THE APPLICATION
OF THE
PHONOGRAPH

Even in the primitive days sustained efforts were made to redeem the cinema from its inherent silence. A “narrator” in the flesh tried to humor the audience; phonograph records were more or less successfully synchronized with corresponding images so that the benevolent spectator might nurture the illusion of listening to a cock crow, an aria, or even bits of conversation; and of course, musical accompaniment emerged at the outset. Those premature attempts at sound and speech were abortive; the narrator yielded to captions, and the phonograph records disappeared after a while. The time for sound film had not yet come.

SIEGFRIED KRACAUER, Theory of Film, 1960

What is the place of the phono-cinematograph? In the first place, until the peculiar nasal sound is eliminated from the talking machine it will not prove popular. . . . Furthermore expression in tone is practically non-existent. Though the cinematographic world be flooded with talking and singing pictures, unless they are of some peculiar interest, the majority of picture-theatre lovers, after the first wave of excitement and curiosity, will patronise those establishments where they can see movement alone.

FREDERICK A. TALBOT, Moving Pictures, 1912

The silent film was not silent. Before 1928 movies were customarily accompanied by one or more of the following: sound effects; music played by live performers; live singers, speakers, or actors; and phonograph recordings. Only the last of these is the subject of this chapter and will be dealt with in detail, but a few observations about each of the other forms of sound accompaniment will be in order here.

Sound effects, produced at first by such primitive methods as the clanking of chains and the clacking of coconut shells,^* gradually became more sophisticated with the virtuoso-like “performances” of Lyman H. Howe, onetime “itinerant phonograph entertainer” of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. (Howe is credited with having first used sound effects with movies and also with introducing the technique of having live speakers behind the screen.¹) Eventually, the effects were to be supplied automatically by complex machines designed to be worked by skilled operators.

From about 1908 to 1915 sound effects were frequently used in conjunction with silent films. They were technically known as “traps” and were provided either by drummers in the orchestra pit or by special effects men working behind the screen. At first the range of effects was no more than could be found in most legitimate theaters of the period, but the public appeal of interesting audio-visual effects created a demand for much wider selections of traps than could be managed efficiently by one operator while he was watching the film. In response to this demand, enterprising manufacturers marketed devices with batteries of sound effects that could be played like organs or pianos and in some instances were combined with organs and pianos. Among them were the Allefex and the Kinematophone (each of which could provide up to fifty different sounds), the Dramagraph, the Excelsior Sound Effects Cabinet, and the Deagan Electric Bells (twenty-five bells that covered a range of two octaves.) The August 26, 1911 issue of Moving Picture World noted that the Yerkes factory, which produced several lines of special effects machines, was working “day and night” to satisfy the demand for their apparatus. (One such machine was used in the same year to contribute sound to the Kinemacolor film of King George V’s coronation, which was screened at the Herald Square Theatre, New York. This showing may have been the very first public presentation in the U.S. of a “sound film” in color.) Public enthusiasm for sound effects declined after 1915, mainly as a result of the increasing sophistication of music for the silent picture. However, many cinema organs built after 1915 continued to be equipped with a wide range of traps.²

Contemporary reactions tell us a great deal about what effects were usually like and what they were expected to achieve but seldom did. In most instances they were unsatisfactory because they were too loud or were ludicrously inaccurate; this was especially true before the emergence of the special effects machines. Quite often the effects succeeded only in obliterating the voices of the actors, singers, or speakers who were endeavoring to accompany the film. Music critic H. F. Hoffman tells an amusing anecdote about this problem:

I was lecturing once at a large theater that held a thousand people on the ground floor and it required some vocal effort on my part. Behind the screen they had a prop-worker who felt the importance of his position, very much to my discomfort. He never missed a horse’s step; every time a door closed he would rap on a box; the waiter’s tip always jingled on the table; the chickens outcackled me; the cows “mooed” me into silence, and I was lost in the ocean’s roar. I said nothing to him because he was peevish and very jealous of his playthings. One evening we had the interior scene of a peasant’s cottage, and a painful parting between two lovers was taking place. All at once a bird began to sing with great violence. I looked at the piano player in wonderment and found him looking the same at me. “What’s that for?” he asked. “You’ve got me,” I replied, “I’ll go and see.” I found my friend with his cheeks and his eyes bulging out, blowing for his very life. “What’s the trouble?” says I. “The bird! The bird!” says he, without removing the whistle. “Where?” says I. “There,” says he, pointing triumphantly with a stick to a diminutive canary in a tiny wooden cage on a top shelf at the far corner of the room. “Good boy!” I cried, giving him a wallop on the back that made him almost swallow his blooming whistle.³

Frequently the sound effects were incorrect. Hence the answer given by the editor of Moving Picture World to the question whether it was best to undertake to reproduce the sounds to go with the picture or not: “The imitations,” he observed, “should be fairly accurate or they shouldn’t be attempted. Inaccuracy is worse than nothing. It creates wrong impressions and often it wrongly interprets the pictures. They must correspond or else they should be let alone.”⁴ W. Stephen Bush, another critic writing for the same journal, had nothing but contempt for most of the sound effects he heard in movie theaters, but he also had very definite ideas of what they should have been like and how they should have been used. His fellow critics seem generally to have concurred with his views whenever they expressed their opinions on the matter:

Now effects to help the picture must be few, simple and well rehearsed for each separate and particular picture. The idea that a set of mechanical contrivances for the production of a limited number of sounds can be made to fit most pictures or even a small percentage of them is utterly absurd. The moment an effect is repeated too often it becomes monotonous, then tires one, and at last is ridiculous. Each picture must be studied by itself and only such effects introduced as have a psychological bearing on the situation as depicted on the screen. . . . At all times, effects must be original, novel, simple, quickly understood and appreciated by the audience. The proper moments for introducing them must be judged from picture to picture and no set of stereotyped rules can be laid down.⁵

Lyman Howe was the only person repeatedly mentioned for his creative use of sound effects. In the 1890s Howe was making a living touring Pennsylvania with his Phonograph Concerts. He used a large tin horn to amplify the sounds of cylinder records played on an Edison phonograph. Up to 3,000 people at a time were said to have attended his programs.⁶ When Howe got into the business of supplying sound effects for movies, he discerned instinctively that if the job were to be done well the sort of principles outlined by Bush would have to be put into practice. His effects were selected and rehearsed with great care, and the public response, especially during 1908–12, was appreciative—and lucrative for Howe. The editor of Moving Picture World noted in 1909, “One exhibitor has made a special study of this phase of motion picture shows, and has achieved a high degree of perfection. Reference is here made to Lyman H. Howe. His sounds imitate and to the mind of a great many who see his pictures they add to the attraction of the entertainment.”⁷ And Clyde Martin, a columnist for the same journal, commented two years later,

Lyman Howe shows several pictures on his programs that the public has seen in five cent theaters. Howe projection is fine, but there are many picture houses over the country that are putting on just as good pictures. Mr. Howe does not use a symphony orchestra and still his admission prices range from twenty-five cents to a dollar. There’s a reason. In the Lyman Howe show they never lose a chance to work an appropriate sound effect, and he can come into your city and show pictures that you have shown a year ago and people will pay a dollar to see them and wish he would come back, which he does, and the same people pass your place up and pay him another dollar. I have put up this argument to many exhibitors in my travels and they all say, “It’s his reputation.” I agree that it is his reputation, but how did he make it? Good pictures with sound effects.⁸

Unfortunately for the audiences of the period, there were no other Lyman Howes.

Film music, in itself the subject of quite a number of books, is too extensive a study to be given adequate treatment here. Even the music of the silent period would require an additional volume, and so the reader who wishes to explore the topic beyond the limited consideration it is given here should consult the primary information sources. Several have been reprinted in the Arno Press The Literature of Cinema series: Edith Lang and George West’s Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures (originally published in 1920); Erno Rapee’s Moving Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (originally 1924) and Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures (originally 1925); and Kurt London’s Film Music (originally 1936). George W. Beynon’s Musical Presentation of Motion Pictures is invaluable, but difficult to obtain: it has not been republished since it first appeared, in 1921.

Many journals of the silent period ran articles on film music, and the determined student should become familiar especially with Clarence Sinn’s series on “Music for the Picture” in Moving Picture World, and with the various pieces on the topic appearing during the teens in the Film Index and Motion Picture News. A thesis by G. D. Pasquella (University of Iowa, 1968) contains two well-informed chapters on film music from 1908 to 1919. That work, regrettably, is unpublished, but other published sources appearing later than the silent period include Hanns Eisler’s Composing for the Films (1947; reprint edition, Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries); Roger Manveil and John Huntley’s The Technique of Film Music (New York: Focal Press, 1957), which contains an admirable section on music and the silent film and an invaluable appendix, listing, year by year, the major developments in film music since 1895; Reginald Foort’s The Cinema Organ, 2d ed. (Vestal, N. Y.: Vestal Press, 1970); Charles Hofmann’s Sounds for Silents (New York: DBS Publications, 1970), which, most usefully, comes supplied with a record of musical examples; and, most recently, Tony Thomas’s Music for the Movies (Cranbury, N. J.: A. S. Barnes, 1973), which is richly informative on the sound period but has little to say about what occurred before 1930, and James L. Limbacher’s Film Music from Violins to Video (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974) which contains authoritative listings of film music credits.

