How The Movies Learned To Talk

BY THE END OF THE NINE teenth century, Thomas Edison’s laboratory had created a machine that could record sounds and one that could record moving pictures. Combining the two was the obvious next step. At first it seemed a simple matter of making them start and stop at the same time—no more complicated than running any two machines at once. Yet more than thirty years would pass before talking pictures fully succeeded with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927.

Edison and others had experimented with them from the very beginning of the motion-picture era but quickly discovered that while uniting sound and image was easy, doing it effectively was not. Imperfect synchronization and poor sound quality underscored the artificial nature of movies; they simply did not create the illusion that the actors on the screen were saying the words that viewers heard. A bad soundtrack turned out to be worse than none at all, and certainly no match for the combination of a pianist’s music and the audience’s imagination.

The trick was to merge sound and image into a seamless single experience instead of two far-from-perfect technologies exhibiting their flaws simultaneously. A turn-of-the-century American hearing a faint, scratchy phonograph record could supply mental images of the performers; similarly, viewers of a silent movie could fill in the gaps with their own imaginary soundtracks. With both senses provided for, however, the imagination had little room to smooth over the many rough spots. To make talking pictures worthwhile would require high-quality sound precisely coordinated with the pictures—a standard that demanded technical ingenuity, advances in electronics and acoustics, and expert showmanship.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD. When Edison’s first phonograph reproduced his rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” from a foil cylinder in 1877, it was an impressive achievement, but even after further development, the device still had major drawbacks. Among other things the sound was bad; recordings were barely audible over all the hissing and scratching. These problems didn’t go away very easily, so Edison busied himself with other projects. He saw the phonograph mainly as a business tool. It was good enough for a secretary to take dictation from, so further refinements languished for a decade until competition set Edison to work on a model suitable for the marketplace, this time with wax cylinders.

The same year he unveiled his improved phonograph, 1888, Edison began work on an obvious complement, a system for recording and reproducing moving photographic images. By analogy with the phonograph, he envisioned a glass cylinder covered with numerous tiny photographs that could be viewed in rapid succession through a magnifier. He hoped eventually to produce a machine with phonograph and motion-picture cylinders spinning on the same shaft, creating a breathtaking combination of sight and sound.

Edison entrusted much of the work on moving pictures to William K. L. Dickson, his official photographer. Dickson was dubious about glass cylinders. To make them work, he would need a photographic emulsion sensitive and fine-grained enough to record sixteen or more extremely small photographs every second. Despite Dickson’s objections, Edison told him to give it a shot: “It will lead to other things,” he confidently predicted.

The cylinder system worked poorly; Edison and Dickson got much better results with long, perforated strips of flexible celluloid, similar to modern movie film. As for linking them to the phonograph, Dickson claimed that an 1889 demonstration for his employer “gave very good synchronization.”

Maybe so, but it hardly could have approached modern standards. Decades would pass before anyone could reliably produce extended synchronization of sound and image. The problem was that the phonograph and the motion picture worked on very different principles. The Edison phonograph involved a continuous record of vibrations etched onto a wax-coated cylinder. Motion pictures, on the other hand, were recorded discretely: one by one, each frame had to be advanced into place and momentarily held still as the shutter opened. In playback even a fairly small miscalibration of sound and image would lead to a progressive and increasingly distracting loss of synchronization.

When a sound recording is played back slightly too fast or slow, only an expert will notice the difference, since there is nothing to compare it with. If it is accompanied by moving images shown at the proper speed, however, anybody can tell that something is wrong. With the technology of the 1890s, it was simply not possible to record sound and pictures on two different media and expect them to match up when played back together. Edison’s original plan—recording them on a pair of cylinders driven by the same shaft—might have worked, but the technical obstacles proved too formidable.

In 1894 Edison and some business partners began marketing Kinetoscopes. The coin-operated peep-show machines displayed silent film loops lasting less than a minute. Kinetoscope parlors opened in a handful of major U.S. cities that spring and summer, allowing patrons to glimpse boxing matches, vaudeville acts, and superstars of the day like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. The following year Edison introduced the Kinetophone, his long-promised marriage of motion picture and phonograph. It was a failure.

