“The Birth of the Talkies”
The music goes round and round
oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo
And it comes out here.
Popular song
Kraahraak! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark
awfullygladaseeragain hellohello amarawf kopthsth. . . .
JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses
The story of the marriage of sound and film begins before cinema—with the invention of the phonograph. Though its original purposes were in no way associated with cinema, the talking machine, either Edison’s or some variation on it, was to be used in most of the early attempts to provide sound accompaniments to motion pictures.
As we shall see, the phonograph, invented in 1877, was a byproduct of research directed elsewhere, and its inventor was slow at first to envisage and develop its application to film. Thereafter, from the 1890s to the 1920s, the history of attempts to link the phonograph and film is checkered with failures, half-failures, and abortive successes. Ironically, the combination was to be perfected and exploited with great commercial success on the very eve of its eclipse by the now virtually standard system of using sound-on-film.
Edison’s Tinfoil Phonograph or Speaking Machine received U.S. patent no.200,521, dated December 15, 1877. The U.S. Patent Office could trace no prior claims to any similar inventions, and to this day it is popularly assumed that the talking machine was invented by Edison. However, the priority of Edison’s invention was, in fact, challenged in the nineteenth century by the dubious claims of other inventors, notably Léon-Scott, Cros, Koenig, Napoli, and Deprez.*
In 1857, Edouard Léon-Scott, a French amateur scientist, invented a device which he called the Phonautograph. It was capable of making recordings of sound waves but could not play them back. It was, as one historian of the phonograph describes it, “halfway towards a talking machine.”1 The Count du Moncel, a contemporary of Edison and Léon-Scott, commenting on Léon-Scott’s charge that Edison’s phonograph was a plagiarism of the Phonautograph, noted that Edison’s instrument “not only registers the different vibrations produced by speech on a vibrating plate, but reproduces the same words in correspondence with the traces registered.” Léon-Scott’s machine had certainly anticipated the first function of the phonograph, but, du Moncel noted, “the second function of the Edison instrument was not realized nor even mentioned by Mr. Scott, and we are surprised that this able inventor should have regarded Mr. Edison’s invention as an injurious act of spoliation.”2
In 1863 the German scientist Karl Rudolf Koenig completed an improved version of the Léon-Scott Phonautograph by providing it with a parabolic-shaped horn, thereby extending the ability of the machine to collect and make graphic records of all kinds of sounds. But Koenig, like Léon-Scott before him, did not provide the Phonautograph with any means of playing back the sounds it recorded. The machine was of value only in the laboratory, where it was used by scientists for analyzing sound waves. Nevertheless, as John Cain points out in his book, Talking Machines, “with the exception of a playing-back diaphragm . . . it [the Phonautograph] incorporated most of the essential features of the Phonograph, namely, a horn or trumpet for concentrating the sound, a diaphragm, a needle, and a revolving cylinder which moved along its axis.”3 In the 1870s, before the invention of the phonograph, a model of the Phonautograph was on exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where Edison might have seen it. But there is no evidence that he actually did see it or that he was directly influenced by the work of Léon-Scott and Koenig.
A more significant claim to priority of invention was that of the French poet and amateur scientist and inventor, Charles Cros (1842–1888). In 1860, when he was eighteen, Cros envisaged a machine which would record and reproduce the sounds of spoken conversation so that they would be visible and readable by deaf-mutes. Nothing came of this idea at the time, although, as we shall see later in this chapter, Cros seems to have anticipated Georges Demeny’s Phonoscope of 1891–92. On April 18, 1877, Cros, who was too impecunious to afford a patent, deposited at the Académie des Sciences in Paris a sealed envelope containing a two-page document, dated April 16, 1877, and titled “Procédé d’Enregistrement et de Reproduction des Phénomènes Perçus par l’Ouie.” This document, written at least three months before Edison began working on his phonograph, describes the principles of a machine that Cros later called the Paléophone.4
As an idea the Paléophone was a remarkable anticipation of Edison’s machine, but Cros never found the business interests necessary to promote his “invention” nor even the means to build a working model of it. John Cain and others have doubted whether the Paléophone would have worked even if Cros had been able to make it. However, the prior claim of Cros to have invented a talking machine was upheld as early as October 10, 1877 in an article published in La Semaine du Clergé. Cros himself, hearing of Edison’s work on the phonograph, requested that his sealed document be opened and its contents made public. His request was complied with on December 3, 1877, twelve days before Edison received his U.S. patent for the phonograph. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that in France particularly, “there are some whose definition of the term ‘inventor’ allows them to regard Cros rather than Edison as the inventor of the talking machine.”5
Other claims to prior invention of the talking machine are not worthy of serious consideration. Napoli and Marcel Deprez were among inventors who, after Léon-Scott and before Edison, attempted without success to make phonograph-like machines. But their work yielded no significant advance on the Phonauto-graph. Whether or not there is any substance in these dubious challenges to Edison’s priority of invention, there can be no doubt that his Tinfoil Phonograph of 1877 was the first talking machine that actually worked. It recorded sounds and reproduced them, and whereas the first of these functions had been accomplished by the Phonautograph, the second had been merely hypothetical until the invention of the phonograph.
