Emerging Markets Asean + 3 bond market guide
1 June, 2012Euromoney China cash management report
1 June, 2012Discovery Channel Magazine, June 2012
What a moment it must have been. On September 1, 1939, as the Second World War formally began, Douglas Birkinshaw was the engineer in charge at Alexandra Palace in London, from which all of British television at the time was being transmitted. At 10a.m. he received a message from Broadcasting House, concerned that the huge transmission tower could be used to guide German bombers: “Close down television at noon.”
Birkinshaw told his staff: “The end has come. At noon, close it all down.” And then, at the end of a Mickey Mouse cartoon – Mickey’s Gala Premiere, to be precise – it shut down. All of TV shut down. For seven years.
Seven years! Imagine it today! It is unthinkable, implausible; most societies in the modern world could barely last an hour without TV. Today, television’s intrusion into our modern lives pervades absolutely everything about us: what we know, what we think, how we talk, what we buy. And yet it is a fairly recently invention, something that’s only really been part of our mainstream lives for 50 years. It is hard to think of any invention which has become so utterly all-powerful so very, very quickly.
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