document_title: History of radio

question_text: who made the first radio broadcast in the world

question_tokens: who made the first radio broadcast in the world

text: History of radio

text: Summary

text: This article may need to be cleaned up. It has been merged from Radio#History.

text: Invention

text: The idea of wireless communication predates the discovery of "radio" with experiments in "wireless telegraphy" via inductive and capacitive induction and transmission through the ground, water, and even train tracks from the 1830s on. James Clerk Maxwell showed in theoretical and mathematical form in 1864 that electromagnetic waves could propagate through free space.[2][3] It is likely that the first intentional transmission of a signal by means of electromagnetic waves was performed in an experiment by David Edward Hughes around 1880, although this was considered to be induction at the time. In 1888 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was able to conclusively prove transmitted airborne electromagnetic waves in an experiment confirming Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

text: After the discovery of these "Hertzian waves" (it would take almost 20 years for the term "radio" to be universally adopted for this type of electromagnetic radiation)[4] many scientists and inventors experimented with wireless transmission, some trying to develop a system of communication, some intentionally using these new Hertzian waves, some not. Maxwell's theory showing that light and Hertzian electromagnetic waves were the same phenomenon at different wavelengths led "Maxwellian" scientist such as John Perry, Frederick Thomas Trouton and Alexander Trotter to assume they would be analogous to optical signaling[5][6] and the Serbian American engineer Nikola Tesla to consider them relatively useless for communication since "light" could not transmit further than line of sight.[7] In 1892 the physicist William Crookes wrote on the possibilities of wireless telegraphy based on Hertzian waves[8] and in 1893 Tesla proposed a system for transmitting intelligence and wireless power using the earth as the medium.[9] Others, such as Amos Dolbear, Sir Oliver Lodge, Reginald Fessenden,[10] and Alexander Popov[11] were involved in the development of components and theory involved with the transmission and reception of airborne electromagnetic waves for their own theoretical work or as a potential means of communication.

text: Over several years starting in 1894 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi built the first complete, commercially successful wireless telegraphy system based on airborne Hertzian waves (radio transmission).[12] Marconi demonstrated application of radio in military and marine communications and started a company for the development and propagation of radio communication services and equipment.

text: 19th century

text: The meaning and usage of the word "radio" has developed in parallel with developments within the field of communications and can be seen to have three distinct phases: electromagnetic waves and experimentation; wireless communication and technical development; and radio broadcasting and commercialization. In an 1864 presentation, published in 1865, James Clerk Maxwell proposed his theories and mathematical proofs on electromagnetism that showed that light and other phenomena were all types of electromagnetic waves propagating through free space.[2][3][13][14][15] In 1886–88 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz conducted a series of experiments that proved the existence of Maxwell's electromagnetic waves, using a frequency in what would later be called the radio spectrum. Many individuals—inventors, engineers, developers and businessmen—constructed systems based on their own understanding of these and other phenomena, some predating Maxwell and Hertz's discoveries. Thus "wireless telegraphy" and radio wave-based systems can be attributed to multiple "inventors". Development from a laboratory demonstration to a commercial entity spanned several decades and required the efforts of many practitioners.

text: In 1878, David E. Hughes noticed that sparks could be heard in a telephone receiver when experimenting with his carbon microphone. He developed this carbon-based detector further and eventually could detect signals over a few hundred yards. He demonstrated his discovery to the Royal Society in 1880, but was told it was merely induction, and therefore abandoned further research. Thomas Edison came across the electromagnetic phenomenon while experimenting with a telegraph at Menlo Park. He noted an unexplained transmission effect while experimenting with a telegraph. He referred to this as etheric force in an announcement on November 28, 1875. Elihu Thomson published his findings on Edison's new "force", again attributing it to induction, an explanation that Edison accepted. Edison would go on the next year to take out U.S. Patent 465,971 on a system of electrical wireless communication between ships based on electrostatic coupling using the water and elevated terminals. Although this was not a radio system the Marconi Company would purchase the rights in 1903 to protect them[clarification needed] legally from lawsuits.[16]

text: Hertzian waves

text: Between 1886 and 1888 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz published the results of his experiments where he was able to transmit electromagnetic waves (radio waves) through the air, proving Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.[17][18] Early on after their discovery, radio waves were referred to as "Hertzian waves".[19] Between 1890 and 1892 physicists such as John Perry, Frederick Thomas Trouton and William Crookes proposed electromagnetic or Hertzian waves as a navigation aid or means of communication, with Crookes writing on the possibilities of wireless telegraphy based on Hertzian waves in 1892.[8]

text: After learning of Hertz demonstrations of wireless transmission, inventor Nikola Tesla began developing his own system based on Hertz and Maxwell's ideas, primarily as a means of wireless lighting and power distribution.[20][21] Tesla, concluding that Hertz had not demonstrated airborne electromagnetic waves (radio transmission), went on to develop a system based on what he thought was the primary conductor, the earth.[22] In 1893 demonstrations of his ideas, in St. Louis, Missouri and at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Tesla proposed this wireless power technology could also incorporate a system for the telecommunication of information.

text: In a lecture on the work of Hertz, shortly after his death, Professor Oliver Lodge and Alexander Muirhead demonstrated wireless signaling using Hertzian (radio) waves in the lecture theater of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on August 14, 1894. During the demonstration a radio signal was sent from the neighboring Clarendon Laboratory building, and received by apparatus in the lecture theater.

text: Building on the work of Lodge,[23] the Indian Bengali physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose ignited gunpowder and rang a bell at a distance using millimeter range wavelength microwaves in a November 1894 public demonstration at the Town Hall of Kolkata. Bose wrote in a Bengali essay, Adrisya Alok (Invisible Light), "The invisible light can easily pass through brick walls, buildings etc. Therefore, messages can be transmitted by means of it without the mediation of wires." Bose’s first scientific paper, "On polarisation of electric rays by double-refracting crystals" was communicated to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in May 1895. His second paper was communicated to the Royal Society of London by Lord Rayleigh in October 1895. In December 1895, the London journal The Electrician (Vol. 36) published Bose’s paper, "On a new electro-polariscope". At that time, the word 'coherer', coined by Lodge, was used in the English-speaking world for Hertzian wave receivers or detectors. The Electrician readily commented on Bose’s coherer. (December 1895). The Englishman (18 January 1896) quoted from the Electrician and commented as follows: "Should Professor Bose succeed in perfecting and patenting his ‘Coherer’, we may in time see the whole system of coast lighting throughout the navigable world revolutionised by an Indian Bengali scientist working single handed in our Presidency College Laboratory." Bose planned to "perfect his coherer", but never thought of patenting it.

text: In 1895, conducting experiments along the lines of Hertz's research, Alexander Stepanovich Popov built his first radio receiver, which contained a coherer. Further refined as a lightning detector, it was presented to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society on May 7, 1895. A depiction of Popov's lightning detector was printed in the Journal of the Russian Physical and Chemical Society the same year (publication of the minutes 15/201 of this session — December issue of the journal RPCS[24]). An earlier description of the device was given by Dmitry Aleksandrovich Lachinov in July 1895 in the 2nd edition of his course "Fundamentals of Meteorology and climatology" — the first in Russia.[25][26] Popov's receiver was created on the improved basis of Lodge's receiver, and originally intended for reproduction of its experiments.

text: Marconi

text: In 1894 the young Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began working on the idea of building a commercial wireless telegraphy system based on the use of Hertzian waves (radio waves), a line of inquiry that he noted other inventors did not seem to be pursuing.[12]  Marconi read through the literature and used the ideas of others who were experimenting with radio waves but did a great deal to develop devices such as portable transmitters and receiver systems that could work over long distances,[12] turning what was essentially a laboratory experiment into a useful communication system.[27] By August 1895 Marconi was field testing his system but even with improvements he was only able to transmit signals up to one-half mile, a distance Oliver Lodge had predicted in 1894 as the maximum transmission distance for radio waves. Marconi raised the height of his antenna and hit upon the idea of grounding his transmitter and receiver. With these improvements the system was capable of transmitting signals up to 2 miles (3.2 km) and over hills.[28] Marconi's experimental apparatus proved to be the first engineering-complete, commercially successful radio transmission system.[29][30][31] Marconi’s apparatus is also credited with saving the 700 people who survived the tragic Titanic disaster.[32]

text: In 1896, Marconi was awarded British patent 12039, Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus there-for, the first patent ever issued for a Hertzian wave (radio wave) base wireless telegraphic system.[33] In 1897, he established a radio station on the Isle of Wight, England. Marconi opened his "wireless" factory in the former silk-works at Hall Street, Chelmsford, England in 1898, employing around 60 people. Shortly after the 1900s, Marconi held the patent rights for radio. Marconi would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909[34]  and be more successful than any other inventor in his ability to commercialize radio and its associated equipment into a global business.[12] In the US some of his subsequent patented refinements (but not his original radio patent) would be overturned in a 1935 court case (upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1943).[35]

text: 20th century

text: In 1900, Brazilian priest Roberto Landell de Moura transmitted the human voice wirelessly. According to the newspaper Jornal do Comercio (June 10, 1900), he conducted his first public experiment on June 3, 1900, in front of journalists and the General Consul of Great Britain,  C.P. Lupton, in São Paulo, Brazil, for a distance of approximately 5.0 miles (8 km). The points of transmission and reception were Alto de Santana and Paulista Avenue.[36]

text: One year after that experiment, he received his first patent from the Brazilian government. It was described as "equipment for the purpose of phonetic transmissions through space, land and water elements at a distance with or without the use of wires." Four months later, knowing that his invention had real value, he left Brazil for the United States with the intent of patenting the machine at the US Patent Office in Washington, DC.