Edison’s own account of how this invention came about indicates that his phonograph was a by-product of his work in telegraphy and telephony rather than any conscious development of previous attempts to construct talking machines.
I was experimenting on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of today. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disk was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.
From my experiments with the telephone I knew of the power of a diaphragm to take up sound vibrations, as I had made a little toy which, when you recited loudly in the funnel, would work a pawl connected to the diaphragm; and this engaging a ratchet-wheel served to give continuous rotation to a pulley. This pulley was connected by a cord to a little paper toy representing a man sawing wood. Hence, if one shouted: “Mary had a little lamb,” etc., the paper man would start sawing wood. I reached the conclusion that if I could record the movements imparted to the diaphragm properly, I could cause such record to reproduce the original movements imparted to the diaphragm by the voice, and thus succeed in recording and reproducing the human voice.
Instead of using a disk I designed a little machine using a cylinder with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm. A sketch was made, and the piece-work price, $18 was marked on the sketch. I was in the habit of marking the price I would pay on each sketch. . . . The workman who got the sketch . . . asked what it was for. I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted “Mary had a little lamb,” etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life.6
Edison’s account, written years after the event, is actually a simplification of what occurred. 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. While he had been working on the proposed telegraph recorder-repeater, it occurred to Edison that on a similar machine he could “indent on a moving strip of paraffined paper a record of . . . speech, and if the paper were later drawn under a stylus attached to the diaphragm of a telephone receiver, the speech would be reproduced.”7 He constructed such a machine in July 1877, and used it to record and reproduce indistinctly the sound of his own voice shouting, “Hulloo!” The possibilities inherent in this primitive talking machine may seem rather obvious to us now, but they were not immediately discernible to Edison. 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 1877, 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.
Early in that November, Edison’s associate, E. H. Johnson, had been lecturing in Buffalo, New York, on the subject of Edison’s most recent work. 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.8
Whether or not Johnson’s statement is correct, there can be no doubt that the transition from paper-strip phonograph to Tinfoil Phonograph occurred during the second half of November. Johnson in a letter to Scientific American, November 17, 1877, 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 machine itself was constructed by the mechanic, John Kreusi, and was tried out to Edison’s satisfaction—and surprise—on December 6. 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, 1877:
Mr. 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. It was conspicuously missing from his own article, “The Phonograph and the Future,” North American Review, June 1878, though he did enlarge on several of those other prophecies in Scientific American and even added several new ones: including the use of the talking machine in providing books for the blind, in aiding teachers of elocution, in making talking dolls and music boxes, and in advertising. 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. The article was, in fact, published some fourteen years before what Gordon Hendricks calls the “achievement of the ‘modern’ motion picture.”9 However, it predicted the synchronization of photographs and recorded sound and suggested their use before an audience. And in pointing to the phonograph’s contribution towards the mechanical reproduction of reality it also provided perhaps the first step towards that “Myth of Total Cinema,” as André Bazin described the dream of the pioneers of the motion picture to achieve “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image.”10
This dream was soon to be expressed in even more vivid detail. On January 3, 1878, 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, 1878:
The article from the Scientific American on the phonograph which is quoted in Nature, vol. xvii, p. 190, concludes as follows:—“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.”
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.
WORDSWORTH DONISTHORPE
Prince’s Park, Liverpool,
January 12.11
A sound feature film in color anticipated as an imminent achievement in 1878! But this proposal was somewhat optimistic. If Wordsworth Donisthorpe had survived until 1935, he would have had the satisfaction of seeing his dream realized in Rouben Mamoulian’s Technicolor film, Becky Sharp. But in 1878 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. He never mentions the word “film,” for it was not until 1889 that celluloid roll film was invented by George Eastman. 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 1889, when he constructed it with the assistance of W. C. Crofts. Their apparatus has been described as “a machine which operated with a single moving lens and took pictures two and one-half inches in diameter on sensitized paper.”12 Though they patented the machine, there is no evidence that it was satisfactory or that it was ever harnessed to the phonograph.
It is not known whether Edison saw Donisthorpe’s letter. 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 fact, statements by Edison’s employee and fellow-inventor, W. K. L. Dickson, indicate that the former’s interest in the idea of making talking pictures was not actively aroused until near the end of the 1880s. 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 1880 and 1886. However, during 1887, 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 1885–86 by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Sumner Tainter. The Graphophone worked on more or less the same principles as the phonograph, but it improved upon Edison’s machine, as V. K. Chew has explained, by having the sound impressions incised “on the wax-coated surface of a cardboard cylinder which was slipped on to a rotable mandrel; the latter did not move linearly as it rotated, but the recorder was moved along it by means of a feed screw. . . . 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.”13 Meanwhile, a challenge to both the phonograph and the Graphophone was looming in the form of the Gramophone, a machine that played disks instead of cylinders. This invention, partly inspired by the Phonautograph of Léon-Scott, was the work of Emile Berliner, who demonstrated it before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on May 16, 1888 and began marketing it, together with 7-inch disks made of hard rubber, during 1893.
