Kent Chronicles
June 7th and 8th 2013
Fascination with Flying Machines
The first manned, powered flying machine
was created by
_______________________________ in
__________. Few understood the ways that aero
planes would change both war and peace over the
next 30 years. The early birds were unsteady,
unstable, and unsafe. Aviation was the realm of
inventors and wealthy thrill seekers, not the people
at large.
That perception started to change, as to
many other things, with the outbreak of
________________. Initially, planes were used as
scouts and observers for the established armies and
navies. However, it soon became an arms race to mount better guns for dog fighting and more
ordinances for bombing. The flying “ace” was born!
The government cut spending after the war and the fledgling air force was forced to sell large
numbers of surplus aircraft for cheap. For a certain type of person there
was an opportunity to make a living ________________________; flying
from town to town doing death defying tricks with their airplanes.
Still dangerous but far more mundane, the
____________________________ had started to experiment with airplanes
in 1911 as a way to speed delivery of letters. However, prewar planes
proved incapable of consistently delivering the mail. After the war that
began to change as plane manufactures, bereft of government contracts for
war planes, started designing planes specifically to carry cargo.
Enter the Loan Eagle
In the late spring of 1927, something bright and
alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who
seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a
heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their
glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of
their old best dreams.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1919, a wealthy New York businessman had issued a challenge to the burgeoning aviation
community. He would pay $25,000 to the first person who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean, from
New York to Paris. In May of 1927, ________________________________________ completed the
objective in 33.5 hours.
That he did it was fantastic, but not really important. Watch the movie clip to see what made
the flight so important.
Birth of an Empire
__________________________, the famous animator got his start in the early 1920s, but made
his mark in the late 20s with the star of Steamboat Willie, ____________________________________.
With the success that came from that series, he branched out with a series of cartoon from 1929
to 1933 called _______________________________________________ which introduced the world to
many other characters that are now synonymous with his name including; Pluto, Goofy, and Donald
Duck.
http://www.youtube.com/channel/HCOohyrrrhkwg/featured - The full collection of the cartoon series
can be found here (Youtube is awesome like that)
Changing Entertainment
Silent films had been around since around 1894 and the filmmaking techniques were quite developed by
the 1920s. The early 20s movies lacked sound since no good way had been developed that could
simultaneously transmit sound and picture together. To overcome the lack of music, small theaters
often had a pianist (or a pianola player) accompany the show while larger locations could offer small
orchestral accompaniment. Such films as The Birth of a Nation, The Big Parade, and Ben-Hur, are all
considered classic examples of the silent film.
Things changed in 1927, when the first “talkie,”
____________________________________ was released. Staring the vocal
talents of Al Jolson, the movie highlighted the generational split as the young
protagonist wants to sing jazz and he is ostracized from his deeply religious
family.
The important technology for the first feature fill talkies was the
______________________process, which was a sound-on-disk system. It was
used in over 1000 short films and numerous feature films in the late 20s and
early 30s. It was eventually replaced by sound-on-film technology.
These talkies were seen by some, including the comedic actor Charlie Chaplain,
as a passing fad…
In 1928, 1,300 of the 20,000 theaters in the United States had sound systems.
By the end of 1930, 10,000 did and movie attendance boomed. In 1930, the
weekly admission tickets averaged about 114 million tickets, equivalent to one
movie ticket per person in the entire United States! For comparison, in 2012
one out of every twelve Americans bought a movie ticket every week.
http://www.silentera.com/ - More info than you ever wanted to know about silent films. It is awesome!
Roaring 20s Burn Out
October 29, 1929: ___________________________________________ 16 million shares were traded
that day as billions of dollars were lost and investors were wiped out. It was the iconic start of the Great
Depression.
Lots of people point to the practice that had developed of buying shares _________________________
as a main culprit for the crash. This was a way to buy shares even if you didn’t have enough money to
pay for it; you could put up a percentage of the share’s value then borrow the rest with the value of the
share. As long as prices kept rising you can then sell the shares again, repay the loan, and keep the
profit. Easy money.
But when share price dipped, there was trouble because you couldn’t sell the share for what you paid
and you would owe money.
Wall Street logic deduced that it was inconceivable for the market to slow enough to cause serious
problems for this system. On a totally unrelated note, Wall Street logic deduced that housing prices
could never go down across the entire United States either.
As convenient as it would be to simply blame Wall Street greed for the crash, there are other much
more important economic trends that are more responsible.
A big one was __________________________________. The 1920s saw a numerous advances in
production methods, the implementation of the assembly line being the most important. The era also
so the increased availability of new goods: cars, toasters, fridges, and radios, objects that increased the
quality of life.
However, by the late 1920s,
_____________________________
became a huge problem. Wages did not
increase as fast as the economy could
create new goods. At first, the WWI saving
had provided the purchasing power, then
the installment plan was introduced in the
mid 1920s to allow people to continue to
buy without paying upfront. However,
finally the bank accounts ran out and the
credit was tapped out.
Additionally, the agricultural sector, which
encompassed a large portion of the
American population had never recovered
from the WWI economic swoon and
couldn’t participate fully in the economy.
The overseas markets couldn’t absorb the
American goods either; Europe was still
trying to recover from the war and
couldn’t afford to buy.
The crash was simply a natural market
correction exacerbated by stupid stock
market speculation.
Enter the Great Depression. But that is a
topic for August!