text: Having few resources, he had to rely on friends to push his project. Despite great difficulty, three patents were awarded: "The Wave Transmitter" (October 11, 1904), which is the precursor of today's radio transceiver; "The Wireless Telephone" and the "Wireless Telegraph", both dated November 22, 1904.

text: The next advancement was the vacuum tube detector, invented by Westinghouse engineers. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden used a synchronous rotary-spark transmitter for the first radio program broadcast, from Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.[37] This was, for all intents and purposes, the first transmission of what is now known as amplitude modulation or AM radio.

text: In June 1912 Marconi opened the world's first purpose-built radio factory at New Street Works in Chelmsford, England.

text: The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan, which survives today as all-news format station WWJ under ownership of the CBS network. The first college radio station began broadcasting on October 14, 1920 from Union College, Schenectady, New York under the personal call letters of Wendell King, an African-American student at the school.[37]

text: That month 2ADD (renamed WRUC in 1947), aired what is believed to be the first public entertainment broadcast in the United States, a series of Thursday night concerts initially heard within a 100-mile (160 km) radius and later for a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) radius. In November 1920, it aired the first broadcast of a sporting event.[37][38] At 9 pm on August 27, 1920, Sociedad Radio Argentina aired a live performance of Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal from the Coliseo Theater in downtown Buenos Aires. Only about twenty homes in the city had receivers to tune in this radio program. Meanwhile, regular entertainment broadcasts commenced in 1922 from the Marconi Research Centre at Writtle, England.

text: Sports broadcasting began at this time as well, including the college football on radio broadcast of a 1921 West Virginia vs. Pittsburgh football game.[39]

text: One of the first developments in the early 20th century was that aircraft used commercial AM radio stations for navigation. This continued until the early 1960s when VOR systems became widespread.[40] In the early 1930s, single sideband and frequency modulation were invented by amateur radio operators. By the end of the decade, they were established commercial modes. Radio was used to transmit pictures visible as television as early as the 1920s. Commercial television transmissions started in North America and Europe in the 1940s.

text: In 1947 AT&T commercialized the Mobile Telephone Service. From its start in St. Louis in 1946, AT&T then introduced Mobile Telephone Service to one hundred towns and highway corridors by 1948. Mobile Telephone Service was a rarity with only 5,000 customers placing about 30,000 calls each week. Because only three radio channels were available, only three customers in any given city could make mobile telephone calls at one time.[41] Mobile Telephone Service was expensive, costing 15 USD per month, plus 0.30 to 0.40 USD per local call, equivalent to about 176 USD per month and 3.50 to 4.75 per call in 2012 USD.[42] The Advanced Mobile Phone System analog mobile cell phone system, developed by Bell Labs, was introduced in the Americas in 1978,[43][44][45] gave much more capacity. It was the primary analog mobile phone system in North America (and other locales) through the 1980s and into the 2000s.

text: In 1954, the Regency company introduced a pocket transistor radio, the TR-1, powered by a "standard 22.5 V Battery." In 1955, the newly formed Sony company introduced its first transistorized radio.[46] It was small enough to fit in a vest pocket, powered by a small battery. It was durable, because it had no vacuum tubes to burn out. Over the next 20 years, transistors replaced tubes almost completely except for high-power transmitters.

text: By 1963, color television was being broadcast commercially (though not all broadcasts or programs were in color), and the first (radio) communication satellite, Telstar, was launched. In the late 1960s, the U.S. long-distance telephone network began to convert to a digital network, employing digital radios for many of its links. In the 1970s, LORAN became the premier radio navigation system.

text: Soon, the U.S. Navy experimented with satellite navigation, culminating in the launch of the Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation in 1987. In the early 1990s, amateur radio experimenters began to use personal computers with audio cards to process radio signals. In 1994, the U.S. Army and DARPA launched an aggressive, successful project to construct a software-defined radio that can be programmed to be virtually any radio by changing its software program. Digital transmissions began to be applied to broadcasting in the late 1990s.

text: Start of the 20th century

text: Around the start of the 20th century, the Slaby-Arco wireless system was developed by Adolf Slaby and Georg von Arco. In 1900, Reginald Fessenden made a weak transmission of voice over the airwaves.  In 1901, Marconi conducted the first successful transatlantic experimental radio communications. In 1904, The U.S. Patent Office reversed its decision, awarding Marconi a patent for the invention of radio, possibly influenced by Marconi's financial backers in the States, who included Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie. This also allowed the U.S. government (among others) to avoid having to pay the royalties that were being claimed by Tesla for use of his patents. For more information see Marconi's radio work. In 1907, Marconi established the first commercial transatlantic radio communications service, between Clifden, Ireland and Glace Bay, Newfoundland.

text: Julio Cervera Baviera

text: Julio Cervera Baviera developed radio in Spain around 1902.[47][48] Cervera Baviera obtained patents in England, Germany, Belgium, and Spain. In May–June 1899, Cervera had, with the blessing of the Spanish Army, visited Marconi's radiotelegraphic installations on the English Channel, and worked to develop his own system. He began collaborating with Marconi on resolving the problem of a wireless communication system, obtaining some patents by the end of 1899. Cervera, who had worked with Marconi and his assistant George Kemp in 1899, resolved the difficulties of wireless telegraph and obtained his first patents prior to the end of that year. On March 22, 1902, Cervera founded the Spanish Wireless Telegraph and Telephone Corporation and brought to his corporation the patents he had obtained in Spain, Belgium, Germany and England.[49] He established the second and third regular radiotelegraph service in the history of the world in 1901 and 1902 by maintaining regular transmissions between Tarifa and Ceuta (across the Straits of Gibraltar) for three consecutive months, and between Javea (Cabo de la Nao) and Ibiza (Cabo Pelado). This is after Marconi established the radiotelegraphic service between the Isle of Wight and Bournemouth in 1898. In 1906, Domenico Mazzotto wrote: "In Spain the Minister of War has applied the system perfected by the commander of military engineering, Julio Cervera Baviera (English patent No. 20084 (1899))."[50] Cervera thus achieved some success in this field, but his radiotelegraphic activities ceased suddenly, the reasons for which are unclear to this day.[51]

text: British Marconi

text: Using various patents, the British Marconi company was established in 1897 and began communication between coast radio stations and ships at sea. This company, along with its subsidiaries Canadian Marconi and American Marconi, had a stranglehold on ship-to-shore communication. It operated much the way American Telephone and Telegraph operated until 1983, owning all of its equipment and refusing to communicate with non-Marconi equipped ships. In June 1912, after the RMS Titanic disaster, due to increased production Marconi opened the world's first purpose-built radio factory at New Street Works in Chelmsford, and in 1932 the Marconi Research Laboratory. Many inventions improved the quality of radio, and amateurs experimented with uses of radio, thus planting the first seeds of broadcasting.

text: Telefunken

text: The company Telefunken was founded on May 27, 1903, as "Telefunken society for wireless telefon" of Siemens & Halske (S & H) and the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electricity Company) as joint undertakings for radio engineering in Berlin. It continued as a joint venture of AEG and Siemens AG, until Siemens left in 1941. In 1911, Kaiser Wilhelm II sent Telefunken engineers to West Sayville, New York to erect three 600-foot (180-m) radio towers there. Nikola Tesla assisted in the construction. A similar station was erected in Nauen, creating the only wireless communication between North America and Europe.

text: Reginald Fessenden

text: The invention of amplitude-modulated (AM) radio, so that more than one station can send signals (as opposed to spark-gap radio, where one transmitter covers the entire bandwidth of the spectrum) is attributed to Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden used an Alexanderson alternator and rotary spark-gap transmitter to make the first radio audio broadcast, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.

text: Ferdinand Braun

text: In 1909, Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".

text: Charles David Herrold

text: In April 1909 Charles David Herrold, an electronics instructor in San Jose, California constructed a broadcasting station. It used spark gap technology, but modulated the carrier frequency with the human voice, and later music. The station "San Jose Calling" (there were no call letters), continued to eventually become today's KCBS in San Francisco. Herrold, the son of a Santa Clara Valley farmer, coined the terms "narrowcasting" and "broadcasting", respectively to identify transmissions destined for a single receiver such as that on board a ship, and those transmissions destined for a general audience. (The term "broadcasting" had been used in farming to define the tossing of seed in all directions.) Charles Herrold did not claim to be the first to transmit the human voice, but he claimed to be the first to conduct "broadcasting". To help the radio signal to spread in all directions, he designed some omnidirectional antennas, which he mounted on the rooftops of various buildings in San Jose. Herrold also claims to be the first broadcaster to accept advertising (he exchanged publicity for a local record store for records to play on his station), though this dubious honour usually is foisted on WEAF (1922).