Edison’s feverish activity to improve his own talking machine is reflected in the fact that during 1887–88 he took out no fewer than 33 patents for developments of the phonograph.14 In June 1888 he had completed an improved machine that he considered competitive with the Graphophone, and this new phonograph was put on the market before the end of the year. 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.15
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:
Edison’s idea, as disclosed to me in 1887 at the Newark Laboratory, was to combine the phonograph cylinder or record with a similar or larger drum on the same shaft, which drum was to be covered with pin-point microphotographs which of course must synchronize with the phonograph record. . . .
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. In this micro camera I tried Daguerre’s process on highly polished bits of silver and developed it in the usual way. The subject I used was a lantern slide of Landseer’s stag for all these comparative single still pictures.
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. . . .
I just slotted the aluminum drum and wrapped a sheet of Carbutt’s stiff sensitized celluloid over it. 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.16
The idea of this machine had, actually, been anticipated in 1870 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 1889. 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. An undated letter by the inventor that appears prefatory to the Dicksons’ History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kineto-Phono graph, 1895, states:
In the year 1887, 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 . . . the germ of [this idea] comes from a little toy called the Zoetrope, and the work of Muybridge, Marie [Marey], and others. . . .17
On February 25, 1888, while the phonograph was uppermost in Edison’s mind, Eadweard Muybridge, a British-born inventor and pioneer of the motion picture, came to Orange, New Jersey, to give a lecture to the New England Society. 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. Gordon Hendricks, who has meticulously examined all factual material pertaining to Edison at this period, states: “It is possible that both Edison and Dickson attended this February 25 lecture by Muybridge.”18 Whether or not Edison attended the lecture, it is known that Muybridge visited him two days later at the West Orange laboratory. Muybridge, in the preface to his Animals in Motion, 1899, observes, “It may be here parenthetically remarked that on the 27th of February, 1888, the author . . . consulted with Mr. Thomas A. Edison as to the practicability of using [the Zoöpraxiscope] in association with the phonograph.”19 But Edison contradicts this statement. Gordon Hendricks notes: “In the margin of the [Terry] Ramsaye manuscript [of A Million and One Nights] now at Harvard University, opposite the Ramsaye remark that Muybridge wanted to interest Edison in uniting this device with the phonograph” Edison has noted: “No—Muybridge came to Lab to show me picture of a horse in motion—nothing was said about phonogph.”20 However, Hendricks insists that Muybridge’s version is the more accurate one. “We can be sure . . . ,” Hendricks says, “that the . . . visit [of Muybridge to Edison] was about the idea of joining the phonograph with pictures of motion.”21 And this opinion is supported by the fact that only three months after the Muybridge visit, the New York World of June 3, 1888 noted “This scheme [of combining the phonograph and moving pictures] met with the approval of Mr. Edison and he intended to perfect it at his leisure.”22
At the time of his visit, Muybridge was renowned on both sides of the Atlantic as the first man to succeed in taking “instantaneous photographs.” In 1878 he had devised a method for “analyzing motion with a camera and . . . re-synthesizing it in a viewing device.”23 In 1872, Leland Stanford, governor of California, commissioned Muybridge to photograph a trotting horse in order to determine whether at any time the animal had all four feet off the ground. Muybridge’s first experiments were unsuccessful, and his work was abruptly and sensationally interrupted when, on discovering that his wife was having an affair, he shot and killed her lover. The bizarre trial that followed would have done credit, half a century later, to the imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter. (It is described briefly in Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights.) Muybridge was acquitted by a sympathetic California jury, but he did not resume his work for Leland Stanford until 1877.
When he did return to the challenge, he enlisted the aid of a railroad engineer named John D. Isaacs. Terry Ramsaye rather dubiously credits Isaacs with the inspiration for what followed, although the latter seems for the most part to have been carrying out the instructions of Muybridge. The two men set up a battery of twelve (later twenty-four) still cameras along a race track at 27-inch intervals. “Isaacs worked out a system of electrical contacts with wire stretched at intervals across a measured section of the Stanford race track at the governor’s Palo Alto stud farm. As the sulky swept past, the wheels closed the circuits successively and the magnetic releases set off the cameras.”24 The series of photographs taken in this way were, in effect, successive frames of a motion picture.