As Kracauer said (see quotation at the head of this chapter) the need for music to accompany the silent images was recognized from the beginnings of cinema. The first public movie show appears to have been a presentation by the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky, using their Bioskop apparatus, at the Wintergarten, Berlin, November 1, 1895. It is not known whether any musical accompaniment to the films was provided on that historic evening. But a pianist was employed to play during France’s first public movie show: the Lumière program, given in Paris at the Grand-Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, December 28, 1895.⁹ Pianists were at work in most store-front theaters or nickelodeons in the first eight or ten years of the present century. Affluent exhibitors would also employ a drummer and a violinist. “Of course,” wrote George W. Beynon, “it was not to be expected that they should play continuously. . . . They played only during those scenes which appealed to them as holding possibilities for music with which they were conversant. In other words, they made no pretense to fitting the music to the scenes but waited until a scene should appear that fitted the music. They had little or no [sheet music] library, and ‘faked’ selections by ear. Technically the music was abominable.”¹⁰ At times the musicians also played what they knew or could “fake” even when it did not fit the scene, and sometimes they played in competition with one another.

As G. W. Beynon saw it, the accompaniment frequently “resolved itself into a question in the minds of the performers as to who could make the most commotion. . . .”¹¹ The drummer usually won without much difficulty, and, no doubt, to his great satisfaction, since, according to H. F. Hoffman, the drummer assumed “that the audience came there to hear him and him only. His object,” insisted Hoffman, “is to drown the piano player and prove his worth by the amount of noise he can make. . . . His noisy fault is apt to abide with him, and that is why we have so many irritating men behind the drum in moving picture houses.”¹² Thus, music, which was originally intended both to render the absence of sound tolerable and to heighten the effect of the visual images, often became an annoying distraction from the motion picture. Even when the musicians were inclined to play in harmony, their selections would vary from the banal to the ludicrous. “Stock pieces” such as “Hearts and Flowers” or a butchered version of the William Tell Overture were the pinnacles of musical taste in many nickelodeons. But standards were changing even before 1910.

In the period between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) the standard length of the dramatic motion picture increased from the thousand-foot single reel (12 to 15 minutes’ showing time) to features of six to ten reels (60 to 90 minutes’ showing time.) As film stories became more elaborate and sophisticated, the need for more elaborate and sophisticated musical accompaniments became increasingly evident. The practice of musicians playing only intermittently during film shows gradually gave way to continuous musical accompaniments, and among many musicians a controversy arose as to whether music should be selected with regard to the prevailing mood of the picture or whether the nature of each scene should determine the kind of music played with it. The second alternative, which failed to serve the increasing complexity of film stories after 1910, was usually abandoned in favor of the first.¹³

Meanwhile, the nickelodeons were giving way to movie palaces that could accommodate several thousand patrons at one sitting and also orchestras of a hundred or more musicians. Pasquella cites two examples of orchestras playing in movie theaters as early as 1908, but that was a rare occurrence until the teens.¹⁴ Around this time, organs began to be installed in many larger movie palaces whose proprietors could not (or would not) provide the luxury of a full orchestra. Beynon maintained that Mitchell Mark’s Alhamabra Theatre on English Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, contained the first organ installed in a movie theater¹⁵—this was in 1910, according to Pasquella.¹⁶ Some exhibitors tried to eliminate the need for any musicians by introducing player pianos, but they soon found that machines lacked the versatility of live musicians, who, of course, could vary the musical mood along with the twists and turns of the film story.

As movie musicians began to take greater pride in their work, their interest in widening the choice of appropriate music also increased. Between 1910 and 1913 a number of publishing houses started issuing collections of relevant sheet music, consisting invariably of pieces that had not been composed with movies in mind. Cue sheets giving suggestions for music linked to specific scenes seem to have appeared first around 1910.¹⁷ In that year, Edison Kinetogram started publishing a series of articles giving appropriate musical selections and musical cues for Edison Company releases.¹⁸ Other movie companies were quick to follow the example.

J. S. Zamecnik introduced the idea of publishing collections of “classified mood music,” beginning in 1913 with the issue of his Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volumes. Zamecnik’s was perhaps the most widely used collection in the teens; it was supplanted in Europe by Giuseppe Becce’s Kinothek or Kinobibliothek (Berlin, 1919), a more extensive compilation, and in the U. S. by Erno Rapee’s one-volume Moving Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924). From 1915 to 1928 scoring for silent features could either mean assembling a pot-pourri mainly or entirely from the works of composers unconnected with film or else an original composition commissioned (usually by the studio) to be played along with the movie. An outstanding example of the pot-pourri was the score concocted by D. W. Griffith and Joseph Carl Breil for The Birth of a Nation (1915): the selection ranged from songs like “Dixie” through Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”¹⁹ With the pot-pourri as with the original score, the method of using leitmotifs and linking themes to specific characters and key incidents was well established by 1915.

The composition of original film music seems to have begun in France in 1907, when Camille Saint-Saens wrote a score for the Film d’Art production L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise. It was subsequently published as his Opus 128 for strings, piano, and harmonium. The score cued each musical segment (an Introduction and five Tableaux) to specific scenes of the movie.²⁰ In the same year or in 1908, Russian composer Ippolitov-Ivanov provided the music for a film about Stenka Razin and the revolt of the Don Cossacks. Perhaps the first American composer to follow the direction pointed by Saint-Saens and Ippolitov-Ivanov was Walter Cleveland Simon, who wrote an original score for the screen adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s Arrah-na-Pogue (directed by Sidney Olcott for Kalem, 1911).

With the rise of the feature film and the establishment of orchestras in the movie palaces of most cities, studios began to take film music more seriously, and composers were assigned to write original compositions as well as to prepare the usual pastiches. In the teens and twenties, a number of talented composers became distinguished exclusively or mainly for their film scores–most notably Joseph Carl Breil (The Lily and the Rose, Intolerance), Victor Schertzinger (Civilization, Robin Hood), Hugo Riesenfeld (Joan the Woman, The Blue Bird, Humoresque, The Covered Wagon, The Ten Commandments, Grass, Beggar on Horseback), Louis F. Gottschalk (Broken Blossoms, Orphans of the Storm), Mortimer Wilson (The Thief of Bagdad), William Frederick Peters (Way Down East, The Enemies of Women), Erno Rapee (The Iron Horse, Sunrise), and Leo Kempinski (Greed). Max Steiner, the most prolific composer of film music, began his career in 1916 with a score for The Bondman; but his best-known work (the music for King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and The Big Sleep) would belong to the sound era. In Europe during the twenties, Edmund Meisel wrote memorable scores for Eisenstein’s Potemkin and October, while Gottfried Huppertz was critically acclaimed for the music he provided for Fritz Lang’s Siegfried and Metropolis.

A number of European composers whose work was to become part of the regular concert repertoire supplied original music for other important films of the twenties. Among them were George Antheil (Ballet Mécanique), Erik Satie (Entr’acte), Darius Milhaud (L’Inhumaine), Arthur Honegger (Fait Divers, Napoléon), Jacques Ibert (The Italian Straw Hat), Jean Sibelius (The Unknown Soldier), Roger Desormière (À Quoi Rêvent Les Jeunes Filles), Paul Hindemith (Krazy Kat at the Circus, Ghosts Before Breakfast), and Dmitri Shostakovich (The New Babylon). J. S. Zamecnik and Giuseppe Becce, compilers of the leading mood music collections, were also active film composers: the former wrote scores for Abie’s Irish Rose and The Wedding March; the latter the music for Tartuffe.

After special effects and music, a third method of adding sound to the silent film was via the voices of live singers, actors, or lecturers.

During the period before 1915, singers were most commonly used for “illustrated songs” or accompanied tableaux, and for operatic scenes. As these two art forms are sometimes confused by film historians, it is worth distinguishing between them.

With the illustrated song or accompanied tableau, a filmed scene representing a well-known melody or musical piece was accompanied by a singer (or singers) behind a screen. Thus Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River” would be represented by a short film (often in color) of a plantation in the Old South, while the song was being sung by singers invisible to the audience. Ketelby’s “In a Monastery Garden,” an intensely popular piece of program music, was sometimes depicted in a filmed tableau of a beautiful arbor where cowled monks paraded to the strains of a chorus hidden behind the screen. Sometimes there were no singers behind the screen, but a pianist accompanied the illustrated song or tableau while the audience sang along, aided by large display cards or printed sheets giving the lyrics of “Daisy,” “Lily of Laguna,” or other popular songs of the time. This was a not uncommon variation on the song slide, which became a popular interlude attraction in movie programs from about 1909 onwards.

With the operatic scenes, the film subjects were not fanciful creations suggested by the words of a song or the title of a piece of music but were filmed excerpts from operas–or at least scenes whose settings were appropriate (more or less) to the arias sung by the hidden singers. Although the use of live singers to accompany silent operatic scenes reached the peak of popularity between 1908 and 1915, the most ambitious effort along these lines did not occur until 1922. On May 19 of that year, an audience in Berlin, Germany, saw and heard Across the Stream, an original film-opera conceived and directed by Ludwig Czerny with music by Ferdinand Hummel. A correspondent for the London Times (May 20, 1922) attended the presentation and noted that

The problem resolved itself into one of synchronization, the orchestra and the singers behind the screen timing their efforts to fit exactly with the action of the film. Though they were, on the whole, successful in keeping pace with the rapid action of the film, the illusion of an opera was not created, as the close association between voice and gesture was entirely wanting. It might have been better if the characters of the film had actually sung their parts at the time of production; but this was not done, and the impression always remained that one person was acting and another singing.

