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In 1901, Marconi made his first transatlantic airwave transmission of a message in Morse code, and the subsequent development of radio led to the British Broadcasting Company being established in 1922. This became a corporation (the BBC) in 1927 and was given a Royal Charter requiring news programmes to be impartial. Television was developed by the EMI-Marconi Corporation and by John Logie Baird, with the first continuous television service started by the BBC from London in 1936. Cinema remained a popular form of entertainment as well during this period, offering newsreels as well as films and cartoons.
In medicine, one of the major advances of this period was penicillin, discovered to kill bacteria by Alexander Fleming in 1928 and isolated for clinical use during the Second World War. With other antibiotics it continues to treat a variety of diseases. During the period, physicists such as Ernest Rutherford explored the structure of the atom. Work in this area led to the first atom bombs being built in the US during the Second World War, and to the development of nuclearenergy After the First World War, air transport routes began to be set up, first from London to Paris and then around the world, with Imperial Airways offering services to Singapore and the Cape (though this took thirty-three staged \'hops\' in 1932). The Second World War brought accelerated air technology, benefiting from the invention of radar in 1935, and commercial services grew rapidly afterwards, with the Comet, the first civilian jet plane, built in 1949.
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