text: In 1912, the RMS Titanic sank in the northern Atlantic Ocean. After this, wireless telegraphy using spark-gap transmitters quickly became universal on large ships. In 1913, the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was convened and produced a treaty requiring shipboard radio stations to be manned 24 hours a day. A typical high-power spark gap was a rotating commutator with six to twelve contacts per wheel, nine inches (229 mm) to a foot wide, driven by about 2,000 volts DC. As the gaps made and broke contact, the radio wave was audible as a tone in a magnetic detector at a remote location. The telegraph key often directly made and broke the 2,000 volt supply. One side of the spark gap was directly connected to the antenna. Receivers with thermionic valves became commonplace before spark-gap transmitters were replaced by continuous wave transmitters.

text: Harold J. Power

text: On March 8, 1916, Harold Power with his radio company American Radio and Research Company (AMRAD), broadcast the first continuous broadcast in the world from Tufts University under the call sign 1XE (it lasted 3 hours). The company later became the first to broadcast on a daily schedule, and the first to broadcast radio dance programs, university professor lectures, the weather, and bedtime stories.[52]

text: Edwin Armstrong

text: Inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong is credited with developing many of the features of radio as it is known today. Armstrong patented three important inventions that made today's radio possible. Regeneration, the superheterodyne circuit and wide-band frequency modulation or FM. Regeneration or the use of positive feedback greatly increased the amplitude of received radio signals to the point where they could be heard without headphones. The superhet simplified radio receivers by doing away with the need for several tuning controls. It made radios more sensitive and selective as well. FM gave listeners a static-free experience with better sound quality and fidelity than AM.

text: Wavelength (meters) vs. frequency (kilocycles, kilohertz)

text: In early radio, and to a limited extent much later, the transmission signal of the radio station was specified in meters, referring to the wavelength, the length of the radio wave. This is the origin of the terms long wave, medium wave, and short wave radio. Portions of the radio spectrum reserved for specific purposes were often referred to by wavelength: the 40-meter band, used for amateur radio, for example. The relation between wavelength and frequency is reciprocal: the higher the frequency, the shorter the wave, and vice versa.

text: As equipment progressed, precise frequency control became possible; early stations often did not have a precise frequency, as it was affected by the temperature of the equipment, among other factors. Identifying a radio signal by its frequency rather than its length proved much more practical and useful, and starting in the 1920s this became the usual method of identifying a signal, especially in the United States. Frequencies specified in number of cycles per second (kilocycles, megacycles) were replaced by the more precise designation of hertz (cycles per second) about 1965.

text: Audio broadcasting (1919 to 1950s)

text: Crystal sets

text: The most common type of receiver before vacuum tubes was the crystal set, although some early radios used some type of amplification through electric current or battery. Inventions of the triode amplifier, motor-generator, and detector enabled audio radio. The use of amplitude modulation (AM), with which more than one station can simultaneously send signals (as opposed to spark-gap radio, where one transmitter covers the entire bandwidth of spectra) was pioneered by Fessenden and Lee de Forest.

text: The art and science of crystal sets is still pursued as a hobby in the form of simple un-amplified radios that 'runs on nothing, forever'. They are used as a teaching tool by groups such as the Boy Scouts of America to introduce youngsters to electronics and radio. As the only energy available is that gathered by the antenna system, loudness is necessarily limited.

text: The first vacuum tubes

text: During the mid-1920s, amplifying vacuum tubes (or thermionic valves in the UK) revolutionized radio receivers and transmitters. John Ambrose Fleming developed a vacuum tube diode. Lee de Forest placed a screen, added a "grid" electrode, creating the triode. The Dutch company Nederlandsche Radio-Industrie and its owner engineer, Hanso Idzerda, made the first regular wireless broadcast for entertainment from its workshop in The Hague on 6 November 1919. The company manufactured both transmitters and receivers. Its popular program was broadcast four nights per week on AM 670 metres,[53] until 1924 when the company ran into financial troubles.

text: On 27 August 1920, regular wireless broadcasts for entertainment began in Argentina, pioneered by the group around Enrique Telémaco Susini, and spark gap telegraphy stopped. On 31 August 1920 the first known radio news program was broadcast by station 8MK, the unlicensed predecessor of WWJ (AM) in Detroit, Michigan. In 1922 regular wireless broadcasts for entertainment began in the UK from the Marconi Research Centre 2MT at Writtle near Chelmsford, England. Early radios ran the entire power of the transmitter through a carbon microphone. In the 1920s, the Westinghouse company bought Lee de Forest's and Edwin Armstrong's patent. During the mid-1920s, Amplifying vacuum tubes (US)/thermionic valves (UK) revolutionized radio receivers and transmitters. Westinghouse engineers developed a more modern vacuum tube.

text: Political interest in the United Kingdom

text: The British government and the state-owned postal services found themselves under massive pressure from the wireless industry (including telegraphy) and early radio adopters to open up to the new medium. In an internal confidential report from February 25, 1924, the Imperial Wireless Telegraphy Committee stated:

text: Licensing of radio stations in the U.S.

text:
Under the Radio Act of 1912, licensing was the authority of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor (after 1913, the Department of Commerce). There is no known comprehensive record of the stations licensed under this act. The Department had no authority to withhold a license from anyone who requested one, and did not regulate frequencies or power.
Beginning in 1926, the Federal Radio Commission regulated radio use in the United States.
The Radio Act of 1927 gave the Federal Radio Commission the power to grant and deny licenses, and to assign frequencies and power levels for each licensee. In 1928 it began requiring licenses of existing stations and setting controls on who could broadcast from where on what frequency and at what power. Some stations could not obtain a license and ceased operations. There was no control of the content being broadcast.
The Communications Act of 1934 abolished the Federal Radio Commission and replaced it with the Federal Communications Commission, giving it authority over broadcast television, then the subject of experiments, and the new radio networks (and famously contributing to the breakup of the NBC Network for anti-trust reasons).

tag: ul

text: Licensed commercial public radio stations

text: The question of the 'first' publicly targeted licensed radio station in the U.S. has more than one answer and depends on semantics. Settlement of this 'first' question may hang largely upon what constitutes 'regular' programming.

text:
It is commonly attributed to KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which in October 1920 received its license and went on the air as the first US licensed commercial broadcasting station on November 2, 1920 with the presidential election results as its inaugural show, but was not broadcasting daily until 1921. (Their engineer Frank Conrad had been broadcasting from on the two call sign signals of 8XK and 8YK since 1916.) Technically, KDKA was the first of several already-extant stations to receive a 'limited commercial' license.
On February 17, 1919, station 9XM at the University of Wisconsin in Madison broadcast human speech to the public at large. 9XM was first experimentally licensed in 1914, began regular Morse code transmissions in 1916, and its first music broadcast in 1917. Regularly scheduled broadcasts of voice and music began in January 1921. That station is still on the air today as WHA.
On August 20, 1920 8MK, began broadcasting daily and was credited by famed inventor Lee De Forest as the first commercial station. 8MK was licensed to a teenager, Michael DeLisle Lyons, and financed by E. W. Scripps. In 1921 8MK changed to WBL and then to WWJ in 1922, in Detroit. It has carried a regular schedule of programming to the present and also broadcast the 1920 presidential election returns just as KDKA did.[55]  Inventor Lee DeForest claims to have been present during 8MK's earliest broadcasts, since the station was using a transmitter sold by his company.[56] In August 1921, teenagers Michael DeLisle Lyons, his younger brother Francis "Frank" Edward Lyons and Ed Clark (founder of WJR - Detroit) put the first radio in a police car in Toledo, Ohio.

text: There is the history noted above of Charles David Herrold's radio services as early as 1909 with call signs FN, SJN, 6XF, and 6XE until 1921 when it became WKQW and then finally KCBS in 1949.

text:
The first station to receive a commercial license was WBZ, then in Springfield, Massachusetts .  Lists provided to the Boston Globe by the U.S. Department of Commerce showed that WBZ received its commercial license on 15 September 1921; another Westinghouse station, WJZ, then in Newark, New Jersey, received its commercial license on November 7, the same day as KDKA did.[57] What separates WJZ and WBZ from KDKA is the fact that neither of the former stations remain in their original city of license, whereas KDKA has remained in Pittsburgh for its entire existence.
2XG: Launched by Lee De Forest in the Highbridge section of New York City, that station began daily broadcasts in 1916.[58] Like most experimental radio stations, however, it had to go off the air when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, and did not return to the air.
1XE: Launched by Harold J. Power in Medford, Massachusetts, 1XE was an experimental station that started broadcasting in 1917. It had to go off the air during World War I, but started up again after the war, and began regular voice and music broadcasts in 1919.  However, the station did not receive its commercial license, becoming WGI, until 1922.[59]
2XN, broadcasting from the City College of New York
2ZK, broadcasting in New Rochelle, New York
WWV, the U.S. Government time service, which was believed to have started 6 months before KDKA in Washington, D.C. but in 1966 was transferred to Ft. Collins, Colorado.
WRUC, located on Union College in Schenectady, New York; was launched as W2XQ
WHA (AM), located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, Wisconsin; was launched as 9XM.
KQV, one of Pittsburgh's five original AM stations, signed on as amateur station "8ZAE" on November 19, 1919, but did not receive a commercial license until January 9, 1922.

