Open Questions

This page indexes the atlas's open questions: the specific, named uncertainties attached to individual entities, such as a disputed first, an unresolved attribution or a contested audience figure, each linked back to the entity it qualifies. An open question here always carries a stated reason it remains unresolved, never a placeholder for research not yet done.

Open Questions

Did Louis Le Prince publicly demonstrate his moving pictures before he disappeared in 1890?

Does violent screen media cause real-world aggression?

Should Baird's 1926 mechanical demonstration or Farnsworth's 1927 all-electronic demonstration be credited as the true invention of television?

Was KDKA's 1920 election-night broadcast really the first, or do rival stations have an equal claim?

Was the hypodermic needle model ever actually formulated as a coherent theory, or is it a retrospective myth?

Was the signal Marconi reported receiving in December 1901 genuinely a transatlantic radio transmission?

What single year should count as the camera obscura's introduction?

What was the actual box office gross of The Birth of a Nation?

When and where did the broadside originate as a printed form?

When exactly did Nicéphore Niépce make the first surviving photograph?

When was the camera obscura effect first described and used?

Where did the 1867 earliest known billboard rentals take place?

Where was Jorn Barger based in December 1997 when he coined the term weblog?

Where was the 1786 advertising agency of William Taylor located?

Where was The Nostalgia Merchant, the first home video distribution company, based?

Which computer game is properly the first video game: OXO (1952), Tennis for Two (1958), Spacewar! (1962), or a later commercially released title such as the Magnavox Odyssey games (1972)?

Which process truly began the 1950s widescreen era: Cinerama or CinemaScope?

Which work counts as the first film?

Who actually deserves credit for the vacuum tube's amplification mechanism: Lee de Forest or Edwin Armstrong?

Who was Tank Man, the unidentified man who stood in front of the tank column near Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, and what became of him?