Chancellor Winston Churchill, headed for the House of Commons on budget day, 1929. With him are his wife Clementine, daughter Sarah, and son Randolph. This would be the fourth and final time Churchill presented the budget to the Commons as chancellor.
Winston Churchill couldn’t campaign in the 1922 general election, because he was recovering from abdominal surgery. He lost his seat in that election, and found himself (as he later put it) “without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.”
But Churchill returned to the Commons in 1924, now sitting with the Conservative Party for the first time in twenty years. And no one was more surprised than he when he was named chancellor of the exchequer.
Lydia Lopokova, shown with her husband, John Maynard Keynes.
History seemed to teach that reestablishing convertibility between British pounds and gold at the prewar rate was the key to British economic recovery, as well as protecting the status of the pound as the world’s most reliable currency.
But not everyone agreed—in particular, John Maynard Keynes, an intellectual gadfly who argued that the role of central banks should not be to preserve gold convertibility, but to regulate the money supply to keep prices steady.
This NBC publicity photo shows Freeman Gosden (l.) and Charles Correll clowning around on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Amos ‘n’ Andy in 1938.
The RCA partners: GE, Westinghouse, and AT&T eventually settled their disputes over the booming business of radio. A new corporation, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was created to manage the business of radio broadcasting and would buy up AT&T’s broadcasting business. The phone company would in the future limit its involvement in the radio business to supplying phone lines to connect radio stations.
The introduction of radio networks changed American entertainment and culture by, among other things, homogenizing it. Entertainers in New York could make good money performing over NBC; entertainers elsewhere were unlikely to get radio work at all. Radio entertainment was at first mostly music, although not jazz, which was largely banned from the airwaves. Later, radio experimented with drama, plays meant not to be seen, but to be listened to. In 1928, the first hit radio series appeared. The good news was: it pioneered a new form of entertainment, with a set cast of characters experiencing new adventures every week, and proved audiences could and would follow the story. The bad news was: It was Amos ‘n’ Andy.
Hungarian Dance No. 5 Composed in 1869 by Johannes Brahms. Public domain. Performed by the Fulda Symphonic Orchestra and used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Source.
The Barber of Seville Composed in 1816 by Gioachino Rossini. Public domain. Public domain recording. Source.
Advertisement for the opportunity to listen to the Dempsey-Carpentier world championship fight from a theater, brought to you by radio.
Prodded by the US Navy, the General Electric Company bought out Marconi Wireless’s US subsidiary and formed a new corporation along with other US companies that owned useful radio patents, including Westinghouse Electric and American Telephone and Telegraph. The new corporation was dubbed the Radio Corporation of America, and universally known by its initials: RCA.
The complex RCA deal took two years to complete, from 1919 to 1921. In 1919, RCA’s mission was seen to be wireless communication. But in 1920 Westinghouse, on its own, first demonstrated that there was a consumer market for radio receivers, provided customers had radio broadcasts to listen to. By 1921, when the RCA merger was complete, the mission of the company had completely changed. Radio was the new craze. But with so much money up for grabs, everyone wanted a piece of the action.
Music from the Sam Fox Silent Move Book Public domain. From RF Media and the Texas Radio Theatre Company, used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 license. Source.