text: Outside the United States there are also claims for the first radio stations:

text:
XWA, Marconi's broadcast station in Montreal, Canada, since 1919 (was CFCF, later CINW and shut down in February 2010)
On August 27, 1920 the Argentina Station started the first transmission from Coliseo Theatre at Buenos Aires, Argentina. Later that station received the name LOR Radio Argentina, and finally LR2 Radio Argentina. That station was in service until 31 December 1997 at 1110 kHz. Further information: Enrique Telémaco Susini

text: Broadcasting was not yet supported by advertising or listener sponsorship. The stations owned by manufacturers and department stores were established to sell radios and those owned by newspapers to sell newspapers and express the opinions of the owners. In the 1920s, radio was first used to transmit pictures visible as television. During the early 1930s, single sideband (SSB) and frequency modulation (FM) were invented by amateur radio operators. By 1940, they were established commercial modes.

text: Westinghouse was brought into the patent allies group, General Electric, American Telephone and Telegraph, and Radio Corporation of America, and became a part owner of RCA. All radios made by GE and Westinghouse were sold under the RCA label 60% GE and 40% Westinghouse. ATT's Western Electric would build radio transmitters. The patent allies attempted to set up a monopoly, but they failed due to successful competition. Much to the dismay of the patent allies, several of the contracts for inventor's patents held clauses protecting "amateurs" and allowing them to use the patents. Whether the competing manufacturers were really amateurs was ignored by these competitors.

text: These features arose:

text:
Commercial (United States) or governmental (Europe) station networks
Federal Radio Commission
Federal Communications Commission
CCIR
Birth of the soap opera
Race towards shorter waves and FM

text: FM and television start

text: In 1933, FM radio was patented by inventor Edwin H. Armstrong. FM uses frequency modulation of the radio wave to reduce static and interference from electrical equipment and the atmosphere. In 1937, W1XOJ, the first experimental FM radio station, was granted a construction permit by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In the 1930s, regular analog television broadcasting began in some parts of Europe and North America. By the end of the decade there were roughly 25,000 all-electronic television receivers in existence worldwide, the majority of them in the UK. In the US, Armstrong's FM system was designated by the FCC to transmit and receive television sound.

text: FM in Europe

text: After World War II, FM radio broadcasting was introduced in Germany. At a meeting in Copenhagen in 1948, a new wavelength plan was set up for Europe. Because of the recent war, Germany (which did not exist as a state and so was not invited) was only given a small number of medium-wave frequencies, which were not very good for broadcasting. For this reason Germany began broadcasting on UKW ("Ultrakurzwelle", i.e. ultra short wave, nowadays called VHF) which was not covered by the Copenhagen plan. After some amplitude modulation experience with VHF, it was realized that FM radio was a much better alternative for VHF radio than AM. Because of this history FM Radio is still referred to as "UKW Radio" in Germany. Other European nations followed a bit later, when the superior sound quality of FM and the ability to run many more local stations because of the more limited range of VHF broadcasts were realized.

text: Later 20th century developments

text: In 1954 Regency introduced a pocket transistor radio, the TR-1, powered by a "standard 22.5V Battery". In the early 1960s, VOR systems finally became widespread for aircraft navigation; before that, aircraft used commercial AM radio stations for navigation. (AM stations are still marked on U.S. aviation charts). In 1960 Sony introduced their first transistorized radio, small enough to fit in a vest pocket, and able to be powered by a small battery. It was durable, because there were no tubes to burn out. Over the next twenty years, transistors displaced tubes almost completely except for picture tubes and very high power or very high frequency uses.

text: Color television and digital

text:
1953: NTSC compatible color television introduced in the US.
1962: Telstar 1, the first communications satellite, relayed the first publicly available live transatlantic television signal.
Late 1960s: The US long-distance telephone network began to convert to a digital network, employing digital radios for many of its links.
1970s: LORAN became the premier radio navigation system. Soon, the US Navy experimented with satellite navigation.
1987: The GPS constellation of satellites was launched.
Early 1990s: Amateur radio experimenters began to use personal computers with audio cards to process radio signals.
1994: The US Army and DARPA launched an aggressive successful project to construct a software radio that could become a different radio on the fly by changing software.
Late 1990s: Digital transmissions began to be applied to broadcasting.
2015: The first all-digital radio transmitter, called Pizzicato, was introduced.[60]

text: Telex on radio

text: Telegraphy did not go away on radio. Instead, the degree of automation increased. On land-lines in the 1930s, teletypewriters automated encoding, and were adapted to pulse-code dialing to automate routing, a service called telex. For thirty years, telex was the absolute cheapest form of long-distance communication, because up to 25 telex channels could occupy the same bandwidth as one voice channel. For business and government, it was an advantage that telex directly produced written documents.

text: Telex systems were adapted to short-wave radio by sending tones over single sideband. CCITT R.44 (the most advanced pure-telex standard) incorporated character-level error detection and retransmission as well as automated encoding and routing. For many years, telex-on-radio (TOR) was the only reliable way to reach some third-world countries. TOR remains reliable, though less-expensive forms of e-mail are displacing it. Many national telecom companies historically ran nearly pure telex networks for their governments, and they ran many of these links over short wave radio.

text: Documents including maps and photographs went by radiofax, or wireless photoradiogram, invented in 1924 by Richard H. Ranger of Radio Corporation of America (RCA). This method prospered in the mid-20th century and faded late in the century.

text: Mobile phones

text: Broadcast and copyright

text: When radio was introduced in the 1920s many predicted the end of records. Radio was a free medium for the public to hear music for which they would normally pay. While some companies saw radio as a new avenue for promotion, others feared it would cut into profits from record sales and live performances. Many companies had their major stars sign agreements that they would not appear on radio.[61][62]

text: Indeed, the music recording industry had a severe drop in profits after the introduction of the radio. For a while, it appeared as though radio was a definite threat to the record industry. Radio ownership grew from two out of five homes in 1931 to four out of five homes in 1938. Meanwhile, record sales fell from $75 million in 1929 to $26 million in 1938 (with a low point of $5 million in 1933), though the economics of the situation were also affected by the Great Depression.[63]

text: The copyright owners were concerned that they would see no gain from the popularity of radio and the ‘free’ music it provided. Luckily, what they needed to make this new medium work for them already existed in previous copyright law. The copyright holder for a song had control over all public performances ‘for profit.’ The problem now was proving that the radio industry, which was just figuring out for itself how to make money from advertising and currently offered free music to anyone with a receiver, was making a profit from the songs.

text: The test case was against Bamberger's Department Store in Newark, New Jersey in 1922. The store was broadcasting music throughout its store on the radio station WOR. No advertisements were heard, except at the beginning of the broadcast which announced "L. Bamberger and Co., One of America's Great Stores, Newark, New Jersey." It was determined through this and previous cases (such as the lawsuit against Shanley's Restaurant) that Bamberger was using the songs for commercial gain, thus making it a public performance for profit, which meant the copyright owners were due payment.

text: With this ruling the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) began collecting licensing fees from radio stations in 1923. The beginning sum was $250 for all music protected under ASCAP, but for larger stations the price soon ballooned to $5,000. Edward Samuels reports in his book The Illustrated Story of Copyright that "radio and TV licensing represents the single greatest source of revenue for ASCAP and its composers […] and [a]n average member of ASCAP gets about $150–$200 per work per year, or about $5,000-$6,000 for all of a member's compositions." Not long after the Bamberger ruling, ASCAP had to once again defend their right to charge fees, in 1924. The Dill Radio Bill would have allowed radio stations to play music without paying and licensing fees to ASCAP or any other music-licensing corporations. The bill did not pass.[64]

text: Exotic technologies

text:
Meteor scatter
Earth–Moon–Earth communication


document_title: Climate of Oregon

question_text: when does the rainy season start in oregon

root

text: Climate of Oregon

text: Precipitation[edit]

text: Precipitation in the state varies widely: some western coastal slopes approach 200 inches (5,100 mm) annually, while the driest places, such as the Alvord Desert (in the rain shadow of Steens Mountain) in eastern Oregon, get as little as 5 inches (130 mm).[2][3]

tag: p

text: The Pacific Ocean, the moisture-laden air above it, and the storms moving from it over the Oregon coast, are major factors in the state's precipitation patterns. As humid ocean air flows east from the ocean and encounters the Coast Range, it rises steeply, cools, and loses moisture through condensation, which produces heavy rain. The heaviest precipitation in the state occurs at 2,000 to 4,000 feet (610 to 1,220 m) above sea level in these coastal mountains. At lower elevations along the coast, orographic precipitation is less intense but still produces 60 to 80 inches (1,500 to 2,000 mm) a year.[2]

text: In the Willamette Valley east of the Coast Range, storms blowing from the Pacific retain enough moisture to drop from 35 to 45 inches (890 to 1,140 mm) annually in the most heavily populated part of the state. East of the valley, the storm air rises again as it meets the Cascade Range, cooling once more and forming condensate at elevations often as low as 3,000 feet (910 m).[2] Since volcanic peaks in the range are quite high—more than 11,000 feet (3,400 m) in the case of Mount Hood[4]—most of the remaining Pacific moisture falls here in the form of rain or snow.[2]