In the same city, only five months after this stillborn venture, American inventor Lee De Forest gave the first public demonstration of his sound-on-film experiments, the ultimate success of which would sweep such efforts as Across the Stream into oblivion.

The use of the actor behind the screen or the lecturer alongside it was the most familiar form of nonmusical accompaniment to silent film from about 1905 to 1915. The movie lecturer’s art was never as developed in the West as it became in the Far East; in Japan, for example, the speaker was known as the benshi. Anderson and Richie in their history of the Japanese film note that

From the very first the benshi tended to dominate the film and, since the audience liked to be instructed, he would rarely let an opportunity slip by. . . . As his popularity grew so did his importance. In the larger theaters a fanfare would sound before every show . . . and the benshi would enter with great dignity to sit on his platform beside the screen. . . . The more famous had different techniques and sometimes differed widely in interpreting the film. . . . Eventually the benshi rather than the film became the box office attraction. . . . His pay became equivalent to that of the highest paid Japanese film actor, and his position was further secured by the producers and distributors, who liked the benshi, saying he saved the cost of printing titles.²¹

The Western movie lecturer never attained such glorious heights. More frequently he was the subject of fundamental advice from long-suffering columnists in trade papers. “A thorough and patient study of the picture is essential,” wrote W. Stephen Bush in 1911.

If you have seen a picture ten times you can be of great help to the man who sees it for the first time. You can explain and point out things that at the first exhibition of the release even a man of average intelligence and good education might very easily miss. Do not, however, attempt to lecture on a film unless you feel in your heart and soul that there is need for it and that you are competent to fill that need.²²

In the West, the typical movie lecturer engaged in little more than such elementary exposition; there was seldom any attempt to provide dramatic characterizations similar to those skilfully undertaken by the benshi.

Such performances were, however, expected of actors behind the screen, who, at their best, probably anticipated the techniques of acting for radio. One performer, the Baroness Blanc, claimed to have spent three years studying the art of talking to pictures, “noting each detail, and seeking to cultivate that particular vocal method combining flexibility and adaptability, which is essential, in order to make the figures on the screen absolutely true to life.”²³ However, not all performers were so painstaking; from time to time the trade press erupted with complaints about amateurs and inadequately trained professionals who were lowering the standards of acting behind the screen; they made no attempt to synchronize their voices with the characters on screen, or their voices were unsuitable or characterless, or they uttered dialogue that was irrelevant or absurd.

Acting behind the screen, sometimes known as the “Talking Picture Play,” seems to have originated with Lyman Howe as early as 1897, but it did not become popular or professionally organized until ten years later. Commentators of the period sometimes distinguished between two kinds of Talking Picture Play: standard film subjects to which dialogue, not necessarily intended for the picture, was subsequently added; and movies “specially posed with completely spoken dialogue by all characters and with the same dialogue rendered from manuscript during projection by the speakers behind the screen.”²⁴ The second kind clearly involved close association between the production company and the performing group(s), but it is not known how frequently this arrangement occurred or even which companies were most involved with it. We do know that in the heyday of the Talking Picture Play, about 1908 to 1912, troupes, generally consisting of two men and a woman, would tour theater circuits with several films for which they had rehearsed dialogue for all the roles. After a week’s performance at a specific location, a particular troupe would move on to the next theater, together with their films, to be followed by the next troupe, along with their films and rehearsed dialogue. Mogul-to-be Adolph Zukor at one time managed no fewer than twenty-two such talking trios, which he called Humanuva Troupes.²⁵

Thus far, except for sound effects machines and player pianos, all the methods we have considered for supplying sound for silent films involved the active presence of live performers or live special effects men. But before the coming of talkies, two other methods of making sound films were investigated and applied with varying degrees of success. The first involved the combination of the phonograph and the motion picture; the second, which we shall discuss in the next chapter, involved the use of a sound track on the film itself.

Numerous attempts to combine the phonograph and the motion picture were made during a period of nearly forty years following the commercial beginnings of cinema in 1895.^* The remainder of this chapter is concerned with the more significant, ingenious, or spectacular of these attempts before the inception of Vitaphone, the sound system which marked the culmination of all efforts at linking phonograph recordings and the cinematograph.

All the attempts we shall discuss fall into three main categories: (1) Films made first and then supplied with a phonograph record accompaniment which provided varying degrees of synchronization. (2) Films made to “illustrate visually” previously made phonograph records. Usually the singers or actors were filmed while miming to the sound of a record—the same record that was later played when the film was projected. The usual reason for this procedure was that before 1910 adequate recordings could only be made if the performer was as close as possible to the microphone. Thus, to film while the recording was being made would have meant revealing the microphone in the movie. (3) Films made simultaneously with the recording of the relevant sound and subsequently shown with the same sound accompaniment; this type was rarely attempted with any success before 1910. To a greater or lesser extent all these categories of sound films were affected by the same problems—those of synchronization, amplification, and brevity of recorded disks in relation to the standard lengths of movies. It will be convenient here to consider each of these problems separately before turning to actual achievements in combining the phonograph and the cinematograph.

Synchronization generally involved difficulties at two separate stages: first in recording, and then in reproducing the visuals and the accompanying sound. Success at the first stage did not automatically guarantee success at the second. Accordingly, inventors sought various methods of obtaining a precise relationship between the recording and the reproducing machines. The methods that evolved were, basically, the use of unitary machines, the use of dependent machines, and the use of dialregulated and operator-adjusted machines.²⁶

With the unitary method, the phonograph and cinematograph (in recording) or the phonograph and projector (in reproducing) used synchronous electric motors or were driven by the same power source, which worked a single main shaft connecting the two machines. This main shaft might be fairly short in the film studio, where the camera and the phonograph were often placed in close proximity. In the movie theater, by contrast, the main shaft was often very long. It would frequently be located under the floor of the auditorium, extending from the phonograph, which was placed behind or alongside the screen, to the projector, situated in a booth behind the audience. This arrangement was considered necessary because it seemed unnatural for the audience to listen to the sound coming from behind their seats while they were facing the picture. The alternative method of projecting the picture from behind a translucent screen would have allowed for a short connecting shaft between the two machines, but for some obscure reason this procedure was not regarded as acceptable or satisfactory.

In its conception the unitary method may have seemed promising, but in order for it to work satisfactorily it was necessary for picture and sound to start off in exact synchronization—or for some means to be provided whereby the operator could slow down or speed up either machine if synchronization was not maintained. A problem could arise if there was a defect in the record or a splice in the film where a repair had necessitated the removal of a number of frames. A loss of three frames would reduce a film’s showing time—at the silent speed of 16 frames per second—by approximately one-fifth of a second; thus a long film with many splices would gradually run seconds or minutes ahead of the sound accompaniment. A typical solution to the problem was the use of a clutch mechanism that allowed the projectionist to disengage the projector from the main shaft. He could then adjust the speed of the projector by hand-cranking it until synchronization was regained—at which time he could use the clutch to reengage the projector and the main shaft.

With the dependent method, one machine depended on, that is, was driven or controlled by, the other. Usually it was the phonograph motor that controlled the speed of the projector. Any change in the speed of the phonograph effected a corresponding change in projector speed. The phonograph could not normally be the dependent machine because any adjustment that involved varying the speed of the phonograph would change the pitch of the sounds being reproduced, and that was usually undesirable or even objectionable, particularly with music. As with the unitary method, clutch-like devices were introduced that allowed the projectionist to disengage the projector from the controlling drive of the phonograph whenever it was necessary to restore synchronization by hand-cranking the projector.

By contrast, there were no connections between the separate machines in the dial-regulated or operator-adjusted methods. The first provided the operator with dials that gave readings of the speed of each machine. By watching the dials and where necessary making hand-crank adjustments to the speed of the projector, the operator was able to maintain approximate synchronization. The operator-adjusted method was the simplest: the operator did not rely on dials but listened to the sound either directly, as it filtered through to him from the auditorium, or as he heard it over an internal telephone system. While listening to the sound he adjusted the speed of the projector to coincide with it.

None of these synchronization techniques was perfect, and usually they were less than adequate. Until the arrival of Vitaphone, sound systems using phonographs or Graphophones achieved synchronization on a hit-or-miss basis at best, though some inventors, including Edison and Gaumont, made exaggerated claims of having attained perfection.