Muybridge used this technique to take many more photographs of animals in motion,25 and he went on to produce motion pictures by using these photographs in a viewing toy called a Zoetrope and in a projection machine called the Zoöpraxiscope—neither of which he had invented.26 In 1886, the year before his lecture in Orange, Muybridge had begun to switch from photographing animals to taking pictures of human beings in motion. If Edison saw any of these later pictures, he may have become further interested in the idea of linking moving pictures of human beings to recordings of the human voice. However, Edison was to claim, rather questionably, that Muybridge showed him only pictures of a horse in motion. At all events, Edison was not inspired to apply Muybridge’s actual cumbersome battery-of-cameras technique to the making of talking pictures. Temporarily, he saw more promise in his pinpoint microphotographs.
As we have noted, Muybridge certainly did not originate the idea of linking moving pictures and the phonograph. But neither did Edison—although Edison, the Dicksons, and, later, Terry Ramsaye seem to have gone to some pains to circulate the notion that the idea for this combination was originally Edison’s. Thus, the Dicksons, echoing Edison’s letter (quoted above) state:
In the year 1887, Mr. Edison found himself in possession of one of those breathing spells which relieve the tension of inventive thought . . . the phonograph was established upon what seemed to be a solid financial and social basis, and the inventor felt at liberty to indulge in a few secondary flights of fancy. It was then that he was struck by the idea of reproducing to the eye the effect of motion by means of a swift and graded succession of pictures and of linking these photographic impressions with the phonograph in one combination so as to complete to both senses synchronously the record of a given scene.27
There are several things wrong with this statement. First, as we have seen, the phonograph was not established on a solid financial basis in 1887: it was being commercially challenged by the more proficient Graphophone. Secondly, the impression is given that the combination of motion pictures and the phonograph was first conceived in 1887, by Edison. But this combination had been suggested by others a decade earlier, and in the intervening years Edison appears to have done nothing to develop the idea. Thirdly, the notion is conveyed by the Dick-sons that it was Edison who first conceived the application of persistence of vision to the making of motion pictures. To accept this view is to ignore more than half a century of pioneer work preceding Edison and Dickson and fundamental to their experiments in making workable motion pictures.
However, their microscopic pinpoint photographs were an initial step towards the realization of the Kinetophone or Kinetophonograph—the Dicksons’ comprehensive term for the invention that would achieve the “synchronous attachment of photography with the phonograph. . . .” The next step has been obscured by contradictory evidence. In 1889 Edison went to the Paris Exposition, where he met the motion picture pioneer Etienne Marey. Marey demonstrated a moving picture projector which used electrical illumination to show a series of photographs mounted on a revolving disk.28 According to the Dicksons, on October 6, 1889, when Edison returned to West Orange, he entered his laboratory and was confronted with his first “talkie”: “I [W. K. L. Dickson] was seen to advance and address Mr. Edison from the small 4-foot screen; small because of the restricted size of the room. I raised my hat, smiled, and said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you back. Hope you like the kinetophone. To show the synchronization I will lift my hand and count up to ten.’ I then raised and lowered my hands as I counted up to ten. There was no hitch, and a pretty steady picture.”29 Clearly, Dickson claims here to have rigged up a movie projection apparatus and synchronized it with the phonograph.
But this claim is flatly contradicted by a statement of Edison’s made eleven years later: “there was no screen as Mr. Dickson says.”30 Gordon Hendricks supports this contradiction by quoting a later comment by Edison: “There was no screen . . .”; but he also mentions a note by Edison in the margin of the manuscript of Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights (on file at Harvard University Library) in which the inventor says, “the facts are that Dickson & I had a machine projecting on a screen 5 ft sq at the time we were making peep machines.” Hendricks comments: “Since these ‘peep machines’ [Kinetoscopes] were not manufactured until beginning late in 1893, and were continued until at least 1899, this Edison remark is inconclusive.”31 What Dickson probably exhibited to Edison in October 1889 was not motion picture projection but an apparatus constructed by Dickson for the purpose of viewing the microscopic pinpoint photographs that Dickson had taken on the cylinder machine.32 We have no means of knowing whether this device was synchronized with the phonograph.
Gordon Hendricks describes Edison’s “Motion Picture Caveat IV” (on file at Edison’s laboratory in West Orange) dated November 2, 1889, as the first indication that the inventor had “envisioned something else than a cylinder surface for receiving the photographs.”33 In this document Edison refers for the first time to an apparatus he calls the Kinetoscope, and in describing it he states, “The sensitive film is in the form of a long band passing from one reel to another. . . .” The introduction of this idea marks a decisive step away from the cylinder-viewer and in the direction of the projected motion picture.