Descriptions of the Kinetophone vary, so it’s hard to tell just what was wrong. A 1927 book says that it offered adequate synchronization but poor sound. On the other hand, one modern film historian writes that Edison and his partners had to settle for simple musical accompaniment; the only thing synchronized about the Kinetophone was that the film loop and phonograph cylinder started and stopped at the same time. Whatever the Kinetophone was, people stayed away from it. Only forty-five units sold.

Between the Kinetophone and The Jazz Singer , a number of talking-picture systems hissed and sputtered their hour on the screen and were heard no more, among them Synchroscope, Cinematophone, and Cameraphone. Their inventors tried all sorts of ways of connecting the sound equipment to the projector. Some linked the hardware mechanically—in more than one case, by means of a shaft running the length of the auditorium from the projection booth to a phonograph behind the screen. But complicated mechanical connections inevitably involved some slippage among the moving parts, which led to loss of synchronization. Electrical links offered better precision, but the technology of the early twentieth century still could not ensure that a projector and a phonograph would run at exactly the same rate. Even if they had, any variations in speed during recording—from hand-cranked cameras, for example—would show up on playback. Splices, too, would mess up the synchronization, as would less-than-perfect switching from one phonograph disk to the next. Nearly all these systems depended on an attentive operator to adjust the speed of the projector to keep it from getting too far out of sync.

AMPLIFICATION ALSO PRESENT ed a challenge, especially after big-screen theaters replaced peep-show parlors as the preferred venue for motion pictures during the late 1890s. The amplification problem involved not just volume but fidelity as well. The phonographs manufactured by Edison and others at the time recorded and reproduced sound mechanically. A motor might turn the cylinder or wax disk, but the energy to actually cut the grooves came from the sound waves themselves, funneled through a horn to a vibrating diaphragm, which in turn would drive a needle or stylus into the recording medium. Playback reversed the process: the needle’s movement set a diaphragm to vibrating, creating sound waves that had to be amplified by unwieldy horns, sometimes massed by the dozen or coupled with elaborate compressed-air devices.

With all the noise and distortion to which this process was vulnerable at every step, voices often sounded muffled and inhuman, especially when magnified many times. For audiences, a muddy and erratically synchronized sound accompaniment added little to the moviegoing experience.

In 1913 the sixty-six-year-old Edison, whose inventiveness had been flagging somewhat in recent years, unveiled a new Kinetophone. With typical bluster he boasted that he had solved the synchronization problem once and for all; in fact, it had been “the least difficult of my tasks.” His declaration was a bit premature. To be sure, he had solved a number of vexing problems, but new ones had cropped up in their place. He had made the phonograph’s horn sensitive enough to pick up performers’ voices from a distance and devised a mechanical amplifier; unfortunately it also picked up street noise, sounds from the camera, and the crackling of the studio’s arc lights. Heat from the lights also interfered with recording by softening the wax of the phonograph cylinders.

Synchronization, however, remained the chief obstacle. The new Kinetophone may have worked well in Edison’s laboratory, but the complicated hardware did not hold up in the field. After a spectacular premiere in New York, subsequent showings became progressively less impressive. Sometimes the synchronization was so bad that audiences booed the show off the screen.

If workable talking pictures were going to be made, a major breakthrough would have to come from the sound end. For the visual part, capturing rapid-fire pictures on strips of film gave excellent results; indeed, the basic process remains unsurpassed today. Phonograph technology, however, was still far from satisfactory, and it showed few immediate prospects for improvement. Finding a completely new way of recording and reproducing sound looked more and more necessary.

Two keys to a better sound technology were already available by the early 1910s. The telephone, invented by Bell back in 1875, showed that sound could be converted to an electric signal instead of a physical tracing in foil or wax. Then, in 1906, Lee de Forest invented the audion, or triode, a three-electrode vacuum tube that he built as an improved detector of wireless telegraph signals. The triode amplified the current between a cathode and an anode by interposing a charged grid through which electrons could pass. It was a fairly simple matter to adapt the audion to amplify recorded sound signals, though it did not occur to de Forest to do so until 1912.

De Forest experimented briefly with sound movies in 1913. He got fair results by recording sound magnetically on a steel wire, using a technique first introduced in 1900. In playback the wire recording ran on reels fixed to the film projector reels, eliminating the possibility of picture and sound running at different speeds. He made a sound film of a dog barking and turning a somersault, but his project soon collapsed for lack of money.