In 1912, the London Times noted the observations of an eminent scientist, Professor W. Stirling, on the conditions that had to be fulfilled for the successful making of sound films. Much of what he had to say concerned amplification, which would have to be sufficient for large audiences to “hear the sound and observe the exact correlation between the movements of the speakers, actors, or singers, and the audible sounds as regards pitch, loudness, and quality of tone.”²⁷ That, of course, was the ideal, and it was not to be realized for many years. At the outset, when only one horn speaker was used, amplification was as serious a problem as synchronization. However, it became less of a problem from about 1908 onwards, when theaters presenting sound films would, typically, be equipped with numerous horn speakers arranged behind a perforated screen (where they were sometimes moved about by hand in relation to the on-screen action), or assembled in a battery below a slightly raised screen, or scattered at various locations throughout the auditorium. Around 1910, various methods of increasing the volume of sound by compressed air devices were tried in the U. S. and Europe.²⁸ Audiences were thus quite often able to hear the sound fairly well, but what they heard seemed just like old phonograph records with plenty of surface noise.

The brevity of sound recordings posed another serious problem for inventors. Even as early as 1905, the average story film ran longer than the four minutes of a cylinder record or the five minutes of a 12” disk recording. Theoretically there was no limit to the length of recorded sound that could be supplied with a film provided that several records were used; but switching from record to record generally resulted in loss of synchronization. The development of auto-change systems (c.1910) or the use of several phonographs never totally overcame this particular difficulty. Some European inventors tried using oversize disks that played for as long as twenty minutes, but they found that sound quality would deteriorate markedly as the needle approached the center of the recording.

Bearing in mind these general observations on the problems of combining the phonograph and the motion picture, let us now turn to specific work in this area of sound cinema.

A selective listing, compiled by Film Daily, giving details of patents for sound-on-disk apparatus, shows that more than one hundred inventors in France, Germany, Britain, and the U. S. were at work in this field before 1929.²⁹ Since we cannot discuss all of them and their achievements, we shall concentrate on the highlights.

In America the impulse to harness the phonograph to the motion picture declined temporarily between 1897 and 1908, the years following the debut of the Vitascope. The main inventive development of the period was the introduction of the Biograph projector, which reduced the flicker of the projected image to a tolerable minimum, and which, in 1897, began to supplant the Vitascope.^* Most film activity before 1900 was concentrated on the commercial development of the silent motion picture. Independent inventors were soon overshadowed by the rise of the entrepreneur, the small businessman who bought or rented a movie projector, obtained a few short, crudely made films, and presented them at fair grounds, as a vaudeville turn, or, most ambitiously, as a separate show in a converted store. Early in the twentieth century, the more successful of these converted store-theaters sometimes became nickelodeons, the first established movie houses. Despite some spectacular success stories, the majority of entrepreneurs did not become millionaires. In fact, by 1900, periods of fluctuating profits had already demonstrated the fickleness of the public with regard to motion pictures. Not unnaturally, the entrepreneurs were more interested in consolidating their business enterprises than in sinking money into new technical developments, such as sound and color, which might turn out to be a nine days’ wonder as far as the public was concerned.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that no one showed much interest in marketing the invention of one George W. Brown, which received U.S. patent no.576,542, on February 9, 1897. Brown constructed an apparatus that synchronized a moving picture film and a phonograph. The pictures he used were not projected; they could only be viewed (as in the Kinetoscope) through an eyepiece as they ran, on an endless loop, over a drum which was rotated by a belt worked from the drive mechanism of a phonograph. The playing of the phonograph was automatically adjusted to the speed at which the picture strip passed under the eyepiece. The invention was, obviously, a variation on the Kinetophone, developed too late to be an exploitable novelty.

Alas for Brown, the immediate future of the motion picture generally and of sound film in particular lay not in the peep show machine but in the use of projected film in movie theaters. The initiative now shifted to France, where for nearly ten years after Edison abandoned his earliest efforts to make sound movies, a number of inventors tackled, with varying degrees of success, the problems of linking the phonograph and the motion picture.³⁰

The first of these inventors was Auguste Baron. Fired by the commercial success of the Lumière Cinématographe, Baron sank his personal fortune of 200,000 francs into a series of attempts to make sound pictures. His work evidently passed through three main phases:

On April 16, 1896, Baron and a collaborator named Burnon took out a patent for an apparatus that would record and reproduce scenes and sounds. There is no evidence that at this time they actually constructed such a machine. In fact, the Lumières, claiming priority as pioneers of sound film, were later to maintain that they had actually accomplished synchronization of sound and image (using their Cinématographe and an Edison phonograph) four days later than the “theoretical” patent of Baron and Burnon. But their claim remains conjectural.

In the second phase of his activity, Baron seems to have actually constructed an improved version of his apparatus. On April 4, 1898, he took out French patent no.276,628 for a machine “perfected to record and reproduce simultaneously animated scenes and the sounds which accompany them.” The invention was a combination of a phonograph and a “chronophotographic apparatus”–the latter most probably being an adapted Lumiére Cinématographe obtained from Félix Mesguisch, who had worked for the Lumiéres and who became Baron’s assistant in 1897. Mesguisch in his Tour de Manivelle (Paris, 1933) claims that Baron was the first person ever to synchronize the phonograph with a projected motion picture, and he provides a fairly detailed description of the sound system patented by Baron in 1898. Its major innovation was an electrical device which controlled the motor of the “chronophotographic” apparatus and was linked to the motor of a phonograph. Mesguisch maintains that during 1897–98, at Baron’s modest laboratory in Alma Street, Asnières, he assisted the inventor in making several films that utilized the new sound system. They included a number of song and dance scenes, utilizing stars from the Opéra Comique and the Eldorado, and a “talkie” in which Mme. Baron supplied the spoken commentary. Baron appears to have supervised the sound recording while Mesguisch shot the films.

Probably in 1898, Baron demonstrated his sound films to Marey and was delighted to receive the latter’s praise and encouragement. But, as noted in the previous chapter in connection with Demeny, Marey placed his faith in science and not in money, and Baron soon began to realize that the heavy expense of his work made strong financial backing more desirable than idealistic enthusiasm. Potential backers were generous with their encouragement but would not put up a franc to develop or exploit Baron’s system. What they must have recognized very quickly was that Baron had failed to find a reliable and inexpensive method of duplicating the wax cylinders on which he recorded the sounds that accompanied his films. It was impossible to make copies of the same sound films; to make the equivalent of a copy it was necessary to reshoot the picture and re-record the sound.

In 1899, Baron gave a presentation of his sound films to the Institute of Sciences in Paris. His brief program included movies of Miss Duval of the Lyric Gaiety Theatre singing a popular song and Trewey, the famous magician and friend of the Lumières, giving one of his celebrated shadow shows. Whatever impression this program may have had on the members of the Institute, it did nothing to improve Baron’s deteriorating financial position.

About this time, Baron’s eyesight began to fail. Nevertheless, in the midst of his increasing difficulties, he became involved in a third stage of experimentation–an attempt to make stereoscopic sound films. While engaged in this work, Baron went blind. His efforts to perfect sound films came to a sudden end. Mesguisch left his employ shortly before 1900, and Baron gradually drifted into poverty. He lived on until 1938, dying at the age of 83 in an old people’s home in Neuilly. His end came in the same year as the deaths of Georges Méliès and Emile Cohl, two other French pioneers of the cinema.

Almost contemporaneously with Baron, other French inventors were concentrating their efforts on solving the problems of amplification–in using the phonograph to provide sound accompaniment to films shown before large audiences. One “solution” was that described by G.-Michael Coissac in his Histoire du Cinématographe. A certain Jacques Ducom described to Coissac a presentation of talking pictures at the Olympia in Paris, about 1898. Adequate amplification was provided by supplying individual telephone receivers for each member of the audience. These receivers were connected to a phonograph which provided the sound accompaniment to projected movies.³¹ Unfortunately, nothing more is known of this curious experiment though it may well have influenced the Phonorama of Dussaud, Berthon, and Jaubert, of which we shall be hearing shortly.

According to Georges Sadoul, the eminent film historian, French pioneers of the cinema Charles Pathé and Ferdinand Zecca experimented with talking films as early as 1899.³² But like the Olympia show of the previous year little is known of the success or failure of their efforts at this time. Pathé was variously an inventor, entrepreneur, and showman. In the 1890s he made a fortune by importing into France British-made phonographs and Kinetoscopes that infringed Edison’s patents and which he sold at prices that undercut the Edison machines. He established a recording studio at which he made some of the earliest cylinder recordings in France. And in June 1895 he formed a business partnership with H. Joly, who, in 1906, would patent one of the first dial-regulated sound systems. Years later, Pathé was to observe, “The phonograph for me was only a preparation for the cinema. Just as the phonograph preceded the gramophone, so too the Edison Kinetoscope preceded the cinema. . . . The principle of cinema . . . was achieved by the Kinetoscope . . . which I obtained in London and . . . which I sold in large numbers before the Lumière Cinématographe had made its appearance.”³³ Zecca was to become one of France’s first notable film makers. Inspired by Georges Méliès, he tried his hand at making trick and fantasy films; independently he discovered the dramatic possibilities of the close-up, which he used as early as 1901; he made some of the earliest story films to embody social commentary; and in 1905 he filmed the very first reconstruction of the Potemkin mutiny.

A more obscure figure than either Pathé or Zecca was the French inventor Gariel. On March 31, 1900 he patented a system for “combining in the same cinematographic apparatus the mechanisms for recording and reproducing the words used in the phonograph.”³⁴ This system was, presumably, a method of synchronization. But there is no evidence that the apparatus was constructed or demonstrated, and Gariel’s name does not figure in connection with subsequent attempts to make sound movies.

