The twenties. An era of Prohibition (and gangsters)…jazz…flappers…The Great Gatsby…and an accelerating stock market. I thought it might be fun to take a look at the state of technology as it stood a century ago, in 1925. This post first post of a series will focus on communications and entertainment..
Radio had been pioneered in the early 1900s, but was initially restricted to wireless telegraphy for point-to-point or ship-to-shore use. Broadcasting has to wait for the introduction and improvement of vacuum tubes and development of a viable business model. The first US broadcasting station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air in November 1920 and reported the results of that year’s presidential election. By 1925, there were about 500 US radio stations, and nearly 20% of households owned a receiver. Good receivers were expensive, though: $119 for a loudspeaker model (headset-only versions were cheaper)…that’s about $2200 in our present money.
Broadcast stations all transmitted with vacuum tubes, however, there were still some earlier technologies (spark, arc, and alternator-based transmitters) in use for other applications.
One important broadcasting event of 1925 was the debut of WSM in Nashville and its most famous program, The Grand Old Opry; along with portable recording for the phonograph (discussed later), this would have a real impact on the national spread of music that had previously been regional or local.
The telephone was still far from universal–only about 35% of households had phones, and those that did used it mainly for local communication. (Telephone connections were often ‘party line’, so privacy could not be assumed) Transcontinental telephone service had been launched in 1911 (again, enabled by vacuum tube amplification) but was still very expensive. Rapid long-distance communication was usually conducted by telegraph. Morse code was still very much in use, although printing telegraphs had long been available and were handling a growing proportion of the traffic. One specialized form of printing telegraph was the stock ticker–these devices were shortly to get a real workout, in 1929.
Dial telephone technology had been developed and was expanding, but most calls were still completed manually by operators. There were 178,000 women working as operators in 1920 (men and boys had been tried, but did not work out well) and the number was still growing, reaching 342,000 by 1950. And those numbers count just the employees working in phone company central offices, not the switchboard operators in businesses and government offices.
Transoceanic telegraph cables had been in use since the 1860s, but undersea telephone cables were far from being a practical possibility. Still, a transatlantic telephone service would soon be available (launched in 1927), based on high-power long wave radio stations at each end…but not many could afford to use it.
Movies had reached extreme levels of popularity. I can’t find specific numbers for 1925, but by 1930, the weekly movie audience would reach 65 million. These were black & white films, and without sound–musical accompaniment was usually provided by local orchestras. Sound wasn’t too far away, though, the first mainstream sound film, The Jazz Singer, came out in 1927. The early sound films used a process called Vitaphone, which required synchronization of the sound on a phonograph record with the stream of images on film. It would be replaced by a process in which the soundtrack was recorded on the film itself.
Newpapers were a huge deal in 1925. Their success was enabled by a convergence of technologies: the rotary printing press, the Linotype machine, photography and halftone printing, and the telegraph. (That line from the song The Easter Parade about “you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure” wouldn’t have made sense to people in 1925, since rotogravure printing wasn’t introduced until 1926.)
Just over the horizon (1927) was the teletypesetter,which allowed stories transmitted by telegraph to be entered directly into a Linotype machine for typesetting, without the necessity of being re-keyed…so a news item written by an Associated Press reporter in (say) New York City could be inserted into the copy for hundreds of newspapers around the country, almost untouched by human hands.
Books and magazines were increasingly popular–this phenomenon was driven more by expanded literacy than by any particular technological improvement, although mechanized binding and reduced paper costs (driven by improvements in chemical pulping processes) contributed to the growth of the book-publishing industry, while magazines benefited from highly-selective use of color. Grok says that in a mass-circulation weekly like the Saturday Evening Post you might see 1 full-color cover, 5-15 color ad pages (5-10% of total pages), occasional two-color accents (eg, blue headers) on 10-20% of editorial pages, and 80-90% black & white interior pages, and notes:
Where color appeared, it dazzled. A 1925 reader flipping to a Lucky Strike ad with a green pack and golden smoke in Collier’s (circulation ~1 million) felt the modernity of the Jazz Age. Publishers knew color sold—ads with it often doubled engagement, per early ad studies—and it became a status symbol. But for every color page, dozens stayed monochrome, balancing art with economics.