De Forest tried again in 1920, this time taking a completely different approach. Instead of recording sound mechanically or electrically, his Phonofilm system turned sound into light and captured it photographically. The first step was to transform sound waves into an electric signal, as Bell had done decades earlier. This signal was amplified and transmitted to a Photion tube—an oxide-coated vacuum tube that dimmed and brightened according to the fluctuations of the electric signal. Light from the Photion tube passed through a narrow slit and was recorded in a special area near the edge of a strip of motion-picture film.

In playback the process was reversed. Light was beamed through the soundtrack and onto a photoelectric cell, whose resistance varied with the intensity of the light beam. The light beam, modulated by the varying density of the soundtrack, in turn modulated a current traveling through the photoelectric cell. The current was then amplified and transmitted to loudspeakers.

Phonofilm had a clear advantage over phonograph-based systems: since sound and pictures were recorded on the same strip of film, they could not drift out of sync. De Forest made his first talking picture in 1921 (the 1913 film had only been a barking picture). On July 9 he wrote in his diary: “Today I made my first ‘talking movie’ picture—of myself, very hot and somewhat flurried; talked too loud, and the photography was poor, due to white ‘back drop’ and bad placing of the light. But it was at last made , despite all the jinxes and hoodoos—two months behind schedule, and after two years of hard work in preparation—a definite promise of great things to come.”

The German firm of Eric Huth G.m.b.H. lured de Forest to Berlin to continue his research. He and his wife stayed there a year, unhappily. De Forest gave a public presentation in September 1922. The German press, he recalled, was “polite, if not enthusiastically laudatory.” Back in New York he found support from Hugo Riesenfeld, musical director of two Paramount movie theaters, the Rivoli and the Rialto. Riesenfeld set up de Forest with a studio, a cameraman, and musicians and promised his plush theaters for the debut of Phonofilm.

The inaugural Phonofilm program, which made its premiere in April 1923, included Eddie Cantor singing and Lillian Powell dancing to the music of Brahms. De Forest and Riesenfeld courted big-shot Hollywood producers like Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zukor, but the motion-picture establishment, remembering the stinging failure of Edison’s Kinetophone and other talking-picture systems, remained stubbornly unconvinced. So bad was the reputation of talking pictures that when de Forest tried to raise money with a stock offering, the state of New York seized the company’s books, forbade the further sale of Phonofilm stock, and unsuccessfully tried to force the company into receivership.

Though woefully undercapitalized, de Forest and Riesenfeld managed to wire thirty-four theaters along the East Coast for sound. In 1924 de Forest loaded a pickup truck with his equipment and filmed campaign speeches by President Calvin Coolidge and his opponents, John W. Davis (Democrat) and Sen. Robert La Follette (Progressive). The next year the New York politicians Franklin D. Roosevelt and Al Smith delivered speeches before Phonofilm cameras.

Throughout the 1920s de Forest made hundreds of Phonofilm short subjects, with scenes from grand opera, comedy acts, vaudeville routines, George Bernard Shaw offering greetings to America, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” Other Phonofilm performers included Elsa Lanchester, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, and George Jessel.

Unfortunately de Forest never got the major studio backing he wanted to make Phonofilm the new moviemaking standard. Harry M. Geduld, in his book The Birth of the Talkies , blames Phonofilm’s ultimate failure in part on still-inadequate sound quality. Perhaps more important, the company made boring movies. James Quirk, the editor of Photoplay , put it simply in 1924: “Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil.”

Among de Forest’s few supporters was Edward B. Craft, chief engineer of the Western Electric Company, a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph. For several years Craft had lent microphones and amplifiers to de Forest, but in 1925 the company refused de Forest continued use of its equipment. De Forest asked John Otterson, head of Western Electric’s radio products division, what was going on. “His reply,” wrote de Forest, “was a hearty, cynical laugh.”

