The Epic History of Synchronized Sound — Part 1
This story begins with one of the original American pioneers of movies and film, the prolific inventor: Thomas A. Edison. Although Edison didn’t precisely invent motion pictures, he did invent the phonograph in 1877 — a device which could record and playback sound edged on a wax cylinder.
In February of 1888, Edison attended a lecture by motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the man who first documented the pace of a galloping horse, and the inventor of a very artisanal projector device called the zoopraxiscope. After the lecture, both men met privately. Why not marry the idea of Edison’s sound recording device, the phonograph, with the moving images and pictures of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope? There was one major technological hurdle: there was no way of amplifying sound for large audiences to hear.
The phonograph used large horns to direct and amplify sound, but it just wasn’t big enough for a crowded theatre. Because of this issue, the English-born photographer abandoned the project and the idea, and return to making pictures of his motion studies. However, Edison didn’t ditch the whole project that fasts. Edison was a firm believer that the future of film was not in the projection for large audiences but in the individual exhibition. Edison kind of imagined and tried to foresee a future of a whole entertainment movie machine.
Some years after the meeting with Muybridge Edison embarked himself on a mission and envisioned a design of a device for what he believed would be the future of moving images. The inventor then tasked his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dixon, with developing a machine that years later would be called the kinetoscope. In 1894, Dixon and Edison experimented with recording sound in hopes to amplify it through another machine called the kinetophone.
From the very beginning, the design of motion pictures included the use of synchronized sound, unfortunately for all those enthusiast developers, especially Edison, getting and keeping such level of synch was nearly impossible using those early devices and machines. But the kinetoscope by itself did deliver what was expected and ended up catching on. On April 14, 1894, the first kinetoscope parlor was opened in New York City.
The industry, at least the emerging and incipient film industry, started to realize that there was indeed a very lucrative opportunity in moving images and sound, which proved Edison wrong about his initial thought of believing that individual viewing was the way to go, and the idea around which all of these machines and devices should develop. Motion pictures would find a home in the public theatre exhibition.
On another hand, sound itself was also having the same issues as moving images, the same issues that scared away Muybridge from joining Edison. In fact, other inventors tried to come up with a solution for the sync issue, and in 1900, at the Paris World Fair, three separate phonographs-synch devices were exhibited: phonorama, the cronophone, and the phono cinéma théatre. The issue was that these would run on sound-on-disk, and had, at least, three major problems: it was really easy to lose sync, they had no amplification, and they were really limited when it came to the recording time. The marriage of film and sound would just simply have to wait.
In the meantime, film would go from an archaic novelty to a major international industry. When sound technology was able to finally catch up, the movie and film business was already a game of moguls and lots of money, and it was sound what threatened to turn the whole industry on its head.
The Silent Stage
Twenty years after Edison and Dixon’s first film and sound experiment, the movies were a major entertainment source and outlet. It’s important to note that even though we call it silent movies or silent film, it was never really 100% silent. When the nickelodeons (the movie theatres) gave way to the movie palaces around 1915, these massive and large movie establishments would employ live orchestras to play music to add sound effects to the situations happening in the moving images.
Smaller venues, on the other hand, would hire or employ pianists, as the live orchestra was a luxury only a few could afford. Even that way, having either a pianist or an orchestra playing music in sync with the moving images was a rather high expense. The focus was now on having pre-recorded music to go along with silent films. Inventors wanted to go in the opposite direction to Edison, ditching the idea of recording music on two separate discs. Now, inventors and engineers wanted to imprint the audio right on the film’s strip itself.
In 1919 three German inventors, Josef Engl, Joseph Massole, and Hans Vogt, patented the tri-ergon process, a process capable of transforming audio waves into electricity which drove a light. This light would then be photographed on the film strip negative. When played back, a light would shine through the audio strip, converting the light back into electricity and then into sound.
And that solved the initial issues with synch and length Edison encountered; however, amplification was still to be solved.