There’s a great documentary made in 2015, American Epic. An original 1925 recording machine was restored by engineer Nicholas Berg (the electronics runs off batteries and the recording lathe is powered by a descending weight) and the producers took the restored machine on an extended trip, introducing 1925 recording technology to some present-day performers and having them record their own renditions of music from the machine’s younger days. Highly recommended. The move website is here. The book that accompanies the program is subtitled The first time America heard itself.
Photography had been accessible to the casual picture-taker since the introduction of the Kodak Brownie in 1900. You’d just point, shoot, and send the film off to be developed. More serious photographers wielded folding cameras or large-format view cameras, often with bellows, which used glass plates or sheet film. These required tripods and a good understanding of exposure, since there were no automatic settings. 1925 marked the introduction of a compact 35mm camera, the Leica I.
Film was black-and-white, Kodachrome wouldn’t arrive for another ten years. Flash bulbs were just starting to arrive, displacing the earlier magnesium-based flash systems. The potential for home movie-making first emerged with Kodak’s 16mm film and the Cine-Kodak camera, introduced in 1923. These systems (camera plus projector) were priced at $335 in 1925 money, so not yet a product for mass adoption.
In response to my question about photography in 1925 versus photography in 1915, Grok said:
In 1915, photography was still more of a niche pursuit. World War I was raging, and photography’s role leaned heavily toward documentation—think gritty battlefield shots by official war photographers using bulky glass-plate cameras. The gear was similar to 1925’s in some ways (view cameras, folding cameras), but less refined. Roll film existed, thanks to Kodak, but it wasn’t as widespread or user-friendly yet. Developing was strictly a darkroom affair, often left to professionals or dedicated hobbyists, and the average person wasn’t snapping casual photos much—cameras were pricey and less portable.
By 1925, the war was over, and the Roaring Twenties brought a lighter, more consumer-driven vibe. The Kodak Brownie had matured, making photography cheaper and simpler, so families started capturing everyday life—picnics, kids, vacations. The Leica I’s debut in 1925 introduced 35mm film to the masses, shrinking cameras down and hinting at candid, on-the-go shooting, though it was still pricey and mostly for enthusiasts. Artistically, 1915 was peak Pictorialism—soft, romantic images mimicking paintings—while 1925 saw modernism creeping in, with sharper focus and bolder experiments. Plus, the rise of illustrated magazines demanded more dynamic press photography, shifting the medium’s purpose from static art to storytelling.
So, 1925 was more accessible and versatile than 1915, with a growing amateur base and a pivot toward capturing a booming, post-war world.
One limitation of that ‘dynamic press photography’ was the time consumed to send photographs for long distances, which required physical transportation of the image…a photo of an event in Europe could not arrive in New York in much less than about a week. This problem began to be addressed in 1924 with a Western Union service called Transoceanic Photography, which enabled transmission of photos via undersea cable. It was expensive and provided only limited quality, though: timely photographs from abroad would not be a common thing in newspaper until AP’s introduction of its Wirephoto service in 1935.
Not everyone was happy about the new media. Composer Arnold Schoenberg, for one, was a harsh critic of radio, saying that it “accustoms the ear to an unspeakably coarse tone, and to a body of sound constituted in a soupy, blurred way, which precludes all finer differentiation.” He worried that radio gave music a “continuous tinkle” that would eventually result in a state wherein “all music has been consumed, worn out.”
Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, said about radio:
There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.
Roth didn’t much like photography, either:
People who had completely ordinary eyes, all of a sudden obtain a look. The indifferent become thoughtful, the harmless full of humor, the simpleminded become goal oriented, the common strollers look like pilots, secretaries like demons, directors like Caesars.
That comment about photography driving people to “obtain a look” mirrors today’s discussions about the influence of Instagram.
The next post in the Technology in 1925 series will focus on transportation–land, sea, and air.
I have a weakness for children’s book from that era, when kids would read a 300 page book, for enjoyment. My favorites include The Radio Boys series, as they were doing their thing when radio was cutting edge technology.