defined as at least 200 lines) television service from the BBC, based at Alexandra Palace in London, officially begins broadcasting. Nuclear fission discovered by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman in 1939. The Volkswagen Beetle, one of the best selling automobiles ever produced, had its roots in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Created by Ferdinand Porsche and his chief designer Erwin Komenda. The car would prove to be successful, and is still in production today as the New Beetle. In 1935, Howard Hughes, flying the H-1, set the landplane airspeed record of 352 mph (566 km/h). In 1937, flying the same H-1 Racer fitted with longer wings, the ambitious Hughes sets a new transcontinental airspeed record by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds (beating his own previous record of 9 hours, 27 minutes). His average ground speed during the flight was 322 mph (518 km/h). First intercontinental commercial airline flights. The chocolate chip cookie is developed in 1938 by Ruth Graves Wakefield. The Frying Pan becomes the first electric lap steel guitar ever produced. Edwin Armstrong invents wide-band frequency modulation radio in 1933. The bass guitar is invented by Paul Tutmarc of Seattle, Washington, in 1936. Science Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto in 1930, which goes on to be announced as the ninth planet in the Solar System. Albert Einstein's equations form the basis for creation of the atomic bomb. Popular culture Literature and art Height of the Art Deco movement in North America and Western Europe. Notable poetry include W. H. Auden's Poems. Notable literature includes F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934), T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (1938), J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1937), Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (1937), John Dos Passos's U.S.A trilogy, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934) and Butterfield 8 (1935), and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), which was later famously adapted into a film in 1939. Notable "hardboiled" crime fiction includes Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Notable plays include Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938). Near the end of the decade,