More spectacular than the efforts of Baron, Pathé, Zecca, or Gariel were the exhibitions of sound-on-film systems at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The first of these systems was the Phonorama of L. A. Berthon, C. F. Dussaud, and G. F. Jaubert. The development of Phonorama appears to have been as follows: Before 1897, Dussaud found a way to combine simultaneous recordings made by at least twelve phonographs. Rather like multi-channel recording on a modern tape recorder, it was a means of capturing clearly all the various sounds that might be audible in one location: music, conversation, natural sound, etc. Dussaud called his apparatus the Macrophonograph. Subsequently he joined forces with Berthon and Jaubert to find a way of combining the Macrophonograph and the cinematograph. The machine they constructed was given the elephantine name of Ginemacrophonograph, and patented on January 1, 1898. News of the invention came to the attention of Eugène Pereire, president of the General Transatlantic Company of Le Havre, and he decided that it could be exploited as a novel advertisement for his company, which had reserved a booth at the Paris Exposition. Pereire’s company thereupon acquired an interest in the invention, which was mercifully renamed Phonorama.

Félix Mesguisch, who had worked for the Lumières and for Auguste Baron, was employed to shoot the films that would be shown in the Phonorama exhibit. Mesguisch evidently made three films for the show: views of maritime life in Le Havre and Marseilles, some Paris street scenes, and a singer performing with an orchestral accompaniment. In making the films, the same electrically powered shaft was used to drive the movie apparatus and twelve phonographs, thus insuring some degree of synchronization during the recording and playback. In filming the singer’s performance, some of the phonographs were placed on stage, while others were located in the orchestra. Subsequently, the films were colored by hand at the Gaumont studios, so that Phonorama was actually a presentation of sound films in color! The sound system used inside the Phonorama booth at the Exposition was similar to that used at the Olympia two years earlier. Each member of the audience watched Mesguisch’s films while simultaneously listening through an earphone to the synchronized sounds being supplied by the twelve phonographs.

More impressive than Phonorama, and in certain respects more spectacular than any presentation in the history of sound film, was the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre of Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret, which had its public premiere at the Paris Exposition on June 8, 1900.

Gratioulet (who called himself Clément-Maurice) is said to have introduced the Lumières to the Kinetoscope; he was the concessionaire who had arranged for the showing of the Lumière program at the Grand-Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, on December 28, 1895. He was a fashionable photographer who specialized in making portraits of the stars of theater, opera, ballet, and vaudeville. His dual interests in the cinematograph and show business led him to the idea of making sound movies of many of the stage personalities he had photographed. His associate, Lioret, was an horologist by training and an inventor by inclination. In the 1890s he patented a cylinder talking-machine which he called the Lioretographe: its recording and amplification qualities were said to have been superior to Edison’s phonograph, and Lioret had already marketed it profitably before he went into partnership with Clément-Maurice. The Lioretographe was to become the basis of the sound system used in the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre. Film historians René Jeanne and Charles Ford claimed that Léon Gaumont had a hand in developing it, but that may be purely conjectural.³⁵

Lioret’s system was less complex than that used in the Phonorama. Apparently there was no mechanical connection of the cinematograph and the Lioretographe. It was the first (or one of the first) systems using the operator-adjusted method. The scenes to be shown were first filmed, and then the performers recorded their dialogue or songs on the Lioretographe, endeavoring to adjust their cadences to the film performance. In showing the films, synchronization of sorts was achieved by adjusting the film image to conform to the sounds issuing from the Lioretographe. The projectionist was equipped with a telephone through which he listened to the cylinder machine, which was located in the orchestra pit. While following the sound, he regulated the speed of the projector, which was hand-cranked. The sound reached the audience by way of a large morning-glory horn attached to the Lioretographe. It has been claimed–by Georges Sadoul and others–that the ubiquitous Félix Mesguisch was the projectionist at the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre for its run at the Exposition, but that is questionable since Mesguisch was then involved with Phonorama. However, Mesguisch, assisted by a young man named Berst, who later became the agent for Pathé Frères’ New York office, did take the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre on a successful European tour in the fall and winter of 1900–1901.

Before this tour the first home of the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre was a beautiful pavilion in the Cours la Reine. The building was a reconstruction of the Salon Frais at the Trianon, and in this lovely setting, for the modest sum of one franc, the visitor to the Paris Exposition could see and hear films of the great stars of theater and opera, ballet and vaudeville. The program included such attractions as Sarah Bernhardt in the duel scene from Hamlet, Coquelin the Elder in scenes from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules, Réjane in Madame Sans-Gêne and Ma Cousine, and Victor Maurel in Falstaff and Don Juan; it offered dance attractions such as Zambelli in Le Cid and Sylvia, Rosita Mauri, Violat, and Mante of the Paris Opéra in La Korrigane, Cléo and Merode performing a Javanese dance, and Félicia Mallet in a ballet, The Prodigal Son (in three tableaux); it presented Cossira, vocal star of the Paris Opéra, and such vaudeville celebrities as Little Tich (the British comedian), Mason and Forbes (American vaudeville artists), and popular singers Polin and Milly Meyer. The only bill that approached this galaxy of stars was the one offered by Warner Bros, twenty-six years later in one of the programs used to introduce Vitaphone.

The Paris press gave the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre rave notices. One journal, quoted by Georges Sadoul, rhapsodized over the scenes showing Coquelin in the Molière play: “It is really Coquelin whom we see before us; it is his voice that we hear! It is stupendous!”³⁶ L’Intransigéant described the large audiences that enthusiastically applauded the “arresting presentation” of the ballet The Prodigal Son and the shouts of triumph that greeted the screening of the duel scene in Hamlet, in which the divine “Sarah Bernhardt is so tragically beautiful.” Le Figaro noted:

The success of this very original enterprise surpasses all that can be said about it. The artists themselves, after graciously posing before the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre apparatus, go to see themselves again, to hear themselves again, and, what is also satisfying, to hear themselves being applauded just as if they were acting in person before the public. . . . The duel scene from Hamlet . . . is a wonder of art at the same time that it is a masterpiece of accurate representation. Réjane plays in Ma Cousine and Madame Sans-Gêne with such spirit that the spectator believes himself transported to the vaudeville theatre. Coquelin . . . brings the show to an end with [a scene from] Les Précieuses Ridicules, and his resonant and splendid voice is drowned by the thunder of applause.³⁷

Summing up the experience, a reviewer for Le Matin observed:

Beyond the very real pleasure which one feels at this spectacle, one cannot help entertaining the agreeable and consoling thought that here are beautiful sounds and beautiful gestures which are fixed for eternity; and while the people of our generation know of Talma and Rachel only through hearsay, our descendants will admire [through these films] the performance of the divine Sarah and will be able to relive our emotions and our joys at her artistry.³⁸

With such notices the success of the show was almost guaranteed. It played to packed houses until the Exposition closed and then, on November 10, 1900, was transferred to a new location, at 42 bis Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. Mesguisch and Berst took charge of the touring version of the show which, during the fall and winter of 1900-1901 visited Sweden, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain. They were back in Paris by the spring of 1901, when the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre was transferred to the Olympia. By this time, however, several other programs of sound films (including Phonorama) were being presented in Paris. Competition was vigorous, and there were even attempts to sabotage the program at the Olympia–which was commercially the most successful of the sound film enterprises and had received the most favorable publicity. One attempt to disrupt the show was described thus, by Mesguisch:

One evening, when I was in the projection booth on the second floor while Berst was working the phonograph in the orchestra, an ill-disposed workman cut the wire of the telephone by which I was supposed to follow the sound coming from the phonograph. Without interrupting the performance, I actually succeeded in finishing my projection in perfect synchronization with the phonograph. No one noticed that the projectionist had for a short time been ‘struck deaf.’³⁹

The Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre did not survive more than two or three years, but sabotage was not responsible for its demise. Its fate was sealed by two factors. First, contrary to the extravagant claims of its promoters and the press reviewers, the sound it provided was unsatisfactory. It was harsh, strident, and seldom more than approximately synchronized. Some of the original cylinders and films still survive, unearthed in 1930 by Mesguisch and Clément-Maurice’s son in the archives of their firm, the Compagnie de Tirage Maurice. At that time, the beginning of the sound era, the cylinders and films were played and projected under conditions that simulated the original presentations. The latest methods of sound reproduction were also applied, but neither approach resulted in a satisfactory experience. Sadoul comments, “The sound was sharp and nasal, and it was difficult to follow the words. As soon as the first flush of success due to public curiosity had ended, this defect, even more than the imperfections of the synchronization, prevented the novel attraction from becoming established in a seasonal or permanent fashion, in the programs of the great music-halls.”⁴⁰

The second reason that the success of the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre was brief was probably that the main attraction it held for the public was not the “Phono” or “Cinéma” but its “Théâtre.” The novelty was in seeing great stars at little expense and in unusual circumstances, and when the novelty had worn thin, the public went back to seeing the same stars, in person, in full-length stage productions rather than in poorly recorded excerpts. Phonorama aroused less interest than the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre because, though its sound quality and synchronization were probably better, it could not rival the theatrical galaxy presented by Clément-Maurice. Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre did little or nothing to create an enduring public interest in sound films; but it is still memorable for having demonstrated, more than a decade before Adolph Zukor rediscovered it, the box-office appeal of famous players in film versions of famous plays.