text: The remaining two-thirds of the state is relatively dry, classified as semi-arid, with large areas receiving no more than 12 inches (300 mm) a year. Exceptions occur at higher elevations in the Blue Mountains and the Wallowa Mountains to the northeast, which get 50 to 80 inches (1,300 to 2,000 mm) a year.[2]

text: Across Oregon, the wet season runs from November through March, when the jet stream is strongest in the Northern Hemisphere. Precipitation is less in the months between winter and summer: April through June in the spring and September and October in the fall. Statewide, the dry months are July and August, when moisture arrives during afternoon thunderstorms, mainly in the mountains, and less often from storms that reach the north coast and adjacent counties.[5]

text: Snow[edit]

text: Snowfall in Oregon is greatest in the Cascade Range. Based on data from ski resorts and a few official weather stations, average annual snowfall in the Cascades can range from 300 to 550 inches (760 to 1,400 cm).[3] The state's largest annual snowfall on record, 903 inches (2,290 cm), occurred at Crater Lake in the Cascades in 1950.[6] In the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, snowfall totals can also be large, between 150 and 300 inches (380 and 760 cm). On the other hand, most winter precipitation in the Coast Range falls as rain, though heavy snow sometimes occurs.[3]

text: In most mountain areas in Oregon, the ground above 4,500 feet (1,400 m) is covered with snow from December through April. Snow depths, which vary with elevation and time of year, average an estimated 50 to 100 inches (130 to 250 cm) in the Cascades and 25 to 65 inches (64 to 165 cm) in the Blue Mountains at the end of January; by the end of April, they diminish to 40 to 120 inches (100 to 300 cm) in the Cascades and 5 to 45 inches (13 to 114 cm) in the Blues. Glaciers remain year-round on some Cascade peaks higher than 7,000 feet (2,100 m) above sea level.[3]

text: Annual snowfall along the coastal plain averages 1 to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.6 cm) a year, including years with none. Further inland, between the Coast Range and the Cascades, snowfall generally averages from 10 to 15 inches (25 to 38 cm) a year. East of the Cascades, in non-mountain settings, the annual totals range from 15 to 75 inches (38 to 191 cm), depending on location; they are smallest in the north-central region and the Snake River basin in the southeast and largest in the northeastern valleys and in the high plateaus of the south-central part of the state.[3]

text: Temperature[edit]

text: In addition to seasonal cycles in solar radiation (more in summer, less in winter), major factors affecting temperatures in Oregon include the moderating influence of the Pacific Ocean combined with variations in surface elevation, especially the Cascade Range. In general, temperatures on Earth drop by about 4 °F (2 °C) per each 1,000 feet (300 m) increase in elevation. Throughout the year, high elevations across the state tend to be cooler than low elevations. In addition, the Cascades, running north–south from border to border, generally retain relatively warm Pacific air masses on the western side of the state and relatively cool continental air masses on the eastern side. This prevailing pattern breaks down occasionally when dense cold air flows down the Columbia Gorge into the Willamette Valley and lowers temperatures more than usual from Portland to Eugene.[7]

text: Oregon has a wide range of temperatures, though the extremes are rare.[3] The highest was recorded on July 29, 1898, in Hermiston, Oregon, and again on August 10, 1898, in Redmond, Oregon, both east of the Cascades, when the temperature reached 122 °F (50 °C).[6] The lowest occurred on February 9, 1933, in Ukiah, and again on February 10, 1933, in Seneca, also both east of the Cascades, when the temperature dropped to −54 °F (−48 °C).[6] The temperature in the Willamette Valley is mild compared to the desert regions of the state, with high temperatures at or above 90 °F (32 °C) occurring only five to fifteen times per year, and low temperatures below 30 °F (−1 °C) similarly infrequent.[8] The hottest area of the state is the southwest; Jackson County is the warmest place in the state during summer.[9]

text: Selected climate charts[edit]

text:
Astoria

Bend

Brookings

Burns

Eugene

Medford

Newport

Ontario

Pendleton

Portland

Map of locations in the charts below

tag: table

text:
Astoria

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

10

50
38

7.2

52
37

7.5

54
39

5.2

56
41

3.3

60
46

2.6

64
50

1

67
53

1.2

69
53

2.1

68
49

6

61
44

11

54
40

9.9

49
37

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

259

10
3

183

11
3

189

12
4

132

14
5

84

16
8

65

18
10

26

20
12

29

20
12

54

20
10

152

16
7

283

12
5

251

9
3

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Bend

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

1.5

41
24

1.1

44
24

0.7

51
28

0.7

57
30

0.9

65
36

0.8

72
42

0.6

82
48

0.5

81
46

0.4

74
40

0.6

62
33

1.4

47
28

2.1

39
23

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

37

5
−4

29

7
−4

18

11
−3

18

14
−1

22

18
2

20

22
6

14

28
9

12

27
8

10

23
4

15

17
0

35

9
−2

54

4
−5

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Brookings

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

12

55
42

10

56
43

9.4

58
43

6.5

60
44

3.9

63
47

2

67
50

0.4

68
52

0.7

68
53

1.4

64
51

5.4

64
48

11

58
45

15

55
42

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

301

13
6

253

13
6

240

14
6

164

15
7

98

17
8

51

19
10

11

20
11

18

20
12

35

18
11

136

18
9

285

14
7

369

13
5

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Burns

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

1.2

35
15

1

39
18

1.1

49
25

0.9

57
29

1.2

66
36

0.8

75
42

0.4

86
47

0.4

85
45

0.4

76
36

0.8

62
28

1.2

45
22

1.6

34
14

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

30

2
−10

26

4
−8

28

10
−4

24

14
−2

31

19
2

19

24
5

10

30
9

9.1

29
7

11

24
2

20

17
−3

30

7
−6

39

1
−10

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Eugene

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

6.9

47
35

5.4

51
35

5

56
37

3.3

61
40

2.7

67
44

1.5

73
48

0.6

82
52

0.6

83
51

1.3

77
47

3.3

64
42

7.7

52
38

7.8

46
34

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

175

8
1

138

11
2

127

13
3

85

16
4

69

19
7

38

23
9

14

28
11

15

28
11

33

25
9

83

18
5

196

11
3

199

8
1

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Medford

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

2.4

48
32

2

54
34

1.7

59
36

1.4

65
40

1.3

73
45

0.6

82
51

0.3

92
57

0.4

91
56

0.6

84
49

1.1

70
42

3

53
36

3.5

46
30

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

61

9
0

51

12
1

43

15
2

35

18
4

33

23
7

16

28
11

7.1

33
14

10

33
13

14

29
9

29

21
6

76

12
2

89

8
−1

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Newport

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

11

50
38

8.1

52
39

8.2

54
40

4.9

56
41

3.5

59
45

2.7

62
49

1

64
50

1.3

65
51

2.6

65
49

5.4

61
46

11

55
42

12

51
39

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

270

10
3

206

11
4

209

12
4

125

13
5

89

15
7

68

17
9

25

18
10

32

18
11

67

18
9

138

16
8

276

13
6

299

11
4

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Ontario

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

1.3

34
18

0.9

43
24

1

55
31

0.7

65
37

0.9

74
45

0.6

84
51

0.3

93
57

0.3

91
54

0.5

81
45

0.6

66
34

1.2

47
27

1.4

36
20

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

33

1
−8

22

6
−4

24

13
−1

17

18
3

24

23
7

16

29
11

7.6

34
14

7.1

33
12

12

27
7

14

19
1

30

8
−3

36

2
−7

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Pendleton

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

1.4

42
29

1.1

47
30

1.3

55
35

1.2

62
39

1.3

70
46

1

78
52

0.3

88
57

0.4

87
57

0.6

77
49

1

64
40

1.5

49
33

1.5

40
27

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

37

5
−2

28

8
−1

34

13
2

30

17
4

34

21
8

25

26
11

8.1

31
14

9.7

30
14

14

25
10

26

18
5

39

10
1

37

4
−3

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm

text:
Portland

Climate chart (explanation)

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

4.9

47
36

3.7

51
36

3.7

57
40

2.7

61
43

2.5

68
49

1.7

74
54

0.7

81
58

0.7

81
58

1.5

76
53

3

64
46

5.6

53
41

5.5

46
35

Average max. and min. temperatures in °F

Precipitation totals in inches

[show]Metric conversion

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

124

8
2

93

11
2

93

14
4

69

16
6

63

20
9

43

23
12

17

27
14

17

27
14

37

24
12

76

18
8

143

12
5

139

8
2

Average max. and min. temperatures in °C

Precipitation totals in mm


document_title: Fortnite Battle Royale

question_text: when did season 2 start in fortnite battle royale

text: Fortnite Battle Royale

text: Gameplay

text: The main gameplay for Fortnite Battle Royale follows the battle royale genre's standard format. The game nominally is played either with each player on their own, or in a squad of two to four players, with up to 100 players participating each round. The round starts with players, weaponless, skydiving from floating buses ("Battle Bus") then deploying a glider onto a region of land. The island's fixed layout includes several landmarks and locations (named in an alliterative fashion, such as "Loot Lake", "Tilted Towers", and "Retail Row") that are mostly ghost towns, while a random distribution of weapons, shields, and other combat support features can be found by searching buildings and other sites. The goal is to be the last player or team alive by eliminating or avoiding other players. Over time, the game's safe zone (representing the eye of a storm that is ravaging the world), decreases in size, and players caught outside the zone will take damage, potentially dying. This directs the surviving players into tighter spaces, forcing player encounters. Players can loot defeated enemies for equipment. Random supply drops will occur during a match, providing random weapons and items. Like in the original Fortnite game, Fortnite Battle Royale is primarily played in a third-person perspective, and there is no current way to change it.