Between the cylinder-viewer and the projected motion picture was to come the Kinetoscope and its more elaborate sister machine, the Kinetophone. In the form in which it came before the public in 1894, the exterior of the Kinetoscope resembled a closed-in wooden sentry box or casket. It stood about 48 inches high. On top of the box was the eyepiece—not unlike the framework of a pair of opera glasses. By inserting a coin into an appropriate slot, a viewer could peer into the eyepiece and observe a brief motion picture presentation. Inside the machine approximately 56 feet of 35mm film “circulated [at 46 frames per second] in an endless loop under a viewing lens, each frame briefly illuminated by a flash of light through a rotating shutter.”34 Photographs of the exterior and interior of the Kinetoscope may be seen in Gordon Hendricks’s monograph, The Kinetoscope (1966).
Hendricks assembles a wealth of factual evidence to support his view that this invention should be attributed to Dickson rather than to Edison. Nevertheless, Edison publicized the Kinetoscope as his own invention; he then proceeded to make grandiose claims about it. His “Motion Picture Caveat IV” devotes a paragraph to the combination of Kinetoscope and phonograph (ultimately to become the Kinetophone), asserting that “all the movements of a person photoghd will be exactly coincident with any sound made by him. . . .”35 In 1899 this development was hypothetical or at best indicated work in progress. Hendricks states, “It appears certain that . . . the only motion picture work at the [Edison] laboratory resulting in practicable apparatus until May, 1891, concerned a cylinder-viewer . . .”36 This last-mentioned date refers to the completion of the first Kinetoscope. In chapter 15 of The Edison Motion Picture Myth, Hendricks quotes various inflated claims for the Kinetoscope. Thus in 1891, Edison maintained that with the Kinetoscope he had achieved or was on the verge of achieving the projection of talking pictures and that it would soon be possible to make films of operas, plays, and the like. Such claims—which were perhaps intended to discourage other inventors from working along the same lines—received widespread publicity in the press and were inflated by journalists into even more fanciful exaggerations or distortions of the truth. Hendricks disposes convincingly of these wild assertions and rumors.
The Kinetoscope was nothing more than a peephole viewing machine, and the pictures it showed were not projected before an audience—only one person at a time could see them. It is possible—though there is no conclusive evidence—that a Kinetoscope harnessed to a phonograph was shown at an exhibition in New York in May 1891.37 It does appear that such a combination of the two machines was presented publicly two years later at the Columbian Exposition, which opened in Chicago on May 1, 1893. Commenting on the Exposition, Scientific American for October 21, 1893, described “Edison’s phonograph exhibits and his latest invention, the ‘kinetograph’ [sic]. He photographs the face at the same time one talks into the phonograph. By this method the sound and the motion of the lips in producing it are accurately reproduced.” Hendricks considers it
likely that the motor of the Kinetoscope was attached to the phonograph, and as visitors to the Edison exhibit peered into the eye-piece they heard music. We cannot believe . . . that they heard “the sound and the motion of the lips” as described by the Scientific American. Nor can we know whether they heard this music through the ear tubes connected as in the Kinetophone [which was not ready until 1895] . . . or merely through a nearby speaker.38
What films would visitors to the exhibit have seen and perhaps heard? We do not know for certain but can surmise that at least one subject shown was that demonstrated when the Kinetoscope was exhibited on May 9, 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute in New York:
The picture represented a blacksmith and two helpers forging a piece of iron. Before beginning the job a bottle was passed from one to the other, each imbibing his portion. The blacksmith then removed his white hot iron from the forge with a pair of tongs and gave directions to his helpers with the small hand hammer, when they immediately began to pound the hot iron while the sparks flew in all directions, the blacksmith at the same time making intermediate strokes with his hand hammer. At a signal from the smith, the helpers put down their sledge hammers, when the iron was returned to the forge and another piece substituted for it, and the operation was repeated.39
Was this action accompanied by sound effects and/or music? Unfortunately, we do not know, but it would not have been inappropriate if Edison had supplied a recording of Dickson playing “The Anvil Chorus” on his violin.
The commercial debut of the Kinetoscope occurred on April 14, 1894 at 1155 Broadway (near Twenty-eighth Street), New York, at what came to be known as a Kinetoscope Parlor. Ten machines were situated in two rows of five in the center of the room, and the charge for viewing each row of five machines was twenty-five cents. The film subjects—each of which ran for less than fifty seconds—were: Sandow (the celebrated strong man), Blacksmiths (the film formerly shown at the Brooklyn Institute), Highland Dance, Trapeze, Wrestling, Roosters (a scene of two fighting cocks), Horse-shoeing, Barber Shop scene, and two films of the vaudeville contortionist Bertholdi. Most, if not all, of these films had been shot in the first studio constructed exclusively for film production: a wood and tar paper building known as the Black Maria, built in West Orange in 1892 at a total cost of $637.67.40
Commercially the Kinetoscope was an unqualified success. One hundred twenty dollars was taken in on opening day, and succeeding days, when news of the novel machines had begun to spread throughout New York, were far more profitable. Crowds flocked to 1155 Broadway, and by the end of May 1894, the Parlor was staying open on Sundays in order to accommo-date all who wished to see the show. During May and June additional Kinetoscope Parlors were opened in Chicago and San Francisco, and by October there was a Parlor in Washington, D. C. Before the end of the year, Kinetoscopes were being viewed by the public at 20 Boulevard Poissonière in Paris and at a converted store in Old Broad Street, London.