Following Berthon–Dussaud–Jaubert and Clément-Maurice, the most formidable rivals in the phono-film field were Edison and French film pioneer Léon Gaumont, both of whom marketed systems that for a while seemed to promise commercial success–even though they too were far from perfect.

Gaumont’s interest in creating sound movies was evident as early as 1900, when, in his photographic company’s display case at the Paris Exposition, he exhibited a movie projector mechanically linked to a phonograph. Years later, he admitted that it was “basically nothing but a variant of the coupling of the Kinetoscope apparatus of Edison [with a standard phonograph].”⁴¹ In the following year he was granted French patent no.312,613 for his method of driving a projector electrically from a phonograph. This method was demonstrated for the first time on September 12, 1902, before the French Photographic Society. Frederick Talbot wrote in 1912 that Gaumont’s apparatus

was not yet perfect, but it served to demonstrate that synchronous production of sound and movement by the aid of the cinematograph and the talking machine was within measurable distance of attainment. The demonstration was held primarily to show how perfect a synchronizing mechanism had been evolved. The great difficulty encountered was in regard to the sensitive character of the material required for taking the records of sounds from a distance.⁴²

A second Gaumont patent, granted on November 18, 1902, provided a clutch device for correcting faulty synchronization. A third, dated 1903, introduced a microphone and telephone connection from the phonograph, which was located beside the projector, to the loudspeakers, which were placed behind the screen. Gaumont’s system also required that the loudspeakers be moved about in order to follow the on-screen action. (This movement was done by hand, not automatically.) Gaumont created an alternative system in 1904, by devising a phonograph whose speed was controlled from the projection machine. It had rather dubious advantages, since any change in record speed was bound to distort the sound. In 1907 he improved both systems. He patented a gearing device, connecting the phonograph and the projector, which worked a dial that would clearly indicate to the operator when the machines were running in synchronization, and he devised a method for rapidly switching from one record to the next. An electrical circuit that closed when the needle of the phonograph arrived at the end of the record was used to start a second phonograph. In this way, a sufficiently long sound accompaniment could be provided for the average one-reel film of the period. Gaumont never satisfactorily solved the problems of amplification any more than he was able to refine the sensitivity of the phonograph. His most advanced technique for increasing the volume of sound was to use several loudspeakers or morning-glory horns while also intensifying the sound waves by means of compressed air. This method was basically one adopted from the Auxetophone of C. A. Parsons.

The general name for the Gaumont systems was Chronophone, while the sound films it presented were variously known as Filmsparlants or Phono-Scènes. Before 1910, Gaumont had to make each of his Phono-Scènes in two sessions because it was impossible to get anything like a distinct recording unless the singer or speaker projected his voice directly into the micro phone. To avoid having to film the microphone as well as the performer, Gaumont’s practice was first to make the recording, then to play it back while the performer was filmed mouthing the same piece. Inevitably, synchronization was often a hit-or-miss matter. But in 1910, improvements in the Chronophone made it possible for Gaumont to place the horn out of range of the camera and to achieve adequate synchronization by filming and recording simultaneously. In that year, the International Congress of Photographers in Brussels and the French Academy of Sciences applauded demonstrations of Gaumont’s sound system. Within a short time thereafter, a program of Phono-Scènes was prepared for commercial presentation.

It was found that songs made better Chronophone subjects than did spoken dialogue. With the former, the music was usually audible even if the words were indistinct, and imprecise synchrony was generally more tolerable with singing than with speech. Nevertheless, in 1908 the Gaumont company made Phono-Scènes of Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane, and other notable stars of the French theater (it was like a replay of Clément-Maurice’s production), and it was announced that such dramatists as Edmond Rostand and Henri Lavedan had been contracted to write film plays for the Chronophone. At least one twenty-minute talking picture play was made about 1912.⁴³ The title, dramatist, and stars are not known, but it can be said for certain that it did nothing to hasten the arrival of the talkies. They were still nearly twenty years away.

The Chronophone was commercially exploited as early as 1902, although it was not until 1910 that Phono-Scènes became regular presentations at the Gaumont-Palace in Paris. During the next three years they were to be seen and heard in most European capitals and in the U. S. The other leading French sound-on-disk systems–Gentilhomme’s (sponsored by the Pathé company), Joly’s, Couade’s, and Gibl’s–were basically similar to Gaumont’s, but none achieved the international vogue of Chronophone.

The showpiece of Gaumont’s system was an ambitious program that he sent on tour in 1912–13. It presented not only sound films but also movies in “natural color.” (Gaumont had developed an additive color process that he called Chrono-chrome; it was later improved and renamed Gaumont Color.) The subjects of the sound films included a rooster crowing, a lion tamer cracking his whip in a den of roaring lions, a banjo player, a sailor reciting “The Battle of the Clampherdown,” and Gaumont’s magnum opus: the twenty-minute talking picture play.⁴⁴ The program was the accomplishment of more than ten years’ experiment and considerable financial investment by the inventor and his backers, but for the public in Europe and the U. S., it was little more than a novelty.

Even when the Chronophone’s synchronization was perfect, its sound quality was crude and its amplification left much to be desired. Jeanne and Ford maintain that exhibitors were deterred by the expense of installing Chronophone in their theaters, though Edison’s rival system does not seem to have met with comparable objections. More significantly, compared with the increasing sophistication of the story material in silent cinema, the subject matter of even the most elaborate of Gaumont’s sound films seemed ludicrously primitive to European and American audiences in 1913.

World War I interrupted Gaumont’s work with sound-on-disk. Thereafter he resumed his experiments without the impetus of his prewar years. The culmination of this final phase of his work appears to have been a well-received demonstration in Paris, in June 1922, of two short sound-on-disk movies. One presented General Buat speaking about the necessity of conscription; the other was an address by M. Paisant about “the solemn duty of France and her Unknown Warrior.” The London Times noted that the “synchronization of the pictures and words was irreproachable, and the audience could well imagine that they were in the presence of living orators. Some slight imperfections were noticeable in the timbres of the voices, but the speeches were delivered in clear and sonorous tones.”⁴⁵

Years later Gaumont was to claim that some time after 1913 he had been in touch with Danish sound-on-film pioneers M. Valdemar Poulsen and P. O. Pedersen. He noted, “We made an agreement which led to the improvement [or rectification] of the sound films which we used.”⁴⁶ This statement sounds as if Gaumont himself was turning toward experimentation with sound-on-film, but in fact the “agreement” he refers to was a contract enabling the Gaumont Company to promote a soundon-film system invented by Poulsen and Pedersen. Marketed in the 1920s under the name GPP [Gaumont-Poulsen-Pedersen system], it used a 35 mm sound record film separate from the film carrying the photographic images. GPP had faulty synchronization and failed commercially. It was never directly associated with Gaumont’s own attempts at making sound movies.

As we have seen, in the first ten years or so after the birth of cinema, French creativity in the field of sound movies overshadowed everyone else’s. However, inventors were busy in other countries.

In Germany, phono-film activity was dominated by Oskar Messter, who describes his work at this period in a memoir, Mein Weg mit dem Film (Berlin, 1936). Max and Emil Skladanowsky had presented the first public film shows in Germany–at the Wintergarten, Berlin, in 1895–but commercial film production on a regular basis did not begin in Germany until 1897, when Messter opened his Berlin studio on Friedrichstrasse.⁴⁷ Messter had already produced several hunded short silent films by 1903, when he made his first venture into sound movies–a brief film of comedian Robert Steidl accompanied by a record of his patter. Details of the system used at this time are unclear, but it is known that in 1905 Messter patented an operator-adjusted disk system which he improved with patented devices of 1906 and 1909. Before 1908 he went into partnership with inventor Alfred Duskes,^* who was to construct a unitary disk system using synchronous motors and (hopefully) avoiding the need for operator adjustments (French patent of 1908). By this time Messter was customarily supplying recorded musical accompaniments to his films, including those in which Henny Porten, Germany’s first real movie star, was making her appearance. Among the synchronized dialogue films he made about 1908–10 were a short movie of Giampetro of the Metropol Theatre and a longer effort, The Green Forest, starring Henny Porten and Alfred Stein. Messter had major problems with amplification, which, along with waning public interest in his sound films, persuaded him to give up his experiments soon after 1911. German inventor Ernest Vorbeck tackled the amplification problem in 1913, but whatever he accomplished never got beyond the laboratory.⁴⁸

The first British “sound movie” was perhaps the achievement of William Friese-Greene. If his biographer is correct, as early as spring 1889, Friese-Greene used a camera he had invented to take “some moving pictures of a man singing in time with a phonograph record, and . . . played the record during the showing of the film.”⁴⁹ The record was made on an Edison machine that Friese-Greene had acquired two years earlier. As noted in chapter 1, he wrote to Edison later in 1889 telling him of “the experiments he had made in using the phonograph in conjunction with the motion picture camera, and suggested that Edison and he should combine in finding a method of making what, nearly forty years later, was announced as ‘talkies’ ”⁵⁰ He received only a perfunctory reply, and the proposed collaboration never materialized.