text: Fortnite Battle Royale's primary distinction from other battle royale games is the building system, which originated from the original Fortnite survival game. Nearly all objects in the environment can be destroyed and harvested for materials (wood, stone, and metal), which can then be used to build fortifications of limited durabilities, such as walls, ramps, floors, and roofs, which can be used to help traverse the map, protect the player from gunfire, or slow down progression of other players.  Weaker pieces can be destroyed in a few hits, but can be built quickly, while stronger pieces can withstand more punishment, but take longer to build.

text: The game is free-to-play, supported by microtransactions that allow players to buy "Vinderbucks", "V-Bucks" for short, the game's internal currency. V-Bucks are also shared with the main Fortnite "Save the World" game, which offers players the opportunity to earn V-Bucks by completing missions or daily quests.[1] V-Bucks can then be used to buy cosmetic improvements to the player (character, pickaxe and glider skins, back-wear, and emotes). The game is run as seasons, lasting about 12 weeks each. Each season introduces a new set of cosmetic items that can be obtained, which otherwise are not available outside that season. These are offered through a dual-track battle pass, which present a number of tiers that a players climbs through by earning experience through completing in-game objectives and their general performance during matches, while acquiring cosmetic rewards or other items in the process. Each player has access to the "free" track of the Battle Pass, which offers fewer prizes that must be earned by clearing multiple tiers, while players can also purchase the Pass' "premium" track with V-Bucks (roughly costing US$10),[2] which offers more diverse challenges and grants prizes for every tier the player clears. Players can use V-Bucks to complete tiers as well once they have a Battle Pass.[3]

text: Since release, Epic Games has added more features, such as new weapons, vending machines, and small, makeshift vehicles, such as shopping carts and golf carts. Epic is also able to deploy hot-fixes to the game to adjust aspects like weapon attributes and distribution, pushing these out in minutes if necessary should they or players discover critical issues or glitches.[4][5]

text: Limited time and competitive modes

text: Epic has the ability to include limited time modes (LTM) within the game, which provides Epic with experimental capabilities and gain feedback from players to improve upon.[6] One of its earliest additions was a 50-v-50 mode, placing players randomly on one of two teams and dropping them on opposite sides of the map, giving the two teams time to gather resources, create fortifications, and hunt the other team before the storm moved in.[7] Shortly after the launch of the film Avengers: Infinity War, Epic ran a Marvel-sponsored event that featured the Infinity Gauntlet that randomly spawned on the map; any player that equipped it became Thanos with added abilities.[8] A sandbox Playground LTM was introduced in June 2018, which allows up to four players to explore and build anything anywhere on the battle map, while being able to fight each other and respawn upon defeat until the storm covered the map after an hour and eliminated them all; Epic later made this a permanent mode in the game.[9]

text: Epic has stated that they intend to add ranked competitive play in the future.[10] A preliminary competitive mode, Solo Showdown, ran for a limited time starting in May 2018, ranking players by their final placement in matches and rewarding the top-placing competitors with V-Bucks.[11]

text: Seasonal changes

text: Fortnite Battle Royale has created a larger loose narrative that is exhibited through changes in the game map, which generally correlated to the start and end of the in-game season. For example, in the lead up to the fourth season which started in May 2018, players saw a number of shooting stars cross the skies, followed by a giant comet that neared the ground; upon the start of season four, the comet had hit one of the locations on the map, leaving a giant crater, among other changes. This tied into several new cosmetic skins related to superheroes and super-villains that were available that month.[12] Epic has the ability to create custom events that occur across all game servers simultaneously as well; the first example of such was a countdown leading to a giant rocket's launch in June 2018 which, in the aftermath, left cracks in the skies that have grown since that event.[13]

text: The game initially launched without any seasonable schedule, but starting with the release of Season 2 in December 2017, Epic has provided new content, which includes new cosmetics, new gameplay elements, and changes to the game's map, on a roughly 10-week basis. This also introduced the use of the battle pass for players to obtain some of this new content by completing challenges and gaining experience.

text:
Season

Period

Description

Season 1

September 2017 – December 2017

Retroactively considered the first season upon the start of second.

Season 2

December 2017 – February 2018

Introduction of the battle pass. Medieval themed.

Season 3

February 2018 – April 2018

Space-themed.

Season 4

May 2018 – July 2018

Superhero/Movies-themed season. Leading up to the start of Season 4, players had observed shooting stars crossing the game's map during Season 3, which later became small meteorites that hit the ground and caused some damage. Across all games a large meteor also started to appear, on track to hit the game map to coincide with the start of Season 4, completely destroying one of the major landmarks.[14][15]

Season 5

July 2018 – September 2018

Time travel-themed season. Prior to this season, Epic established a one-time event across all games on June 30, 2018 that fired a rocket from a villainous lair which created interdimensional rifts on the map.[16] The rifts grew over the next few days, with some in-game objects disappearing and new objects from other time periods appearing.[17] As part of its marketing, Epic planted a real-world version of the "Durrr-Burger" restaurant sign in the California desert, with clues pointing to locations of real-world version of the game's loot llamas located around the world.[18] The season started with changes of the map due to these rifts, while the rifts remained as a gameplay element within the season, teleporting the player to a high elevation and to re-land elsewhere in the map.[19]

Season 6

September 2018 – present[20]

Darkness and corruption themed. Near the end of the fifth season, another one-time event occurred in which the rifts created by the rocket launch closed up, leaving a large purple cube with glyphs on its surface in the game world, which players nicknamed "Kevin". Kevin slowly moved on its own across the map, in certain spots leaving behind glyphs that created low-gravity playing areas. Kevin ended its journey by falling into Loot Lake, turning its water purple and making it a bouncy surface.[21][22][23] At the start of the sixth season, the skies above the map darkened and Kevin re-emerged from the lake, lifting Loot Lake's island and mansion high into the air and occasionally moving it to different places above the map.  The lake is then renamed "Leaky Lake", becoming a whirlpool that levitates anyone who approaches it.  Several other places on the map became "corrupted" where players could find Shadow Stones which makes them temporarily invisible, able to move faster, and pass through objects, but unable to use weapons.[24] Through the course of the season, the floating island moved across the map to the spots where Kevin had left the glyphs, pulling up a small part of the land as a miniature floating island in its wake.[25]  Eventually, the glyphs of seven floating islands were activated, destroying the mansion and the island that Kevin was levitating and scattering the remains across the map, which then became portals that heralded the arrival of transdimensional alien creatures named "Cube Monsters". The Monsters become a new side threat to all players, similar to the Zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's Blackout mode, and can easily be slain with special weapons for loot.[26]

text: Development

text: Fortnite had first been revealed by Epic Games in 2011, considered to be a combination of Minecraft and Left 4 Dead as four players would work together to scavenge resources to built fortifications, traps, weapons, and other objects to survive monster attacks.[27][28] The game ended up with a protracted development period, in part due to both external pressures, with the industry transitioning to a games as a service model, and internal shifts of focus within Epic (including focusing attention on their first free-to-play title Paragon) to meet the external challenges. During this period, Epic made a deal with Tencent, giving them about 40% of the company in exchange for their support for the games as a service approach as well as ready access to the Chinese video game market.[29] Fortnite was confirmed to have a planned 2018 release in June 2017, with a paid early access period starting a month later; the game is planned otherwise as a free-to-play title supported by microtransactions. With release in early access, the game featured its primary gameplay mode, "Save the World", where players in teams up to four would work cooperatively to survive and complete objectives on randomly generated maps.[30][31]

text: During the latter part of Fortnite's development, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was released in March 2017 on personal computers in early access, and quickly became a popular and successful game, becoming the defining example of the battle royale genre. According to Mustard, the Epic team "loved Battle Royale games like [Battlegrounds]", and explored how they could make a similar mode within Fortnite's engine. They kept this mode in a separate development team from the main player versus environment modes for experimentation and as to not throw off the balance in the main game.[32] The Battle Royale mode development was led by Eric Williamson with Zack Estep as production lead. Their goal was to develop the Battle Royale mode quickly from the core "Save the World" mode, putting off any complex features that weren't already in place as to launch the new mode as soon as possible; while they explored such potential ideas, they held off inclusion until after the main mode was launched.[6] The development of the Battle Royale mode took about two months starting in July 2017 after the "Save the World" mode had shipped, and was aided by the Unreal Tournament team.[4][33] Key differences for Battle Royale that differed from "Save the World" included a more limited progression for weapons, a small subset of traps, and a smoother, more natural terrain for the maps.[6] They also wanted to aim for games not taking longer than 25 minutes, which led to some decisions of which elements from "Save the World" would not carry over.[6] They had including Fortnite's building mechanic for fortifications, not sure how players would use that since the safe zone would continue shrinking, but found quickly that the mechanic helped to distinguish the game from Battlegrounds and was used by expert players frequently to win matches, and had since implemented more features to help players with rapidly constructing temporary bases.[6]