But what of the Kinetophone? The New York Kinetoscope Parlor showed only silent films at its premiere and probably for several weeks thereafter. However, since 1888, press reports, echoing announcements by Edison himself, had repeatedly forecast the imminent completion of a marketable machine that would combine the phonograph and the motion picture. Agents who leased Kinetoscopes from Edison were led to expect that the Kinetophone would soon replace the more restricted Kinetoscope. As the rumors persisted, Edison became aware that orders for the Kinetoscope were declining. Prospective agents decided to sit tight and wait for the Kinetophone rather than invest in nonsound machines that might quickly become obsolete. In response to this situation, Dickson (and perhaps Edison) set to work during April through perhaps December 1894, to synchronize the Kinetoscope with the phonograph.
There still exists a film made about this time in which we can see, in the background, Dickson playing a violin next to a big phonograph horn which was presumably attached to a recording machine. In the foreground two lab assistants are dancing to the music—whatever it was. Apparently the film was one of Dickson’s attempts to achieve synchronization through simultaneously recording sound and picture. A similar effort is to be seen in a contemporary artist’s impression of the filming and recording of a boxing bout staged in Edison’s new studio in 1894.41 But these experiments, and any others made during the same period, proved unsuccessful. Probably no later than December 1894, efforts to achieve synchronization were given up, and Edison and Dickson decided to settle for a conjunction of phonograph and Kinetoscope that would provide nonsynchronized accompaniment to the moving pictures.
Edison’s lukewarm interest in anything pertaining to moving pictures and the growing demand for a sound version of the Kinetoscope were probably the main motivations for abandoning further experiments and for marketing a machine as unsatisfactory as the Kinetophone. The new machine had a phonograph located in the base of the same box that housed the Kinetoscope. A belt drive connected the two machines and insured that they would begin and stop simultaneously. According to Hendricks, over 1,000 Kinetoscopes were made, but only 45 Kinetophones.42 This is hardly surprising. The only novelty that the new machine provided was music—seldom appropriate to the scenes it was accompanying—that could be heard through “ear-tubes” while one watched the Kinetoscope pictures. Among the more popular cylinder records for the Kinetophone were “Pomona Waltz,” “Jolly Darkies,” and “Carnival Dance.”
Primitive as the Kinetophone seems today, it was the most advanced step that the nineteenth century was to take toward the realization of talking pictures. Contemporaneous efforts by Georges Demeny in France, William Friese-Greene in England, and Alexander Black in the U. S. A. were even less promising than the Kinetophone.
While a student at the Sorbonne, Georges Demeny (1850–1927) became the pupil of physiologist and motion picture pioneer, Etienne Jules Marey (1830–1904). Marey’s special study was animal movement, and he was inspired by Muybridge’s trotting horse pictures to turn to photography as a means of furthering his researches. In 1882 he devised two different methods of taking pictures of moving birds and animals. The first was a “photographic gun”—a camera that looked like a wide-bore rifle but which contained, in place of bullets, a revolving dry plate capable of making twelve exposures per second while “shooting” flying birds or swift-running animals. The second was a technique for photographing numerous phases of movement on a single dry plate. In 1893, Marey constructed what “was perhaps the first efficient motion picture projector which could handle more than one scene, using long strips of coated celluloid film instead of pictures set on a disk.”43 Marey’s interest in these devices and in the motion picture generally was entirely scientific. Demeny, however, was more enthusiastic about profits than he was about science and invention.
Early in the 1880s, Demeny left the Sorbonne to assist Marey at his studio-laboratory in the Bois de Boulogne. He became responsible for many of the experiments conducted for the purpose of analyzing animal movement, and in due course came to the conclusion that their researches, and in particular Marey’s motion picture devices, could be commercially exploited. But Marey would not go along with such an idea. Accordingly, in 1893, the two men parted, Marey to continue his investigations for the sake of science, Demeny to exploit what he had learned during his collaboration with his former teacher. Shortly afterward, Demeny patented a motion picture camera which he called the Bioscope—actually it was nothing more than an adaptation of Marey’s latest camera.
