1900 Congress of Electricity held at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris

Constantin Perskyi made the first known use of the word "television."

Scientists were looking at two methods - Mechanical television and Electronic television 

 

1905 Cooper Hewitt mercury lamps make it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight.

 

1906 The first animated cartoon 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' is produced by newspaper cartoonist J. Stuart Blackton and the first full length film 'The Story of the Kelly Gang is written and directed by Australian Charles Tait.

 

Lee de Forest invented the "Audion" vacuum tube with the ablity to amplify signals

Boris Rosing combines Paul Nipkow's disk and a cathode ray tube and builds the first working mechanical TV system.

Reginald Fessenden invents wireless telephony, a means for radio waves to carry signals a significant distance. 

     

1907: Campbell Swinton and Boris Rosing suggest using cathode ray tubes to transmit images via Electronic television

Charles Jenkins and Scotsman John Baird experiment with the mechanical television model

Philo Farnsworth experiment with the the electronic television model. 

 

1909 There are about 9,000 movie theaters in the United States. The typical film is only a single reel long, ten- twelve minutes in length, and the actors are anonymous.

 

Nobel Prize awarded to Karl Ferdinand Braun and Guglielmo Marconi for the development of radio 

     

1910 actors in American films began to receive screen credit, and the way to the creation of film stars was opened.

 

1911 Credits begin to appear at the beginning of motion pictures.

 

1912 Carl Laemmle organizes Universal Pictures, which will become the first major studio. Paramount Pictures is also founded. The Radio Act of 1912 limits broadcasting on radio stations to the 360m wavelength, which jams signals.

 

1915 The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allows directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.

 

1922 Vladimir Kosma Zworykin patents his iconscope television transmission tube leading the way for further advancement in the television 

 

1923 Warner Bros. is established.

 

1924- 1925: American Charles Jenkins and John Baird from Scotland, each demonstrate the mechanical transmissions of images over wire circuits. Photo Left: Jenkin's Radiovisor Model 100 circa 1931, sold as a kit. Baird becomes the first person to transmit moving silhouette images using a mechanical system based on Nipkow's disk. Vladimir Zworykin patents a color television system.

1924
l "Broadcast Listeners" Year Book forecasts 'The Wireless Musical Cinema' within two to three years. 

     

 1925 Vladimir Kosma Zworykin patents the first television color tube

October 30: The first moving image was transmitted (the famous grainy image of a ventriloquists dummy's head) 

     

 

1925 Western Electric and Warner Bros. agree to develop a system for movies with sound. The first in-flight movie is shown. It was a black & white, silent film called The Lost World, is shown in a WWI converted Handley-Page bomber during a 30-minute flight near London.

 

1927 Warner Bros.’s The Jazz Singer, presents the movie’s first spoken words: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” The Vitaphone method that the studio uses involves recording sound on discs.

 

1927 April 9: Bell Laboratories and the Department of Commerce held the 1st long-distance transmission of a live picture and voice simultaneously.

Philo Farnsworth patents the Image Dissector, the first complete electronic television system and transmits the first all-electronic television image

John Logie Baird set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd making the first television programmes for the BBC 

   

 1928 Television is introduced in the United States

The Federal Radio Commission issues the first television license (W3XK) to Charles Jenkins

John Logie Baird beams a television image from England to the United States

The first television set is sold. The Daven television cost $75.

RCA begins work on large-screen television. 

 

1928 Paramount becomes the first studio to announce that it will only produce “talkies”.

 

1929 The first Academy Awards are announced, with the award for the best picture in 1927 going to ‘Wings’.

 

1929 Television is introduced in the United Kingdom and Germany

John Logie Baird opens the first TV studio

CBS was founded by William S. Paley 

 

1930 The motion picture industries adopts the Production Code, a set of guidelines that describes what is acceptable in movies.