text: In those two months of development, Epic's plan was to include Battle Royale within the paid Fortnite game, and originally announced this approach publicly in early September 2017. Only two weeks before it was released did Epic decide to make it a separate free-to-play title, fearing that having it as part of the paid package would slow down the growth of the title.[33] Epic announced this change formally about a week after first announcing Battle Royale, allowing those that had purchased early access to Fortnite in anticipation of this mode to request refunds.[34] This release, which beat out Battlegrounds to consoles, caused some concern with Battlegrounds developer Bluehole, as they had been working closely with Epic for Unreal engine support in Battlegrounds, and were worried that Fortnite might be able to include planned features to their Battle Royale mode before they could release those in Battlegrounds.[35][36][37]

text: With the popularity of Fortnite Battle Royale by the start of 2018, Epic split off a separate development team to focus on improvements for this mode.[38] Epic said that their attention to Fortnite was causing some of their other games to see lower player populations, leading them to reduce development efforts on these games, particularly Paragon.[39] By the end of January 2018, Epic announced it was shutting down Paragon by April of that year, providing refunds to all players.[40] Players on a Fortnite-dedicated Reddit forum had expressed concerns that a similar fate could befall the Save the World mode of Fortnite, as externally, the Save the World mode has not received the same attention in providing updates and improvements compared to the Battle Royale mode since that mode's release.[41]

text: Localization

text: Tencent, who is a partial owner of Epic Games, will bring Fortnite Battle Royale to China; the company is already involved in bringing and supporting Battlegrounds in China as well. Tencent plans to spend up to US$15 million to help promote the game in China, set up eSports tournaments, and fight against copyright infringement and clones of Fortnite that have appeared in the country.[42] Epic is also working with Neowiz Games to bring a version of Fortnite to Korean PC bangs by the second quarter of 2018.[43]

text: Ports

text: A release of Fortnite for the Nintendo Switch video game console had been rumored in the week prior to the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018 in June 2018. During the Nintendo Direct presentation, Nintendo and Epic Games announced the release of Fortnite Battle Royale for the Nintendo Switch, supporting cross-platform play with any other platform except the PlayStation 4; such users are able to carry over their inventory, Battle Pass status, and in-game currency between these platforms through their Epic user account. The game was released on June 12, 2018, the same day as the announcement. It is the first game to support direct voice chat through the Switch console.[44]

text: In March 2018, Epic announced it was making Fortnite Battle Royale for Android and iOS mobile devices.[45] The iOS version was released first, and was expected to be followed by the Android version by mid-2018.[46] The beta version for iOS devices launched on March 15, 2018,[47] and opened to all players on April 2, 2018.[48] Epic Games stated that it was not possible to release the Android version with the iOS version simultaneously, and declined to provide a concrete release date for it, because the developers wanted to spend a few months making sure that the game will be compatible with as many Android devices as possible, a task that is not easily accomplished due to the high variety of Android hardware.[49]

text: The Android beta version of Fortnite was released on August 9, 2018 with a time-exclusivity for selected Samsung mobile devices until August 12, 2018.[50][51] On August 13, 2018, Epic began sending invites for the Android version to registered users for non-Samsung devices,[52] and by October 11, 2018, the Android client was made available to all without an invite.[53] Epic distributed the Android Fortnite Battle Royale app directly from its website rather than through the Google Play Store, citing that they want to have a direct connection to the players of the game, and they believe that the 30% fee Google takes from all microtransactions from apps through the Play Store was disproportionate to the types of services the store provides.[54] Security experts expressed concern over this decision, since this requires users to modify security settings in default Android distributions to allow third-party sites to install Android application packages (APK). This setting can make users, particularly younger players, prone to potential malware, including clones of Fortnite that install malicious programming.[55] About a month after the Android release, there were at least 32 clones of the Fortnite installer on the Google Store, with half found to include malware.[56] Epic's installer for Android does include a warning message following the install that users should re-enable security controls and warns users of only downloading content from trusted sources.[57] The initial installer was found by Google to have a potential vector that would allow for malware to be installed, though this was patched within 48 hours of discovery and Epic did not believe anyone used the vector.[58]

text: The iOS version of Fortnite Battle Royale alone brought in an estimated US$1 million in microtransaction revenue within the first three days of in-app purchases being available, according to analysis firm Sensor Tower. Glixel considered these numbers impressive, compared to the early success rate of other popular mobile games, such as Pokémon Go and Clash Royale which earned US$4.9 million and US$4.6 million in their first four days, respectively.[59] Sensor Tower further estimated that after one month, the mobile title had earned more than US$25 million in revenue, surpassing revenues from any other mobile games and other several top-grossing apps during the same period.[60][61]

text: Cross-platform play

text: For the first five seasons, all ports of Fortnite Battle Royale support cross-platform play with other versions, but with limited interaction in regards to the PlayStation 4. That is, players on personal computer and mobile versions can cross-play with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch users, or alternatively they can cross-play with PlayStation 4 users.[45][62] While Epic Games has expressed interest in having full cross-platform play across all available platforms, Sony's continued refusal to allow cross-play between the PlayStation 4 and other consoles rendered this impossible during the game's first year of operation, according to Microsoft.[45] Further, while players can use a single Epic Games account to share progress in Fortnite: Battle Royale on all other platforms, those who used their PlayStation Network credentials to establish their Epic account cannot use that account on other platforms.[63][64] The account restriction was confirmed to be as a result of Sony's initial decision to prohibit cross-platform play between its PlayStation 4 and other consoles, rather than a choice Epic had made.[63][65]

text: By September 2018, Sony had made a decision to allow cross-platform play for the PlayStation 4 for "select third-party titles", starting with Fortnite. A beta version of the PlayStation 4 client supporting this was released for the game on September 26, 2018, the same day as Sony's announcement.[66] A means to merge multiple Epic accounts as well as unlinking console accounts from an Epic account to attach to another are planned for release in November 2018.[67]

text: Solo mobile players, or squads entirely consisting of mobile players will play solely with other mobile players by default for fairness; players however can use cross-platform play to join squads on other platforms, and matchmaking will consider all available matches.[68]

text: Promotion and marketing

text: In May 2018, Epic announced a partnership with sports apparel manufacturing company IMG to produce official Fortnite-themed clothing.[69] A Hasbro-licensed Fortnite Battle Royale-themed version of Monopoly was announced for release by late 2018; the Fortnite Monopoly game reflects some elements of the video game, such as the money being replaced with player's lives, and the ability to protect properties on the board with walls.[70] Further, with this deal, Hasbro will produce Fortnite-based Nerf blasters, which are expected to reach retail in 2019.[71] Funko will release a series of Fortnite themed Pop! figurines by late 2018.[72]

text: Fortnite Battle Royale has been packaged as special bundles with both the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, each version providing redeemable codes for V-bucks and platform-unique customization options.[73][74] A retail release of Fortnite Battle Royale, called Fortnite: Deep Freeze Bundle, will be distributed by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch by late 2018. The package will include redeemable codes for V-Bucks and unique in-game cosmetics.[75]

text: Professional competition

text: One of the first professional eSports competitions using Fortnite was the Fortnite Pro-Am event, held on June 12, 2018 during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018, with 3000 in attendance.[2] This tournament was announced after the success of the March 2018 stream by Tyler "Ninja" Blevins where he played alongside celebrities like Drake. The event featuring 50 celebrities paired with 50 top streaming players competing for prize pool of US$3 million to be given to winning teams' charities.[76] Ninja and his celebrity teammate Marshmello were the winners of this event.[77]

text: In May 2018, Epic announced it was setting aside US$100 million to fund various tournaments throughout the year to help grow Fornite Battle Royale into a eSport.[78] During the Fortnite Pro-Am at E3 2018, Epic announced it was setting up a 2019 Fortnite World Cup event, featuring separate series for solo players and two-player teams. All players, regardless of skill, would have an opportunity to try to gain placement in the World Cup event.[79]

text: During mid-2018, Epic started running a Summer Skirmish series over 8 weeks, each week having a different format, with US$8 million to be offered to winners throughout the series. The series had some initial problems; the first week event was cut short due to technical issues with game servers, while the second event ended with accusations of cheating towards the winner which Epic later verified were not true.[80] Epic launched its second competition play series, the Fall Skirmish, on September 21, 2018, with up to US$10 million in prizes for winners.[81]

text: Reception

text: ReceptionReview scoresPublicationScoreGameSpot8/10[82]IGN9.6/10[83]

text: Player count and revenue

text: Fortnite Battle Royale has become its own phenomenon, compared by analysts to the success in drawing in players that are not average video game players as both World of Warcraft and Minecraft had done previously.[84] Fortnite Battle Royale obtained over 10 million players two weeks after its release.[85] By March 2018, it was estimated to have more than 45 million players.[86] Three months later, in June 2018, Epic announced they had achieved over 125 million players in less than a year, with at least 40 million players playing the game once per month.[87] Within a day of becoming available, the Nintendo Switch version had been downloaded over 2 million times, according to Nintendo.[88] Epic said that Fortnite had been downloaded over 15 million times for Android within three weeks of its launch.[89] On the release of Season 5 in July 2018, Akamai Technologies reported that Fortnite traffic neared 37 terabytes per second, the largest recorded amount of traffic for any video game that they have observed.[90]