Two years earlier, in 1891, Demeny had begun another collaboration—with a speech pathologist, Professor H. Mari-chelle of the French National Institute for Deaf Mutes. Their idea was to use still pictures of people speaking as a means of teaching the deaf how to speak. For this purpose, Demeny “invented” another version of Marey’s “photographic gun” camera. He took large close-up pictures of people talking and used a lantern-slide projector to show them. Demeny claimed that his pictures “conserved the expression of the face as the voice is preserved in the phonograph.” But the illustrations in his article, “Les Photographies Parlantes,” do not bear him out.44 Nevertheless, he maintained that he had achieved some conspicuous success in showing his pictures before audiences of deaf people. He also devised a machine suitable for an individual deaf person; it combined features of Marey’s revolving disk pictures with the Kinetoscope. Demeny called it the Phonoscope. It was not a new idea, since Charles Cros had proposed it as early as 1860. However, Demeny actually constructed the machine—Cros did not. The Phonoscope consisted of an oblong box about 30 inches tall, perched on a three-legged stand or tripod. The user of the machine peered into the eyepiece on the box and turned a handle, revolving a disk on which were numerous spaced pictures showing a speaker uttering a word. The action of speaking could be watched “frame by frame” or speeded up at the will of the person working the machine. Above a certain speed the effect of motion was achieved through persistence of vision.
Demeny stated that it would be possible to “join the phonograph to the Phonoscope” to create the illusion of watching and hearing a real speaker.45 It is not known whether he ever tried out this interesting combination. It is known that he attempted to exploit the Phonoscope through the Société Générale du Phonoscope, established in 1892. But the invention was not a commercial success. Either the deaf and their doctors were not impressed by the machine or else it was not as perfect as Demeny claimed.
More original than Demeny’s work was the attempt of William Friese-Greene, the British pioneer of cinematography, to combine a phonograph recording with pictures taken with and projected by apparatus that he had patented. Friese-Greene bought a phonograph in 1887 and in that year filmed a man mouthing the words of a song that was being sung on a cylinder record. He then played back the record while projecting the film. The results were far from satisfactory. His projection method was imperfect, and synchronization was not achieved. However, the experiment led Friese-Greene to speculate on the possibilities inherent in successfully projecting sound pictures. “Why should not moving pictures be combined with records of other sounds—all sounds, speech, traffic, the thud of horses’ feet on the turf, the striking of ball on bat at a cricket match, the sounds of human speech? Synchronisation of sound and sight was surely only a matter of improvement in mechanism.”46
With that in mind, Friese-Greene wrote to Edison in June 1889, providing a careful description of his camera and projector, detailing his experiment in trying to make sound pictures, and suggesting that Edison combine forces with him in order to perfect synchronized movies. The letter was formally acknowledged by an assistant or secretary at the Edison laboratory, and Friese-Greene was asked to forward drawings of his apparatus. Enthusiastically, Friese-Greene sent off copies of the drawings he had prepared when he had applied for patents on his camera and projector. That was the last he was to hear of the matter. Receipt of the drawings was never acknowledged, and in 1910 Edison was to state in an affidavit that he had never seen Friese-Greene’s letter or the drawings. That was perhaps true. The correspondence and designs may never have got beyond Edison’s secretary. Nevertheless, as Friese-Greene’s biographer has commented:
When Edison patented his . . . Kinetoscope . . . he took out the patent in America, not in England. Was that just an oversight, or did he, knowing of Friese-Greene’s patent, realize it would not be possible to get a British patent? The mechanism of the Kinetoscope in 1891 would not have stood the test of novelty in the British Patent Office. It would have infringed part of Friese-Greene’s patent.47
Alexander Black’s anticipation of talking pictures was more spectacular but ultimately no more promising than either Demeny’s or Friese-Greene’s. Black was a successful novelist and amateur photographer. His enthusiasm for the still camera led him to the lecture platform, and in the early nineties he toured the “lyceum stages” of New England, delivering an address entitled “Ourselves as Others See Us” and illustrating his comments on the wonders of photography with stereopticon slides made from candid camera snapshots. In due course he came to notice real or coincidental relationships in the content of the pictures that he projected, and incipient plot material began to suggest itself. Out of that grew the idea of telling a long and elaborate story in pictures. Thus, early in 1894, Black embarked on his first “picture play.”
He prepared a long series of photographic slides showing the adventures of a girl reporter (played by Blanche Bayliss), her boyfriend (William Courtenay), and a villain (Ernest Hastings). The heroine’s name, Miss Jerry, became the title of the show. Black selected a wide range of locations in and around New York City. He retained the same viewpoint (camera angle) for each scene, but showed changes in the attitude of the actors. The slides, when projected before an audience were accompanied by a narrator (Black), whose spoken commentary fleshed out the story as it unfolded on the screen. Black “hoped that between the two components of word and picture he would convey the impression of dramatic action.”48 The slides were projected at the rate of four per minute (too slow to achieve the effect of persistence of vision), and transitions between them were accomplished by dissolves made possible by a device within the stereopticon projector. Music, especially composed for the show, was provided by John Hyatt Brewer.
Miss Jerry was a great success. Its premiere, in New York on October 9, 1894, attracted a distinguished audience that included novelists W. D. Howells and Frank R. Stockton, and critics Brander Matthews and Clarence Stedman. Initially the show lasted for two hours, but at the suggestion of Howells, Black reduced it by thirty minutes.