 

1930: Charles Jenkins broadcasts the first TV commercial

RCA demonstrate large screen television in New York

Ulysses A Sanabria gives a Cinema-television demonstration in Chicago

July 28: First UK public demonstration of large screen television given by John Logie Baird at the London Coliseum 

     

1931 American gangster films like Little Caesar and Wellman’s The Public Enemy became popular. Dialogue now took superiority over “slapstick” in Hollywood comedies: the fast-paced, witty banter of The Front Page (1931) or It Happened One Night (1934),

 

1931 January 4 John Logie Baird demonstrates ‘zone television’, showing full-length figures and a cricket lesson by Herbert Strudwick.

April 24: Lee De Forest files a US patent for a method of recording pictures, film or events

Television is introduced in France and the USSR

By the end of 1931 there are nearly 40,000 television sets in the United States 

 

 1932 June: John Logie Baird transmits pictures of the Derby horse race at Epsom to a large-screen television display at the Metropole Cinema in London

November 8: John Logie Baird introduces a programme which is televised from Broadcasting House, London to the Arena Theatre, Copenhagen, Denmark (600 miles away) 

     

1933 Theaters begin to open refreshment stands.

 

1934 The first drive-in movie theater opens in New Jersey, USA.

 

1934 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was established by the Communications Act of 1934 

     

1936 The  first experimental" coaxial cable lines were laid by AT&T between New York and Philadelphia

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) debuts the world's first television service with three hours of programming a day.

August: Television at the Berlin Olympics. Television broadcasts from the Berlin Olympic Games are seen by 150,000 people in public television rooms in Berlin 

     

1937 Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is released.

 

1939 American cinema brought such films as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with The Wind.

 

1938 February 4:  First UK public demonstration of large-screen colour television at London’s Dominion theatre by John Logie Baird and is transmitted from the Baird studio at Crystal Palace in South London 

     

1939 January: Direct projection television with a 15ft x 12ft screen is installed at the 1,190-seat Marble Arch Pavilion by Baird Company.

Television was demonstrated by RCA at the New York World's Fair and the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition

Fritz Fischer patents the Eidophor

Baird Television Ltd goes into liquidation and is re-formed as Cinema-Television but without John Logie Baird on the board.

Television is introduced in Japan and Italy 

     

Early 1940’s The desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas like 49th Parallel (1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944) and Noël Coward and David Lean’s celebrated naval film In Which We Serve in (1942).

 

1940 The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed Disney to make more animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).

 

1945 ‘Post-classical cinema’ described the changing methods of storytelling of the “New Hollywood” producers. The new methods of drama and characterization meant the story chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature unsettling “twist endings”.

 

1946 Peter Goldmark, working for CBS, demonstrated his mechanical color television system to the FCC - the first to introduce a broadcasting color television system 

     

1948: Cable television is introduced in Pennsylvania

Louis W. Parker patents a low-cost television receiver

One million homes in the United States have television sets 

     

 1949 August: In a document entitled 'Television and the Cinema', prepared for the Beveridge Committee on the future of broadcasting, the BBC states that 'the place of television is in the home' 

     

Early 1950’s The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood. Protested by the Hollywood Ten before the committee, the hearings resulted in the blacklisting of many actors, writers and directors, including Chayefsky, Charlie Chaplin, and Dalton Trumbo, and many of whom fled to Europe, especially the United Kingdom.

 

1950 The FCC approves the first color television standard which is soon replaced by a second in 1953

Vladimir Zworykin develops the Vidicon

Phonevision, the first pay-per-view television service, becomes available 

     

  1951 Color television introduced in the U.S.

Philips experiments and produces projection television 

     

  1952 Television is introduced in Canada 

     

1952 The Cold War era translated into a type of near-paranoia manifested in themes such as invading armies of evil aliens, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The War of the Worlds).

 

1953 Seven-year contracts with actors are replaced by single-picture or multi-picture contracts.

 

1956 Robert Adler invents Zenith Space Commander which is the first practical remote control

 

1957 The cinematic industry was threatened by television, and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some film theatres would become bankrupt and close. The demise of the “studio system” spurred the self-commentary of films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).

 

1960 Hitchcock’s Psycho was released.

 

Early 1960’s The studio system in Hollywood declined, because many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà in Rome.

