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Communications: An international history of the formative years traces the evolution of communications from 500 BC, when fire beacons were used for signalling, to the 1940s, when high definition television systems were developed for the entertainment, education and enlightenment of society. The book does not simply provide a chronicle of dates and events, nor is it a descriptive catalogue of devices and systems. Rather, it discusses the essential factors - technical, political, social, economic and general - that enabled the evolution of modern communications. The author has taken a contextual approach to show the influence of one discipline upon another, and the unfolding story has been widely illustrated with contemporary quotations, allowing the progress of communications to be seen from the perspective of the times and not from the standpoint of a later generation.

A global collection exploring the vital significance of film’s materiality to the history of cinema

Made from animal bones, plant cellulose, and precious metals, photochemical film defined a century of cinema. Looking past Hollywood and beyond iconic companies like Eastman Kodak, Agfa, and Pathé, Film Stock travels to Argentina, India, Czechoslovakia, and other locales to offer a truly global history of the very material of film.

Engaging with cultural, political, economic, and environmental questions of significant contemporary concern, Film Stock shows the immense consequences of how film was made, handled, processed, destroyed, and archived. Individual essays explore how climate shaped film distribution in early twentieth-century Southeast Asia, unique film formats manufactured in China, early efforts to standardize the size of film stock in Hollywood, and how Eastman Kodak’s tropical research lab in Panama became a tool of cultural empire.

With a deep commitment to archival research and substantive engagement with primary materials, Film Stock is a major work that tells the international story of film’s physical life. Its innovative, groundbreaking essays make a compelling case for why, even in our digital age, motion picture film matters.

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From the first notions of 'seeing by electricity' in 1878, through the period of the first demonstration of rudimentary television in 1926 and up to 1940, when war brought the advance of the technology to a temporary halt, the development of television gathered about it a tremendous history. Following the discovery of the photo-conductive effect, numerous schemes for television were suggested but it was in the wake of Baird's early demonstrations that real industrial interest developed and the pace of progress increased. Much research and development work was undertaken in the UK, the US, Germany and France. By 1936 television technology had advanced to the point where high definition broadcasting was realistic.