IN THE EARLY 1920S WESTERN Electric and another AT&T subsidiary, Bell Laboratories, made key breakthroughs in phonograph technology, with considerable help from de Forest’s audion tube. Their improved sound recorder did not rely on the unassisted energy of incoming sound waves to vibrate its needle; instead a condenser microphone turned the sound into an electric signal, which was then boosted by amplifier vacuum tubes—the refined descendants of de Forest’s original audion. (Ironically, de Forest himself could not make use of these improved tubes because he did not hold patent rights to them.) The amplified signals controlled the vibration of the recording needle, which was driven magnetically. During playback the needle’s vibrations were converted to an electric signal, which could be amplified and transmitted to loudspeakers.

Western Electric, meanwhile, had developed the most advanced loudspeaker of the day for the company’s popular public-address system. It was known as the exponential horn, and it made its debut in 1924. The electric phonograph faithfully preserved many of the overtones and nuances that purely mechanical phonographs obliterated, and with Western Electric loudspeakers it could fill a spacious auditorium with rich, crisp sound.

Engineers at Western Electric and Bell Labs set out to apply the electric phonograph to movies. They achieved reliable synchronization by using synchronous alternating-current motors, which rotated at a constant speed determined by the motor’s design and the frequency of the applied current. They also developed a way to switch seamlessly from one sound record to another. But Western Electric’s talking-picture system fared no better than Phonofilm when the company tried to attract the interest of a major studio.

Warner Brothers Pictures was not a major studio, but Harry Warner and his three brothers were determined to make it one. The Warners had gotten their start in the movie business in 1903, when they bought a projector and a print of Edison’s The Great Train Robbery and exhibited it throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio. Later they opened their own movie theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania, furnished with ninety-one chairs rented from a local funeral parlor.

Determined to follow the big money, the Warners got into the more lucrative film-distribution business and then in 1912 began producing their own movies, specializing at first in quick, low-budget pictures. The studio gained stature in the early 1920s and could boast two big box-office draws among its roster of players: John Barrymore, the Shakespearean actor, and Rin Tin Tin, the dog. Shrewd financial maneuvering by Harry Warner and a deal to acquire Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, New York, left Warner Brothers on the verge of joining the big time.

To cross that threshold, Harry decided that the studio needed publicity, so in 1925 he established a Hollywood radio station, KFWB, at the Warner Brothers lot on Sunset Boulevard. The Warners got their broadcasting equipment from a recently bankrupted station, and they hired an engineer named Benjamin Levinson, formerly of the Army Signal Corps, to install it.

Levinson worked for Western Electric, and one day he witnessed a demonstration in New York of his company’s talking-picture system, a short film featuring a piano player. Levinson watched in amazement. He could hear the pianist’s footsteps as he approached the keyboard, the tiny snap as he unbuttoned his gloves, even the sound of his cane, hat, and coat being tossed aside.

Back in Los Angeles, Levinson described the experience to Sam Warner. Fitzhugh Green, in his breathless 1929 account of the beginning of the sound era, describes the scene complete with apocryphal Hollywood-style dialogue:

“Listen, I’m bringing you hot news,” Levinson told Sam. “I just saw in our New York Laboratories the most wonderful thing I ever looked at in my life. A moving picture that talks!”

“Benny,” replied Sam, shaking his head, “haven’t you been around the show world long enough now to know that a picture that talks is something to run away from?”

“I know, I know. You’re thinking about the old ones. ‘Cameraphone,’ ‘Kinetophone,’ all those things. But this is different. This is a talking picture that works like radio! Vacuum tubes. Amplifiers. Listen, while I explain it to you.…”

Technology intrigued Sam Warner. He had first been captivated by the magic of cinema as a youth when he saw an Edison Kinetoscope at the Cedar Point amusement park near Sandusky, Ohio. Working with Levinson to get KFWB on the air, he had enjoyed tinkering with the exotic radio equipment—what Green feverishly called “the embryonic ganglia of the Talkies!”

Some weeks later Sam was in New York to close Warner Brothers’ purchase of Vitagraph. Levinson persuaded him to visit Bell Laboratories for a demonstration of the system. Sam Warner was as captivated as Levinson had been.

THE PROBLEM WAS TO GET Harry Warner captivated. The hard-nosed, cost-conscious Harry knew too well that great sums of money had been lost gambling on sound movies. Sam, however, managed to corral Harry and his other brothers into a screening. As he watched, Harry was impressed, but not enough to want to put money into the system. Then an orchestra appeared on screen, and inspiration struck him.