 

1962 Hollywood films were still largely aimed at family audiences, and it was often the more old-fashioned films that produced the studios’ biggest successes. Productions like Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965) were among the biggest money-makers of the decade.

 

1962AT&T launches Telstar, the first satellite to carry TV broadcasts and television broadcasts are relayed around the World. 

     

  1964 Color television introduced in the U.S. 

 

1964 The growth in independent producers and production companies, and the increase in the power of individual actors also contributed to the decline of traditional Hollywood studio production.

 

Late 1960’s Saw Hollywood filmmakers begin to create more innovative and groundbreaking films that reflected the social revolution taken over much of the western world such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), A Space Odyssey (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Bonnie and Clyde is often considered the beginning of the so-called New Hollywood.

 

1969 July 20: TV transmission from the moon watched by 600 million people 

 

1970’s Filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of bloody deaths.

 

1971 Marked the release of controversial films like Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Dirty Harry. This sparked heated controversy over the perceived escalation of violence in cinema.

 

Mid 1970’s A new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas

 

1972 Film director’s begin to express their personal vision and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial successes, like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Coppola’s The Godfather films, Polanski’s Chinatown, Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas’s Star Wars. It also, however, resulted in some failures, including Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love and Michael Cimino’s hugely expensive Western epic Heaven’s Gate.

 

1972 50% of  home TVs are color television sets. 

     

  1973 Giant screen projection television is first marketed. 

     

  1976 Sony introduce Betamax, the first home video cassette recorder.

 

1977 The phenomenal success in the 1970s of Jaws and Star Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern “blockbuster”. Hollywood studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive marketing and promotional campaigns.

 

Early 1980’s Saw audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on home video became a significant “second venue” for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries.

 

1980 CNN, the first all-news network, is launched by Ted Turner 

     

  1981 NHK demonstrate HDTV with 1,125 lines of resolution.

The Supreme Court rules to allow television cameras in the courtroom. 

     

  1982: 00:00Dolby surround sound for home televisionsets is introduced. 

     

  1986 Super VHS is introduced

 

1988 98% of U.S. households have at least one television set.

The first commercial Direct broadcast satellite DBS service, Sky Television plc (now BSkyB), was launched in the UK 

     

Early 1990’s Saw the development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video.

 

1992 Americans spend $12 billion to buy or rent video tapes, compared to just $4.9 billion on box office ticket sales. 76% of households have VCR players.

 

1992 There are 900 million television sets in use around the world

201 million television sets are in the United States. 

 

1994 Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen form the film studio DreamWorks.

 

1994 Major American studios began to create their own “independent” production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino’s runaway hit Pulp Fiction in 1994. The year 1994 also marked the beginning of film and video distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).

 

1995 The first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, computer animation began to grow and became the principal technique for feature length animation, which allowed competing film companies such as DreamworksAnimation and 20th Century Fox to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own.

 

Late 1990’s Another cinematic evolution began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.

 

2000 The documentary film began to escalate as a commercial genre for conceivably the first time, with the success of films such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.

 

2001 Saw the beginning of a growing problem of digital distribution to be overcome with regards to expiration of copyrights, content security, and enforcing copyright. There is higher compression for films, and Moore’s law allows for increasingly cheaper technology.

 

2002 More films began being released simultaneously to IMAX cinema, the first was Disney animation Treasure Planet.

 

2003 The Matrix Revolutions and a re-release of The Matrix Reloaded could be viewed in IMAX cinemas.

 

2006 Television signals in both analog and digital formats

The US switch-off of all analogue terrestrial TV broadcasts begins NO LATER THAN February 17, 2009

The UK switch-off of all analogue terrestrial TV broadcasts begins in 2008. The last regions are switched off in 2012

A UK Digital Terrestrial replacement, called Freeview, enables analogue television sets to receive programmes 

 

2008 The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.

 

2009 James Cameron’s 3D film Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time.

 

2010 onward 3D films gained increasing popularity with many other films being released in 3D. The best critical and financial success was the feature film animation of Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar’s Toy Story 3.

 

2012 Titanic was re-released in a special 3D version to celebrate the 100th anniversary.