Friese-Greene’s experiments–however successful or prophetic they might have been–remained in the privacy of his laboratory. It was not until 1901 that the British public had its first experience of sound movies. They were Clément-Maurice’s, imported from the Paris Exposition. Gary Alligham prints the text of a 1901 playbill advertising the

Cine-Phono-Matagraph [sic], illustrating in a most marvellous manner, vocal selections from the Royal Italian Opera in Paris. A new kind of Phonograph reproduces the voice, while the Cinematograph shows the singers, their actions, and surroundings. Thus you get scenes from the Royal Italian Opera in Paris brought to your very doors.⁵¹

The same playbill also indicates an additional program, of strong local appeal, made with the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre system at the London Hippodrome:

Mr. Poole has arranged with Mr. Gibbons, of the London Hippodrome, to introduce his latest Singing Pictures–Vesta Tilley, the London Idol, singing ‘The Midnight Sun’; Lil Hawthorne, the famous American comedienne in ‘Kitty Malone’; Alec Hurley, the coster comedian in ‘The Lambeth Cake Walk’; and the American Comedy Four will introduce ‘Sally in Our Alley.’

The film of English comedian Little Tich, shown at the Paris Exposition, but curiously omitted from the 1901–1902 programs in Britain, was presented in London in 1903, along with some of Clément-Maurice’s other sound films. It was acclaimed by the press as one of the entertainment “triumphs” of the year.

An early version of Gaumont’s Chronophone was, according to British film historian Rachel Low, the first disk system to be marketed in England, after being demonstrated at the London Hippodrome in 1904: “By 1906 it was being exploited in the provinces and film subjects for it were selling at is. a foot, with 7s. 6d. for a 10-inch disc and 10s. 6d. for one of 12 inches. This early machine apparently sold well and was followed at the end of the year by an improved model called the ‘Chronomegaphone,’ which was also shown at the Hippodrome and ran there for months with great success.”⁵² Alligham quotes a 1908 advertisement of the Gaumont Company indicating a further development of their apparatus for the British market–a Hand Chronomegaphone, a “living-picture, singing and talking machine” for £150; it was “worked almost entirely by hand,” and was described as a companion to the “renowned Chronomegaphone.”⁵³

Around 1906, British agents for the Pathé and Edison companies began importing their sound systems along with films and records to be used with the apparatus. Contemporaneously, home-produced systems began to make their appearance. The most prominent were Cinematophone (1907), marketed by the firm of Walturdaw Ltd.; Vivaphone (1907), marketed by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company; Cinephone (1909), patented and marketed by Harold Jeapes; and Animatophone (1910), developed by F. A. Thomassin and marketed by a syndicate formed by Thomassin and Harry Nathan.⁵⁴ This last was reputedly the best British disk system, though it survived only until 1911 when the syndicate was dissolved. Rachel Low comments,

it is not difficult to explain the sound film’s failure to become general at this date . . . for the most part sound films were merely unpretentious turns by music-hall artists, thus remaining stationary at one of the very earliest stages of the development of film technique. The technical obstacles to any change on this pattern were formidable. Not only was the actual sound reproduction often faulty and indistinct, but the size of the disc tended to restrict the duration of the film to a few minutes. The muchdiscussed synchronization of sound and picture, moreover, was necessarily poor where there was no automatic regulation of the speeds of the four different machines needed to record and project sound and picture.⁵⁵

The British public’s interest in sound movies seems to have dried up shortly before World War 1. It revived again briefly in 1920, when veteran inventor-producer-director Cecil Hepworth (who in 1910 had patented a disk system using electrical circuit breakers) presented his new feature film, Anna the Adventuress, starring Alma Taylor, James Carew, and Ronald Colman, with synchronized sound effects supplied by some unspecified apparatus. Whether it employed disks or sound-on-film is not known. The London Times reviewer noted:

The new process is Mr. Hepworth’s secret. . . . To the onlooker the synchronization seems to be perfect. In one scene, for instance, Miss Alma Taylor, as the innocent girl, is seen in the act of packing her trunk. Miss Taylor [also doubling] as the adventuress, throws her a nightdress across the room to include in the trunk, and Miss Taylor as the innocent one, deftly catches it. Obviously, the synchronization to secure such a result must be correct to within a fraction of a second.⁵⁶

E. E. Norton’s Cameraphone was the first American disk system to gain a measure of commercial success in the new century. It was promoted by the National Cameraphone Company of New York City. In 1908, when the apparatus became available for lease to exhibitors, demand for it was so great that the company’s Bridgeport, Connecticut plant was worked to capacity. Moving Picture World described Cameraphone as

a combination of the moving picture and the graphophone.^* The two are operated by one man, who controls them by electricity. The moving picture machine is operated by a spring motor, as is the graphophone, which is concealed behind the screen on which the pictures appear. The gestures, steps, or sounds indicated in the pictures are heard, if there is any sound connected with them, from the graphophone behind the screen, thus giving the effect of speaking, as well as moving pictures. They are perfectly synchronized; that is, the movement of the lips in the pictures coincides with the words from the graphophone.^* . . . The operator, if he finds the pictures slightly ahead or behind the graphophone record, can control the two so absolutely as to bring them in unison. The Cameraphone Company purchases the projecting machine and the graphophones from the companies which make them. They then combine the two in a way never before successfully accomplished. . . . The [Cameraphone] Company, at its New York gallery, rehearses the players and makes the moving picture exposures and graphophone records, thus obtaining the music, noises or sounds which properly accompany the action.⁵⁷

A typical Cameraphone program of 1909 consisted of “I Guess I’m Bad,” “the well-known coon song . . . posed by Miss Stella Mayhew,” a scene in a Turkish bathhouse (presumably a comedy), and a short drama, The Corsican Brothers. Synchronization and sound quality ranged all the way from nonexistent to impressive. Concerning the film of Miss Mayhew, one reviewer remarked, “Of course the pictures were good, but the deep metallic voice of the concealed phonograph detracted somewhat from the illusion. It was not a woman’s voice that spoke.” In the Turkish bathhouse scene, “neither action nor words were in accord any of the time,” but with The Corsican Brothers

the work was much better than in the lighter pieces. The deliberate action required was conducive to consonance between the words and the movement of the speakers, and there was less facing of the audience when the characters were speaking, which permitted more illusion regarding the speeches. On the whole there was nothing to be desired in the production. The voices of the characters are notably heavy, anyhow, and that helped the phonograph materially in reproducing the text. On the whole, this ambitious third number was a success.

There were no complaints about inadequate amplification, but the reviewer commented generally about the synchronization, “Perhaps in the near future it will be properly adjusted and the text and the pictures will coincide so closely that the action of the pictures will be in perfect consonance with the words.”⁵⁸ These expectations were not to be fulfilled with Cameraphone during its short vogue.

Nor were they to be realized with such rival devices as L. P. Valiquet’s “combined Mutoscope and Phonograph,” which he called the Photophone (1908); Jules Greenbaum’s Synchroscope, which Carl Laemmle presented for one summer (also 1908) at the Majestic Theatre in Evansville, Indiana (the program included a sound film of Caruso); the nameless system heralded by the Vitagraph Company (also 1908); the British Cinephone, premiered in New York by the Warwick Trading Company in March 1909; or by the Photokinema apparatus promoted in Los Angeles by Orlando Kellum’s Talking Picture Company (c.1910–14.)⁵⁹ Not even Edison was able to succeed where all these inventors and entrepreneurs had failed.

Edison got back into the race to perfect sound movies in 1911, with a system he called the Cinephonograph. The inventor promptly announced that as far as he was concerned all the problems of making talking pictures were either solved or near solution. Others were less optimistic. Film columnist Robert Grau, who attended a Cinephonograph showing of the sextette from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (sung by Caruso, Plançon, and others), was impressed but admitted that “perfection has not yet been achieved.”⁶⁰ Movie exhibitors, who were not impressed, lost no time in letting the inventor know the shortcomings of his system. Aside from the general limitations in tone quality and amplification that it shared with most other commercial systems, the Cinephonograph was restricted to playing no more than one five-minute record. As the exhibitors pointed out, the average story film in 1911 ran for twenty to thirty minutes. (Edison’s problem here was the exact reverse of that experienced with his Kinetophone of 1895–in which the record continued playing some time after the moving pictures had come to an end.) Edison, like Gaumont, was also confronted with insensitive microphones, which forced his performers to stand as close as possible to them while singing or speaking. He, too, could have synchronization at the expense of allowing the apparatus to be visible in the picture.

Heeding the objections to his Cinephonograph, Edison took it back to the drawing board, and within a year he had come up with a somewhat modified system which he named the Kinetophone after his 1895 invention. It was to be launched commercially in 1913.

Isaac F. Marcosson, who saw the system in operation, described it thus:

A receiving-horn attached to the delicate recorder is placed alongside, and is connected with the camera. The operator turns the crank, and the picture and record begin. Frequently a good many feet of film are reeled off before there is any definite sound-wave to be registerd. All this is automatically adjusted.

In making a talking picture, the actor or singer moves about just as if he or she were on the real stage. Every word, every action –even the slightest footfalls–are recorded simultaneously. The action is taken at the usual rate of sixteen pictures a second, and is on ordinary celluloid film, from which the finished positives are printed.