Harry, true to form, saw how sound movies could attract business to Warners by saving money for exhibitors, whose programs often mixed live performers with short films. “We can film and record vaudeville and musical acts, and make up programs for houses that can’t afford the real thing or can’t get big-time acts. Think of what it would mean to a small independent theatre owner to buy his orchestra with his picture! Not to have an organ! Not a musician in the house! Not an actor—and yet his whole show.…”

Sam reminded his brother that the system could also allow actors to talk on screen. According to Jack Warner’s memoirs, Harry replied, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

Other accounts credit Harry with a bit more foresight. The public might eventually want talking pictures, he reasoned, but in the meantime, movies with recorded musical accompaniment would pave the way, providing audiences with something new yet not jarringly different from the live musical accompaniment they were accustomed to.

WARNERS AND WESTERN Electric signed a deal in June of 1925. Warners dubbed the sound system Vitaphone. Technicians from both companies began working on test films at the Vitagraph studios in Flatbush, Brooklyn, which turned out to be a less than ideal site. The studios had been built for silent movies, of course, and it hadn’t mattered that the D train to Coney Island rumbled past the studio on elevated tracks many times a day. With sound recording going on, the trains created more than just unwanted background noise; they made the phonograph needle jump right out of its groove.

When Warners began preparing a series of musical short subjects for Vitaphone’s commercial debut, a new, quieter location had to be found, so the company leased the Manhattan Opera House for a year. It couldn’t get away from the subway, though; workmen were blasting in nearby tunnels. Traffic noise also intruded, forcing the production crew to film at night.

Sound problems didn’t end there. The studio microphones picked up stray footsteps, muffled coughs, and the sizzling of the overhead arc lights. The equipment was sensitive to radio waves from the arcs, and it sometimes even recorded audible snatches of local broadcasts. The sound gear had to be sheathed in metal to block out unwanted radio waves. Eventually new, extra-bright incandescent light bulbs were developed to replace the arcs.

The motion-picture camera posed its own set of problems. Because the films were going to have synchronized sound, the camera couldn’t be cranked by hand, as had been done in the past. But motorized cameras made noise, so the camera and its operator had to be enclosed in a tiny, stiflingly hot soundproofed cubicle, which was mounted on rubber wheels to provide limited camera movement.

The musical shorts being filmed in Manhattan were only half of the planned premiere Vitaphone program. The other half, filmed in Hollywood, was Don Juan , a full-length silent feature that would include a synchronized musical score composed especially for the film.

Don Juan wasn’t the first film with an original musical accompaniment. Earlier scores had been arranged to follow the dramatic action of movies and had been performed live at the theater by pianists who ensured synchronization by peeking at the screen. But Don Juan ’s score precisely matched the shifting moods within each scene. The composers—William Axt, David Mendoza, and Maj. Edward Bowes—screened a finished print of the movie over and over, timing each shot with stopwatches. The score was recorded at the Manhattan Opera House, with Henry Hadley conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra as the film played on a screen.

With millennial fanfare the Vitaphone program opened in New York at the Warner Theater at Fifty-second Street and Broadway on August 6, 1926. Tickets for opening night cost ten dollars, at a time when the typical admission for a first-run movie was around a dollar. Though Harry Warner held the notion of talking pictures in poor regard, the show began with a man talking. The speaker was Will Hays, formerly Postmaster General under Harding and now president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (Hays would go on to achieve notoriety as head of the Hays Office, which served as the movie industry’s chief censor in the 1930s and 1940s.)

IN HIS PORTENTOUS ADDRESS HAYS hailed Vitaphone as the latest chapter in the history of motion pictures and as a valuable tool for the betterment of mankind. “It has been said that the art of the musician is ephemeral, that he creates but for the moment. Now neither the artist nor his art will ever die.” At the end of Hays’s speech the audience applauded, and Hays, as if hearing the applause, took a bow.

Then the show began in earnest, with the New York Philharmonic performing the overture from Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser . Seven more musical shorts followed, including the tenor Giovanni Martinelli singing an aria from I Pagliacci and Efrem Zimbalist on violin with Harold Bauer on piano performing variations from Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. On the lighter side there was Roy Smeck playing the banjo, ukulele, harmonica, and Hawaiian guitar.

