Many small town theaters could only afford to hire a single piano-player to accompany their movies, but with these new sound movies, a recording of a full orchestra could be played, and the Warner brothers though that people would like this better. It also meant that the brothers got to choose for themselves what kind of music was heard alongside their movies, rather than each individual theater musician deciding what to play.
Everyone who went to a Warner Bros. The new sound movies were called Vitaphone movies, which means "the sound of life. A recording of an orchestra accompanied the action on screen, and the record also included some sound effects, like clashing swords and ringing bells, that were synchronized perfectly with the action on screen. Don Juan was a big success and Thomas Edison's dream of combining the phonograph and the movies finally came true.
The Warner brothers celebrated their success and planned to make additional Vitaphone movies. Meanwhile, the other movie-makers in Hollywood shook their heads and said, "It's just a fad. But it wasn't just a fad, and as the Warner brothers made more and more Vitaphone movies, sound movies became even more popular. There were silent adventure stories with recorded orchestral music like Don Juan, and there were also short films where famous singers and comedians sang songs and told jokes.
Moviegoers lined up to see them all. In the Warner brothers made a movie starring a famous singer named Al Jolson. In this movie, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson's character sang songs and in one scene he also talked and kidded with the woman who played his mother. Audiences really liked this scene, and the Warner brothers realized that people did indeed want to hear the actors talk. The rest of Hollywood, too, finally realized that this was not just a fad, and they all now rushed into making sound movies themselves.
But it was hard to catch up. In order to make sound movies, you had to buy a lot of expensive new equipment for recording sound, and you had to find and hire people who knew how to use it. If your studio was in a noisy location, near traffic or with airplanes flying overhead, you had to construct a special new building that would keep out all that noise. Some actors had funny-sounding voices or heavy accents that made them hard to understand. Their voices would not work for sound movies, so new actors with good voices had to be found and turned into movie stars.
Actors now had to memorize their lines ahead of time and stand still when they spoke, to ensure that the microphones would catch the sounds of their voices. And directors could no longer shout out instructions to the actors while the cameras were rolling. The microphones were very sensitive and could even pick up the whirring noise of the cameras. To keep that noise off the recording, the cameras—and cameramen—were put inside special boxes that muffled the sounds.
Cameramen sweated inside these boxes like turkeys being roasted in an oven, and they also complained that they weren't able to move their cameras around any more since that, too, made unwanted noises.
Everyone who worked to make movies had to learn a whole new way to do their job when sound movies were made. Workers in the theaters also had to re-learn their jobs. Projectionists worked in a tiny booth way up high at the back of theater, running the films through the projection machines that brought the films to life on screen.
These men now had to operate phonographs as well as projectors, so their job became twice as difficult. Sometimes when a record was played, the needle would skip, or jump around, in the groove and the synchronization between the sound and the picture would be lost.
If the sound no longer matched the picture, audiences would angrily boo and stamp their feet until the projectionist fixed the problem. But if the projectionist's job became much harder, at least he still had a job.
Theater musicians were not so lucky. When a theater installed a sound movie system, it no longer needed the live musicians to perform from the pit each night, so all those men and women lost their jobs. A few lucky musicians in Hollywood, who performed in the studios where the recordings were made, were now heard by moviegoers across the nation. Hollywood History. Skip to main content. Articles Categories Polls. Log In Sign Up adults kids. I Accept. Log In. Los Angeles Los Angeles.
New York New York. Georgia Georgia. Louisiana Louisiana. Silent Era classics. The workman who got the sketch. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. The phonograph had a less troublesome birth than most of his inventions, but it did not come about with quite the directness that Edison indicates.
There seems to have been at least one intermediate invention, a paper-strip phonograph evolved out of the earlier work on an instrument to be used for recording and reproducing messages in Morse code. His mind was at that time preoccupied with the development of telephony and telegraphy, and consequently he thought of the paper-strip phonograph simply as a machine to be used for recording and storing telephone messages for subsequent play-back or transmission.
But during November , Edison transferred his attention from the paper-strip phonograph with its limited application in telephony to the invention of a practicable machine for recording and reproducing the human voice. Shortly afterwards, Johnson informed Edison that the audiences at his lectures had shown particular interest in the paper-strip phonograph, but they were enthusiastic about the idea of recording and reproducing the human voice rather than any application of the invention to telephony.
Now Edison was sometimes influenced by the direction of public interest in his researches, so it is not unlikely, as Johnson was subsequently to assert, that it was this news that persuaded the inventor to concentrate on making the Tinfoil Phonograph.
Johnson in a letter to Scientific American, November 17, , revealed that Edison was at that time improving the paper-strip phonograph.
Less than two weeks later, Edison sketched in his notebooks a design for what was soon to become the Tinfoil Phonograph.
It consisted of a brass cylinder, made to move along a hand-cranked metal screw shaft, and a metal stylus affixed to a mica diaphragm connected to the tapered end of a horn. The surface of the cylinder was incised with an unbroken spiral groove.
The actual recording surface, known as the Phonogram, was provided by a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around the brass cylinder. To record or play back it was necessary to hand-crank the apparatus by means of a handle that caused the brass cylinder to rotate and move horizontally at regular speed along the screw shaft. In recording, sounds picked up by the horn caused the diaphragm to vibrate and thence to force the stylus up and down as it moved against the rotating tinfoil surface.
The action of the stylus dented the tinfoil by forcing it into the incised groove of the cylinder. In order to play back a recording, the machine was again hand-cranked while the stylus was placed on the tinfoil at the point where the indentations began.
