-flop circuit

shortwave radio

Hinckley-Tandy Leather (later Tandy Electronics) founded

Siemens & Halske, AEG and Auer found Osram

     1920

Pearson-controlled Westminister Press buys UK provincial newspaper chains

first broadcasting stations opened

KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts first scheduled radio programs

telephone penetration in US is 123 per 1,000 people

Charles Ponzi arrested for postal fraud

electricity in 35% of all US homes

Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace

     1921

Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Western Union begins wirephoto service

establishment of Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague

soap powder for washing machines

first hamburger chain, White Castle

RadioShack founded as broadcast station

Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers & the Price System

     1922

UK BBC formed as commercial radio broadcaster

Technicolour introduces two-colour process for movies

average US weekly movie attendance is 40 million (1.56 per household)

first film with optical sound track produced by Germany's UFA

first radio advertisement in USA, US$100 for ten minutes

first 3-D movie

Dwiggins coins term 'graphic design'

Nanook of the North, first documentary

first portable radio in US

National Bank of Australasia buys Bank of Queensland

Great Kanto Earthquake levels Tokyo

     1923

Sydney to Brisbane telephone trunk line

R v Hurst and other Justices of Sussex, ex party McCarthy

Disneys found film studio in Hollywood

electric guitar

Union of American Biological Societies established as unified abstracting service for biosciences

Frye ruling in US rejects use of polygraph

first commercial radio broadcasting in Australia

Siemens builds first fully-automatic long-distance phone exchange

Book-of-the-Month Club founded

Zworykin's electronic iconoscope camera and kinescope display

A C Nielsen founded

16mm nonflammable film

Kodak introduces home movie equipment

Time magazine

Edward Bernays writes Crystallizing Public Opinion

partial privatisation of Italy's telephone companies

     1924

Marlboro is launched, targeted at women with the line 'Mild as May'

invention of spiral binding for notebooks

Powers introduces a tabulator with alphabetic capacity

Convention for the Development & Progress of the Incandescent Electric Lamp Industry

invention of Vegemite

AT&T in US offers teletype service

Massachusetts Investment Trust is first US mutual fund

The Eveready Hour is the first sponsored radio program in US

CTR becomes International Business Machines (IBM)

2.5 million radio sets in the US

first G & J Coles store in Bourke St, Melbourne

last Cobb & Co stage-coach trip (in outback Qld)

Compagnie Francaise des Petroles founded

     1925

Leica 35 mm camera

commercial picture facsimile radio service across the US

electric phonograph

enabling legislation for private limited liability companies - Sociétés à Responsabilité Limitée (SARL) - in France

widescreen film

ITT buys International Western Electric

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

AT&T establishes Bell Labs

McCarthy gains US patent for Checkograph microfilm machine

Otlet & Goldschmidt propose microform library, precursor of Bush's Memex

Myer Emporium Ltd formed




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