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On this day in engineering history, The Walt Disney Company was
founded in a garage in Hollywood,
California. Today, the multi-divisional
enterprise is one of the world's largest media and entertainment corporations. Although
Walter Elias Disney and Roy Oliver Disney weren't engineers, they designed and
built what one observer has called "a unique combination of technology and
artistry". According to Professor Nina Ziv of the Institute for Technology and Enterprise (Polytechnic
University, New York,)
"Disney was first and foremost a great content company where technological
innovations were seamlessly blended with content."
Modest Beginnings
On October 16, 1923, Walt Disney and his brother Roy
borrowed $500 from their uncle to launch a filmmaking business. Soon, the
Disney boys received an order for their first animated film, Alice in Cartoonland, an adaptation of an earlier advertising experiment
that had flopped when Walt Disney was a twenty year old cartoonist in Kansas City. Although the
Disney brothers offered to repay their debt with an ownership stake in their California company, the
uncle requested repayment in cash. That choice was a costly one. According to
Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson, authors of The
Disney Way: Harnessing the Management Secrets in Your Company, the uncle's
$500 would have yielded a return on investment (ROI) of nearly $1 billion.
Sound and Color,
Cameras and Music
During the 1920s and 1930s, The Walt Disney Company turned technological innovation into its first taste of commercial success. In Steamboat
Willie, the first synchronized sound cartoon, Disney introduced the
now-iconic Mickey Mouse. Later, Disney added Technicolor to the Silly
Symphonies Cartoon Features. A patented process, Technicolor tints multiple
strips of film with special dies to create color images from black-and-white
stock. Disney held the Technicolor patent for several years, producing the
world's only color cartoons during the early 1930s. Later, in 1937, the company released The Old Mill,
the first film-short to use the multi-plane camera technique. That same year,
Disney also released Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated musical.
Disney at War
After building its Burbank Studio in 1940, The Walt Disney Company
grew its staff to over 1,000 artists, animators, and sound technicians. With America's entry
into World War II, however, the Disney facility shifted from Mickey Mouse to serious
subjects. Dedicating nearly 95% of its capacity to making movies for the U.S. armed
forces, Disney developed training and health-related films that continued to be
shown long after the war had ended. The remaining 5% of Disney's capacity was
devoted to the production of comedy short subjects, films that one historian
describes as "highly essential to civilian and military morale".
Editor's Note: Click here for the second installment in this two-part series.
Resources:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-technicolor.htm
http://www.justdisney.com/walt_disney/biography/long_bio.html
http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/dis.html
https://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=145789
http://books.google.com/books?id=NMWnD5bys1kC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=the+disney+way+innovations&source=web&ots=j-mw4_xsXU&sig=9lBswPKT_FHWN4vRPHpC6IUvdBo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPP1,M1
http://www.poly.edu/management/_doc/nina/Disneyfinal_102003.pdf
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