text: Analysis firm SuperData estimated that Fortnite Battle Royale made over US$126 million in February 2018, surpassing Battlegrounds's revenues for the same period of US$103 million.[91] SuperData estimated Fortnite's revenues over all platforms to exceed US$223 million for the month of March.[92] By April 2018, SuperData estimated that Fortnite Battle Royale had surpassed both sales and player count on all platforms over Battlegrounds.[93]  The game generated US$296 million in revenue in April, followed by US$318 million in May, according to SuperData.[94][95] By July 2018, Fortnite Battle Royale had been estimated to have brought in over US$1 billion in revenue.[96][2] Prior to the Season 5 start in July 2018, Sensor Tower estimated that the mobile version of Fortnite Battle Royale made over US$1.2 million daily; following the launch of Season 5, revenues jumped to US$2 million per day.[97]

text: At the time of Tencent's investment into Epic in 2012, Epic Games had a US$825 million valuation.[98] Because of Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic's valuation increased to US$4.5 billion as of May 2018.[99] Bloomberg raised the estimate to around US$8.5 billion by the end of 2018 should Fortnite Battle Royale reach US$2 billion during the year.[98] Partially due to the influx of revenue from Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic reduced its portion of sales it collected from the Unreal Engine Marketplace from 30% to 12% in July 2018, applying that retroactively to past sales.[100]

text: Impact

text: Journalists attributed Fortnite Battle Royale's success over PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds as a combination of several factors: besides being free-to-play and available on consoles, the game was released at a time when Battlegrounds was struggling with game cheaters and a toxic community, and that it features a less violent, cartoonish quality to it that, like Minecraft, was able to draw in a younger and mixed-gendered audiences to play.[101][102] Further, Epic has maintained frequent updates for the game, adding new weapons and in-game tools alongside limited-time events and longer-term narrative elements that help to further draw in players.[103] The high interest in the game within March 2018, which has been able to draw larger audiences compared to existing multiplayer games like Grand Theft Auto Online and Destiny 2, has had a financial impact on competing publishers Take-Two Interactive and Activision Blizzard, their stocks having fallen during this period, according to analysts from Morgan Stanley and KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc.[86][99] Activision's CEO Bobby Kotick, on their quarterly results released May 2018, stated that "Fortnite is definitely a lot of competition right now...it’s been a really important catalyst in attracting new gamers to gaming",[104] and the company is looking to develop its own battle royale title.[105] Electronic Arts CEO Blake Jorgensen also considered both Fortnite Battle Royale and Battlegrounds as having a significant market impact. Jorgensen said " [Fortnite is] bringing younger people into the marketplace and younger people into first-person shooters, and I think that's good for the long run health of that category for all of us in the industry".[106]

text: Part of the game's success is also considered to be related to its impact on social media.[84] By March 2018, Fortnite: Battle Royale became the most-viewed game on Twitch, exceeding the average-concurrent viewership numbers of League of Legends and Battlegrounds.[107] One notable streamer was Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, who gained a large number of subscribers by March 2018, in part due to his skill and through promotions on Twitch that offered free Fortnite Battle Royale cosmetic items; by March 2018, he was estimated to be making US$500,000 a month from his streaming revenue.[108] YouTube streamer Rubén Doblas Gundersen held a Fortnite Battle Royale match with 99 other well-known YouTube streamers in late March, which drew over 1.1 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched gaming YouTube streams.[109] The Fortnite Pro-Am event held at E3 2018 was estimated to have drawn over 1.3 million views across Twitch and other streaming services, making it one of the highest-viewed live-streamed event to date.[110]

text: A number of celebrities and athletes have said they play Fortnite: Battle Royale, such as Chance the Rapper, Joe Jonas, Finn Wolfhard, Roseanne Barr, and Norm Macdonald.[111] For athletes, their appreciation for the game has taken on the form of recreating the various emotes in game as part of their on-field celebration dances.[112] Such Fortnite celebrations were frequently throughout the 2018 FIFA World Cup event in June and July 2018,[113] including by Antoine Griezmann after a scoring penalty kick during the final.[114] In March 2018, Tyler Blevins hosted a stream that included Drake, Travis Scott, Kim DotCom, and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster all playing the game. The stream broke over 635,000 concurrent viewers, making it the highest-watched stream on Twitch outside of eSports tournaments.[115][116] Other notable people have expressed their fondness for the game; the Russo brothers, directors of Avengers: Infinity War, stated that they often played Fortnite Battle Royale during breaks on the film's development, leading them to propose the idea of the Thanos LTM for the game.[8] The awareness of the game from well-known celebrities has been considered a reason for further popularity and player growth of the game.[117]

text: Fortnite Battle Royale has been jokingly referred to as the honomyn "Fork Knife" on social media, believed to have originated with people, unfamiliar with the game, described their friends and family spending time playing the game.[118] Epic added a harvestable, non-playable "Fork Knife" food truck to the game map as the term gained popularity.[2] In September 2018, Fortnite was featured as a question on the game show Jeopardy!,[119] and was spoofed in a skit on the September 29, 2018, episode of Saturday Night Live.[120]

text: With the release of the mobile version, teachers, parents, and students have found that the game had become popular to younger players due to the free-to-play nature, its cartoonish art style, and its social nature.[121] This carries over into schools, which has been seen as a disruptive element within the classroom.[122][123][124] Epic has since added warnings on the game's loading screens to discourage students from playing it during classes.[125] The UK's Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Matt Hancock, expressed concern at how much time children were playing Fortnite Battle Royale and similar video games without a balance of physical exercise and social interactions.[126] Other agencies, including the United States' Center on Media and Child Health and the United Kingdom's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children have cautioned parents that children may be influenced by the violent behavior due to Fortnite Battle Royale.[127][128] At the same time, parents have expressed appreciation for Fortnite to have their children engage socially outside of their core groups of friends in a game that is otherwise not excessively violent,[129] or see offering Fortnite as a reward for encouraging children to do well in school, offering their children the purchase of V-bucks in exchange for good grades.[130] Some parents see potential in their children becoming skilled in Fortnite as to become professional players and compete for part of the large prize pools, creating a market for tutors to help children improve their skills in the game.[131]

text: Lawsuits

text: In January 2018, Bluehole's PUBG Corp., the South Korean company behind PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), filed a lawsuit against Epic Games, claiming that Fortnite Battle Royale was a copyright infringement of Battlegrounds; they accused Epic Games of copying PUBG's user interface and game items.[132][133] According to Korea Times, market observers predicted that there would be little likelihood of Bluehole winning the case, as it would be difficult to establish the originality of PUBG in court due to the battle royale game genre, which includes both PUBG and Fortnite Battle Royale, being derived from the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale.[134] The case has since closed, with PUBG Corp. dropping the lawsuit in June 2018 under undisclosed reasons.[135]

text: In May 2018, Epic Games filed a lawsuit against quality assurance tester Thomas Hannah after he leaked information regarding Season 4. Hannah, who had joined Epic in December 2017, breached the non-disclosure agreement by sharing details of the Season with Adam DiMarco. DiMarco later shared information in a Reddit post, spoiling the theme of the Season.[136] Epic stated that Hannah "diminished the enjoyment of the people who play, or who watch others play, Fortnite by ruining the suspense that had been building in the Fortnite community in anticipation of upcoming season".[137]

text: Cheats and mods

text: In October 2017, Epic Games filed civil complaints against two associates of the website Addicted Cheats, which for a payment provided cheating services to players. The company argued that the two defendants made and used altered game breaking code that was against the End User License Agreement and the Copyright Act.[138]

text: In October 2018, Epic Games sued YouTuber Brandon Lucas, who posts videos on the channel, Golden Modz. The lawsuit details that Lucas, cheats at the game and "...promotes, advertises and sells software that enables those who use it to cheat."[139] The lawsuit also names Lucas's secondary website in which visitors are encouraged to purchase the hack and/or Fortnite user accounts preloaded with hacks.[140]


document_title: Days of Wine and Roses

question_text: who wrote the poem the days of wine and roses

text: Days of Wine and Roses

text: Days of Wine and Roses may refer to:

text:
"days of wine and roses", a phrase from the 1896 poem "Vitae Summa Brevis" by Ernest Dowson
Days of Wine and Roses (1958 TV drama), a teleplay written by JP Miller
Days of Wine and Roses (film), a 1962 film adaptation written by Miller and directed by Blake Edwards
"Days of Wine and Roses" (song), a song from the film, by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer
Days of Wine and Roses and Other TV Requests, a 1963 album by Andy Williams
The Days of Wine and Roses, a 1982 album by Dream Syndicate


document_title: Chinese stock exchanges

question_text: how many stock exchanges are there in china

text: Chinese stock exchanges

text: Chinese Stock Exchanges may refer to the two main stock exchanges in mainland China:

text:
Shanghai Stock Exchange
Shenzhen Stock Exchange