As the stylus moved along the already indented track, it caused the diaphragm to vibrate and produce sounds those originally picked up in the recording process which were, in turn, amplified by the horn attached to the diaphragm. The one apparatus was thus a single, relatively simple device for both recording and reproducing sound. The very next day it was demonstrated to the editor of Scientific American, and the first published account of the new invention appeared in that journal on December 22, Thomas A.
Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we like the phonograph, informed us that it was well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around. This article, which contained a detailed description of the invention and how it worked, also ventured the earliest predictions concerning its future use: it could be employed to send spoken messages through the mail, to preserve the voices of great singers long after they had died, to record testimony offered in court, and to reproduce a last will and testament in such a way that no one could doubt the sanity of the person who had devised it.
To these uses was added a prediction of remarkable prescience:. It is already possible by ingenious optical contrivances to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience. Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices, and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.
Remarkably, Edison himself seems to have been unmoved by this particular prediction. At this stage in the history of the phonograph it was not the inventor but the theoretician who envisaged the application of the new invention to the development of talking pictures. True, the prediction in Scientific American did not speak of moving pictures. This dream was soon to be expressed in even more vivid detail.
On January 3, , the British scientific journal Nature reprinted the article on the phonograph from Scientific American. It evoked the following letter, published in Nature on January 24, The article from the Scientific American on the phonograph which is quoted in Nature, vol. Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.
Ingenious as this suggested combination is, I believe I am in a position to cap it. By combining the phonograph with the kinesigraph I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of Mr. Gladstone which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone.
Not only this, but the life-size photograph itself shall move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making the speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in real life. Surely this is an advance upon the conception of the Scientific American! The mode in which I effect this is described in the accompanying provisional specification, which may be briefly summed up thus: Instantaneous photographs of bodies or groups of bodies in motion are taken at equal short intervals—say quarter or half seconds—the exposure of the plate occupying not more than an eighth of a second.
After fixing, the prints from these plates are taken one below another on a long strip or ribbon of paper.
The strip is wound from one cylinder to another so as to cause the several photographs to pass before the eye successively at the same intervals of time as those at which they were taken. Each picture as it passes the eye is instantaneously lighted up by an electric spark. Thus the picture is made to appear stationary while the people or things in it appear to move as in nature. I need not enter more into detail beyond saying that if the intervals between the presentation of the successive pictures are found to be too short the gaps can be filled up by duplicates or triplicates of each succeeding print.
This will not perceptibly alter the general effect. I think it will be admitted that by this means a drama acted by daylight or magnesium light may be recorded and reacted on the screen or sheet of a magic lantern, and with the assistance of the phonograph the dialogues may be repeated in the very voices of the actors. When this is actually accomplished the photography of colors will alone be wanting to render the representation absolutely complete, and for this we shall not, I trust, have long to wait.
A sound feature film in color anticipated as an imminent achievement in ! But this proposal was somewhat optimistic. But in the phonograph was but a few months old and there were, as yet, no moving pictures.
Donisthorpe was a barrister who dabbled in science. His letter was written in blissful ignorance of the problems of synchronization, sound amplification, and motion picture projection. And when he spoke of the kinesigraph, he was talking of a machine that he had not yet invented, and which was to remain hypothetical until about , when he constructed it with the assistance of W. If he did, we have no reason to believe that he recognized in it a challenge to accomplish all that had been predicted for the phonograph.
In the intervening decade, he was preoccupied with the incandescent electric lamp, magnetic ore separators, dynamos, the telephone and the telegraph, and a vast number of other, related inventions, but gave scant attention to the phonograph and its development between and However, during , he turned back to the phonograph with the object of improving on his invention.
This resurgence of interest initially had no connection with the idea of making talking pictures, but was an attempt to meet the commercial challenge of an improved talking machine, the Graphophone, produced during —86 by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter.
The performance of the Bell-Tainter Graphophone was such that it showed distinct promise as a business dictation machine. An invitation to Edison to co-operate in its exploitation was understandably rejected. A ruthless and complicated business war-of-the-machines followed—at first between the phonograph and the Graphophone; but soon the struggle widened to include the Gramophone.
It was during this period of renewed interest in the phonograph that Edison seems to have turned his attention for the first time to the idea of making talking pictures. Dickson was to recall many years later:. Before making the drum, which was to fit over the phonograph shaft, I made a small micro camera, using various objectives or lenses taken from one of my microscopes to produce the pin-head photos.
The time of exposure was about three-quarters of a minute. Of course, this method was soon abandoned. I increased the size of the aluminum drum and of the pictures, and coated the drum with a bromide of silver gelatin emulsion; and would have obtained a fairly good result but for some chemical action which took place between the aluminum and the emulsion. That made me try a glass drum and a one-opening rapid shutter. This proved quite satisfactory and did away with my home-made emulsion coatings.
The pictures were sharp and good, and to save time in making prints or positives, I turned the negative into a positive effect with bichloride of mercury. The idea of this machine had, actually, been anticipated in by the British inventor Fox Talbot, though he did not go on to build it. However, the machine Dickson described was not only constructed but also demonstrated with qualified success by the end of It was little more than a curious toy of peripheral interest in the history of the motion picture.
Its microphotographs, on the revolving drum, had to be viewed through a low-power microscope; there was no means of projecting the pictures and evidently no conjunction of the viewing device with the phonograph.
Nevertheless, Edison had begun at last to think seriously about making talking pictures—a subject to which he was to return repeatedly and with many frustrations over the next quarter of a century. In the year , the idea occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combination of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously.
In the previous year Edison had established his laboratory in West Orange. We know that the two inventors met, but the influence of this meeting on Edison is open to question. Edison and he intended to perfect it at his leisure. The bizarre trial that followed would have done credit, half a century later, to the imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter. Muybridge was acquitted by a sympathetic California jury, but he did not resume his work for Leland Stanford until
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