In 1895, following an East Coast tour of Miss Jerry, Black prepared his second picture play, A Capital Courtship, which was set in Washington. Recognizing the box-office value of celebrities, he persuaded President Cleveland, the future President McKinley, and the British ambassador to pose for some of his scenes.
Black rejected offers to introduce his picture plays into the theater circuits. He sought his audiences among the more “intellectual” or sophisticated upper or middle classes who attended educational lyceum presentations in preference to vaudeville shows. This deliberate restriction of the audience together with Black’s waning interest in the picture play and the rise of the motion picture show in 1895–96 insured that A Capital Courtship, Black’s most ambitious and financially most successful picture play, was also the last of its kind.
The premiere of Miss Jerry occurred only six months after the Broadway opening of the first Kinetoscope Parlor, so it is not surprising that, as Terry Ramsaye notes, much editorial commentary at that time speculated on or
anticipated an application of the film to the Black idea, when Edison should achieve the screen. This might have influenced Edison. . . . It might just as well have influenced Black, the father of the photoplay. It did neither. . . . Edison was science. Black was art. Between them they held in their separated hands the ingredients of the aqua regalis, that universal solvent of expression—the story-telling motion picture. Only time and tedious experience could bring the two elements together into the flowing menstruum of the modern screen.49
Time and tedious experience did not help to produce the sound film in the nineteenth century—though, as we have seen, that century made up in variety of methods what it lacked in actual accomplishment. Cylinder microphotographs combined with the phonograph (Edison), projected film combined with the phonograph (Dickson, Friese-Greene), the Phonoscope combined with the phonograph (Demeny), the Kinetophone (Dickson), the stereopticon picture play with spoken live commentary (Black)—all were tried and found wanting.
But if the nineteenth century failed to produce the sound film, it did, nevertheless, see the successful realization of motion picture projection. The commercial debut of the movies dates from the year following the premieres of the Kinetoscope and Black’s first pre-film picture play. This debut became possible because of the invention of workable film projectors: in particular, the Bioskop of the brothers Skladanowsky in Germany and the Cinématographe of the brothers Lumière in France. The Bioskop is of less concern to this study than the Cinématographe, a machine that was inspired by the Kinetoscope. In 1894, Louis Lumière visited the Kinetoscope Parlor on the Boulevard Poissonière, Paris. What he saw there suggested the idea of making an apparatus that could project films onto a screen so that many people could view them at the same time. Within a few months, Louis and his brother Auguste had constructed a practicable machine which combined the functions of a camera and a projector. Their projection method was an adaptation of an earlier projector designed in 1892 by Emile Reynaud and used by him in his Théâtre Optique (established in Paris in 1892) to present moving picture shows of hand-drawn cartoonlike figures.
During March 1895, the Lumière brothers shot their first film, La Sortie des Usines, a moving picture of workers leaving the Lumière photographic factory in Lyon-Montplaisir. It was the first film publicly shown at the Paris premiere of the Cinématographe on December 28, 1895. For an admission charge of one franc audiences at the Grand-Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, saw ten single-shot films projected onto a screen. In the temporary absence of Louis and Auguste, the first show was presented by their father, the photographer Auguste Lumière. His commentary, some sort of piano accompaniment, and the astonished gasps of the audience were the only sounds that went along with the pictures.50
In the United States, the commercial premiere of the motion picture took place at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, Thirty-fourth Street at Herald Square, New York, on April 23, 1896. On this occasion the show was provided by the Vitascope, a projector designed by Thomas Armat and manufactured and marketed by Edison. Again, as with the Cinématographe, the projected pictures were silent. Nevertheless, the New York Herald, reviewing the show, reported
Mr. Edison is not quite satisfied yet. He wants now to improve the phonograph so that it will record double the amount of sound it does at present, and he hopes then to combine this improved phonograph with the Vitascope to make it possible for an audience to witness a photographic reproduction of an opera or a play—to see the movements of the actors and hear their voices as plainly as though they were witnessing the original production itself.51
Edison would have a long time to wait before what he told the New York Herald was actually realized. However, in view of later attempts to combine the phonograph and the moving picture, the newspaper report is of particular interest. As we have seen with the Kinetophone, Edison had given up on the problem of trying to achieve synchronization. He was now confronted with a second problem: the need for amplification. The comment in the New York Herald indicating Edison’s desire to “record double the amount of sound” is, presumably, a garbled account of a statement in which he had expressed his awareness of the need to improve the amplifying power of the phonograph if it were to be used before an audience and in conjunction with moving pictures. Subsequently, this same problem was to bedevil many other inventors.
But in the meantime, audiences began to flock to the film shows. For some years they would remain silent, but while they were still a novelty, it was wonder enough—even without sound—that the pictures moved.
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* In his Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune (1656), Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac envisaged a phonograph-like apparatus more than two centuries before it was actually invented. Apparently there were no attempts to construct such a machine until the nineteenth century.
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