Arts & Entertainment.

The compact disc, developed by Philips and Sony, first went on sale in Japan in October 1982 alongside the Sony CDP-101, the first consumer CD player. CDs reached North America and Europe in March 1983. Billy Joel's 52nd Street was among the first titles released.

Katharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress — for Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968) and On Golden Pond (1981) — the most acting Oscars won by any performer. Several actors, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Frances McDormand, have three.

MTV went on air in the United States at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981. Its first music video was the Buggles' 'Video Killed the Radio Star', directed by Russell Mulcahy.

English crime writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976), author of 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, is listed by Guinness World Records as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, with an estimated 2 billion copies sold. Her 1939 novel And Then There Were None alone has sold over 100 million copies.

Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and released by Nutting Associates in 1971, was the first arcade video game and the first commercially available video game. It was based on the 1962 computer game Spacewar!, and Bushnell and Dabney went on to found Atari.

The Beatles scored 20 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles between 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' in February 1964 and 'The Long and Winding Road' in June 1970, the most by any act. Mariah Carey holds the solo-artist record with 19.

Walt Disney won 22 competitive Academy Awards from 59 nominations between 1932 and 1969, plus four honorary awards, for a total of 26 Oscars — the most won and most nominations received by any individual. Most of his wins were in the animated and live-action short subject categories.

The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York City, opened in 1966, holds 3,975 people, including 3,800 seats and 175 standing places. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest opera house in the world.

The Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa and composed between roughly the 4th century BCE and 4th century CE, contains about 100,000 couplets (shlokas) — some 1.8 million words — making it the longest epic poem ever written. It is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined.

ITV's Coronation Street, set in the fictional Manchester suburb of Weatherfield, first aired on December 9, 1960 and was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's longest-running TV soap opera on its 50th anniversary. Actor William Roache has played Ken Barlow since the first episode.

John Ford won the Academy Award for Best Director a record four times, for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952). Frank Capra and William Wyler won three each.

Agatha Christie's murder mystery The Mousetrap opened in London's West End on November 25, 1952 and, apart from a pandemic closure in 2020-21, has played continuously ever since — moving from the Ambassadors Theatre to St Martin's Theatre in 1974 — making it the longest-running play in history.

The BBC's rural soap opera The Archers was first broadcast nationally on January 1, 1951 and has aired ever since, first on the Light Programme and since 1967 on BBC Radio 4. With more than 20,000 episodes, it is the world's longest-running drama by both number of episodes and years on air.

The Hurrian Hymn No. 6, a hymn to the goddess Nikkal inscribed in cuneiform on a clay tablet found at the ancient city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria), dates to about 1400 BCE and is the oldest substantially surviving notated melody. Its notation has been reconstructed in several, differing scholarly interpretations.

NBC's Sunday-morning public-affairs program Meet the Press first aired on November 6, 1947 and has been broadcast weekly since September 12, 1948, making it the longest-running television show in the world according to Guinness World Records.

Bing Crosby's recording of Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas', recorded on May 29, 1942 and introduced in the film Holiday Inn, has sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide, the best-selling single of all time per Guinness World Records. Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind 1997' is second at about 33 million.

The Löwenmensch (Lion-man), a 31-cm figure with a lion's head and human body carved from mammoth ivory, was found in Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southwestern Germany and is about 40,000 years old, among the oldest known figurative sculptures. It is displayed at the Museum Ulm.

The BBC Television Service launched on November 2, 1936 from Alexandra Palace in north London, the world's first regular high-definition (by the standards of the time) public television service. It alternated between Baird's 240-line and Marconi-EMI's 405-line systems before standardizing on 405 lines in 1937.

The Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City, New Jersey, built by the Midmer-Losh company from 1929 to 1932, is the largest pipe organ in the world, with officially 33,112 pipes, though the exact count is uncertain.

The silent war film Wings, directed by William Wellman, won the first Academy Award for the year's top picture (then called Outstanding Picture) at the first Oscars ceremony, held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929 to honor films of 1927–1928.

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), published in 13 volumes in France from 1913 to 1927, contains an estimated 9,609,000 characters, making it the longest novel according to Guinness World Records.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a silhouette-animation feature by German animator Lotte Reiniger, premiered in Berlin in 1926 and is the oldest surviving animated feature film. Earlier Argentine animated features by Quirino Cristiani (beginning with El Apóstol, 1917) are lost.

The Grand Ole Opry, the Nashville country music show on WSM, first aired as the WSM Barn Dance on November 28, 1925. It has been broadcast every week since, which makes it the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history.

The Story of the Kelly Gang, an Australian film about the bushranger Ned Kelly, premiered in Melbourne in December 1906 and ran about an hour. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2007 as the world's first full-length narrative feature film. Only about 17 minutes of it survive.

Canadian-born inventor Reginald Fessenden is credited with the first radio broadcast of voice and music, transmitted on Christmas Eve 1906 from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, in which he played 'O Holy Night' on the violin and read from the Bible to ships at sea. Contemporary documentation is thin and the claim rests largely on Fessenden's own later account.

French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme received the first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 'in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect'.

Roundhay Garden Scene, shot by French inventor Louis Le Prince in Leeds, England, on October 14, 1888, is the oldest surviving motion picture. The surviving fragment lasts about two seconds and shows members of the Whitley family walking in a garden.

The Seikilos epitaph, a short song with Greek lyrics and musical notation carved on a marble grave stele near Aydın in modern Turkey, dates to around the 1st century CE and is the oldest surviving complete musical composition. The stele is held by the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia, survives in Sumerian poems dating to about 2100 BCE and in later Akkadian versions, making it the oldest surviving epic and one of the earliest works of literature. The best-known 'Standard' version is preserved on 7th-century-BCE tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, now in the British Museum.

In April 1860, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded someone, probably himself, singing the folk song 'Au clair de la lune' on his phonautograph, which traced sound waves onto soot-blackened paper. The recording was never meant to be played back, but researchers converted it to audio in 2008. It is the oldest recognizable recording of a human voice and the oldest recorded music.

The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Italy, opened on November 4, 1737 with Domenico Sarro's Achille in Sciro. It is the oldest continuously active venue for opera in the world, opening decades before Milan's La Scala and Venice's La Fenice.

Livraria Bertrand, founded in Lisbon in 1732, has its original shop on Rua Garrett in the Chiado district. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the oldest operating bookstore in the world, and the chain now has dozens of branches across Portugal.

The oldest surviving piano was built in 1720 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, the Florentine instrument maker who invented the piano, and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Only three Cristofori pianos survive, all from the 1720s.

The Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, designed by Andrea Palladio and completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, opened on March 3, 1585 with a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. It is the oldest surviving enclosed theatre and still retains its original trompe-l'oeil stage set; it is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Cambridge University Press dates from letters patent that King Henry VIII granted to the University of Cambridge in 1534. It is the oldest university press in the world and has published continuously since 1584.

Angkor Wat in Cambodia, built between about 1113 and 1150 under King Suryavarman II and originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, encloses 162.6 hectares (401 acres), making it the largest religious structure ever built. It later became a Buddhist temple and appears on Cambodia's national flag.

The Tale of Genji, written by the Japanese court lady Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century during the Heian period, is often called the world's first novel. It follows the life and loves of the courtier Hikaru Genji over 54 chapters and holds a place in Japanese literature like Shakespeare's in English.

A woodblock-printed Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra, discovered in the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang and now held by the British Library, carries a date equivalent to May 11, 868 CE, making it the oldest surviving dated printed book. It predates Gutenberg's Bible by nearly 600 years.