The sound is recorded on soft wax cylinders, resembling in shape the early phonographic records. They are nearly a foot in length and four or five inches in diameter. From this soft ‘master’ record the indestructible records of commerce are made. Mr. Edison told me that these duplicates, in time, could be made for a dollar apiece.

At this point the question naturally arises, what sets the pace –the action or the sound? In the case of the Kinetophone, the film goes at a pace dictated or set by the phonograph. The speech has the right of way, and the picture must follow. In this way perfect accord is secured, and there can be no runaway dialogue.

. . . The reproduction of the talking motion picture seems to be a comparatively simple matter. A horn attached to the phonographic record is placed behind the screen. It is connected by wires with the projecting-machine back in the gallery of the theater or the hall. The machine operator can regulate the phonograph from his station. Once released, it sets the pace for the film; and, the synchronization now established, the machine controls the operator. He can turn his back to the picture while operating the machine and the record.⁶¹

These details are augmented by Eddie O’Connor, another contemporary commentator who noted that

For the picture itself the regular sheet, or film screen of the day was used. In the center, at the bottom, a hole was cut and covered with gauze or muslin, behind which the phonograph which played the record was placed, with its horn against the muslin. Under the phonograph a trap was cut in the stage floor and as it finished the trap opened, the phonograph descended, the screen was rolled up, and behold the stage was bare!⁶²

O’Connor was employed, in 1913, as an actor at Edison’s studio in the Bronx, New York City, where films for the commercial Kinetophone programs were made. The production manager was W. E. Wardell. Allen Ramsey was director and Joe Physiog cameraman on all Kinetophone pictures. O’Connor recalled, sixteen years later, that the first talking film made in the studio was a demonstration picture in which Ramsey was seen and heard delivering the following speech:

Ladies and Gentlemen, a few years ago Mr. Thomas A. Edison presented to the world ‘The Kinetoscope’ and today countless millions of people in every section of the civilized world are enjoying his ‘Phonograph.’ It remained for Mr. Edison to combine two great inventions in one that is now entertaining you and is called ‘The Kinetophone.’ The Edison Kinetophone is absolutely the only genuine talking picture ever produced.⁶³

Then came scenes showing a waiter dropping a pile of dishes, a piano solo by Justus Ring, a violin solo, and some dogs barking.

As O’Connor remembered it, “Every performance, vocal, instrumental or dramatic had to take just five minutes and fifty-five seconds, no more and no less.” (The sound was synchronized to accompany 400 feet of film–the greatest length that Edison was at that time receiving from the Eastman Kodak Company.)

After the demonstration film came A Minstrel Show. “The orchestra was arrayed in costumes of the Court of Louis XIV and the actors were in Court Dress. But the end men were blacked up, and while the Interlocutor was in Court Costume, William H. Meadowcraft, Mr. Edison’s assistant and right-hand man, wore full evening dress and conducted the performance.”⁶⁴ Subsequent films were Julius Caesar, act 4 scene 3 (the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius), The Transformation of Faust, Her Redemption, and the “Miser Scene” from The Chimes of Normandy. O’Connor himself appeared in The Irish Politician, which, he maintained, was “the first real comedy talking picture which told a story.”

There were no soundproof stages and no means of eliminating or excluding unwanted sounds. Shooting and recording were often done at night when there was less noise in the neighborhood. But whether it was by night or day, the microphones unavoidably picked up the splutter of the arc lights, whose heat also softened the wax coatings on the cylinders and sometimes blurred the recordings. A dozen years later the same problem of arc lamp noise would bedevil the making of the first Vitaphone pictures, but unlike the Vitaphone engineers, Edison never managed to solve the matter. The director also had his difficulties. O’Connor noted that Ramsey could not direct in any way that had previously been attempted. “He had to sit on the floor or on a low chair just out of range and direct in pantomime, or by signals given with a handkerchief, or in any way that his inventive faculties suggested. But it must not record and it should not divert too much attention of his actors.” There were problems also for the cameraman, who had to do what little he could to keep his cranking quiet, to make as little noise as possible while moving his equipment–if he was foolhardy enough to attempt any camera movement. No one came up with the idea of using a soundproof booth of the kind that would become commonplace in the sound studios of the late twenties. But it is evident that all concerned had a good foretaste of what it would be like to make talkies in Hollywood.

Edison discounted such difficulties in an interview he gave to Isaac Marcosson in 1913, shortly before the commercial premiere of Kinetophone. He was satisfied with the system and as optimistic about its future as he had been with the Cinephonograph.

The Kinetophone is an old idea of mine that has finally been realized. . . . The problem of actual synchronization was the least difficult of my tasks. The hardest job was to make a phonographic recorder which would be sensitive to sound a considerable distance away and which would not show within the range of the lens. . . . The difficulty has now been overcome, although I expect to make my recorder much more effective than it is at present. . . . I believe that its greatest use, for the present and for a considerable time to come, will be for music. By this I mean opera, musical plays, and kindred entertainment. . . . I am interested in the man I call the five-cent fellow. I want him to be able to go to his regular motion-picture house, and for five cents hear the great artists and the immortal music that for years have been denied him. Thus we can reduce the high cost of amusement, if we cannot put down the high cost of living. Of course, as you have seen, the Kinetophone is and will continue to be more and more effective in the interpretation of the shorter and more intimate plays. I do not think that it will be used, for some time at least, for long, sustained dramas.⁶⁵

Edison was to awaken from his dreams with a sharp jolt. The Keith and Orpheum vaudeville circuits booked Kinetophone programs as star attractions. But the system that had worked well in the controlled conditions of the Edison laboratories or in the Bronx studio, developed unexpected imperfections when transferred to the theater. The Palace, in New York City, was one of several theaters where the Kinetophone lost synchronization or broke down completely. Audiences hissed Edison’s talking pictures off the screen, and Keith-Orpheum paid the Edison Company to terminate the contract and withdraw its talking pictures.

In the wake of this experience, Edison’s attitude toward sound movies underwent a marked change. He no longer considered them worthy of further improvement or experimentation, and persistently ridiculed or underrated the efforts of other inventors to accomplish what he had failed to do with the Kinetophone.

Except for a brief resurgence of activity at the beginning of the twenties, American sound-on-disk ventures remained more or less dormant until the meteoric appearance of Vitaphone. Iris Barry notes that D. W. Griffith used Orlando Kellum’s Photokinema disk system to make records for several scenes in his feature, Dream Street (1921),

but, displeased with the results, limited public performances to a love song [sung] by Ralph Graves. Before the feature Griffith himself appeared on the screen and talked optimistically about “The Evolution of Motion Pictures,” but his sound experiment was unsatisfactory–both the recording techniques and the synchronization were imperfect–and he did not repeat its use after the Town Hall [theater, New York] run.⁶⁶

Griffith’s next essay in using recorded sound would be the synchronized sound-on-film score for The Battle of the Sexes (1928).

Contemporaneously with the Dream Street experiment, George Regester Webb of Baltimore demonstrated what looked like a more promising disk system at London’s Westminster Cathedral Hall. A correspondent for the London Times attended the demonstration, which consisted of the voice of Enrico Caruso (singing “On with the Motley”) synchronized with the projected image of another “singer.” “The illusion was complete and unusually effective,” noted the Times correspondent. He observed that it was created with apparatus that could be used with all standard projectors. Webb’s system comprised

a transmitter, electrically connected by means of an ordinary telephone wire to the reproducing instruments, which are placed in the frame of the screen, and a double turntable . . . [carrying] the musical records, which are automatically controlled by the film in such a way that the change from one record to another is made without pause and in absolute conjunction with the movement of the pictures.⁶⁷

Despite the success of the demonstration, Webb’s system had limited practical and no commercial possibilities. It could be used for supplying sound for short films, but “enormous difficulties” would have had to be overcome if it were ever to be used to provide sound accompaniments to films longer than the playing time of two standard-sized phonograph disks. Among the other problems Webb had not solved was the question of how to regain synchronization when the film ripped and sections of it had to be removed. Like all the other disk systems before Vitaphone, it was an invention without a future.

However, during most of the years in which one disk system after another had come and gone, other inventors were exploring very different ideas for making sound movies. As we shall see, none involved using the phonograph.

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* Hale’s Tours (1903), a movie entertainment creating the illusion of a train journey, used such primitive sound effects.

* See list of patents in Appendix C.

* In the summer of 1901 the Biograph was used in conjunction with the Graphophone to provide an exhibit of moving pictures with sound accompaniment at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The films showed work in the institutions of the U.S. Bureau of Education, and the nonsynchronized cylinder records accompanying them contained the voices of teachers and pupils at those institutions. There is no evidence that the experiment was continued after the Exposition. See further, reproduction of the souvenir card advertising the exhibit in Kemp R. Niver, Biograph Bulletins 1896-1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), p. 58.

* In the teens the firm of Messter and Duskes became a subsidiary of the great UFA organization.

* Norton had been a mechanical engineer for the American Graphophone Company, one of Edison’s major business competitors in the field of talking machines.

* At least in some instances; Moving Picture World was later to have reservations about Cameraphone’s “perfect” synchronization.