The feature presentation, Don Juan , starred John Barrymore as a swashbuckling rake whose hard heart is softened by the beautiful and virtuous Adriana, played by Mary Astor. By all accounts the film was not a masterpiece of cinema, but the lavish sets, Barrymore’s charisma, and the rich Vitaphone musical score gave Don Juan enormous popular appeal.

Most critics pronounced Vitaphone the eighth wonder of the modern world. The movie mogul William Fox, however, commented: “I don’t think that there will ever be the much-dreamed-of talking pictures on a large scale. To have conversation would strain the eyesight and the sense of hearing at once, taking away the restfulness one gets from viewing pictures alone.” Fox would soon change his mind.

Warner Brothers stock surged, and the studio began wiring other theaters for sound. A second Vitaphone program hit the screen in October 1926, featuring lighter short subjects showcasing vaudeville rather than grand opera. The feature presentation, a military farce called The Better ’Ole starring Syd Chaplin (Charlie’s brother), was decidedly less ambitious than Don Juan . The standout of the program turned out to be one of the shorts, Al Jolson in a Plantation Act . The popular blackface vaudeville singer stole the show.

The June 1927 Vitaphone feature Old San Francisco displayed another important technical advance in sound movies. Shortly before the movie’s premiere, censors in New York insisted on the removal of part of one scene. Cutting and splicing the film was no problem, but there was no way to physically remove the corresponding section of the phonograph disk.

The only solution, it seemed, was to rerecord the musical accompaniment. But that would have been hugely expensive; Warners had paid nine hundred dollars an hour to have the Los Angeles Philharmonic perform the score for the microphones. The producers resorted to a tactic that some technicians had declared unworkable: rerecording not the musical performance but the disk, creating a new master disk without the unwanted portion.

Rerecording, or “duping,” was so radical a step at the time that Warner Brothers resorted to it only out of desperation. Technicians used an electronic switching system similar to the one that was used to change seamlessly from one disk to another during full-length Vitaphone presentations. After several tries it worked—and opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Duping offered the makers of sound movies much more flexibility. Before duping, a movie’s entire sound accompaniment had to be recorded in one take, either during filming (as was done with the Vitaphone musical short subjects) or over a projected version of the film (the procedure used for full-length Vitaphone releases).

The Jazz Singer , released in October 1927, used duping to combine a postproduction orchestral accompaniment, as in Don Juan , with musical numbers recorded during filming, as in the short subjects. The movie boasted an unusually wide variety of music as well: an original orchestra composition, bits of classical numbers, popular jazz songs, and traditional Jewish music.

The Jazz Singer featured something else that had not been heard in the previous full-length Vitaphone films: talking. For most of the film dialogue appeared on title cards, as with any silent movie. But in two scenes a reportedly ad-libbing Al Jolson speaks on camera, boasting to an enthusiastic audience that “You ain’t heard nothing yet” as he tells the band to play another number, and later declaring his undying devotion to his mother. By one historian’s count, The Jazz Singer has 354 spoken words—340 by Jolson, 13 by Eugenie Besserer as his mother, and 1 (“Stop!”) by Warner Oland as his father.

Of those improvised speeches, Geduld writes: “For a few moments, Jolson wasn’t merely an image on the screen—he was, or seemed to be, actually there, in person, speaking just the way people did when they tried to break in on conversation or applause, when they were kidding or making small talk. The earlier uses of Vitaphone had, at best, succeeded in recreating other synthetic experiences—opera, vaudeville, sound effects—but here, suddenly, inadvertently, it was creating realism.”

Many critics thought The Jazz Singer —the story of a cantor’s son going into show business—a maudlin piece of work, and modern viewers would find Jolson’s blackface Negro impersonations ludicrous. But 1927 audiences ate it up, in no small part because of the star’s phenomenal popularity. Jolson’s magnetism and unmatched singing voice helped secure Vitaphone’s legitimacy. Sound—both music and dialogue—was here to stay.

The transition from silent movies to talkies took place with remarkable speed. Over the next year Warner Brothers released several more pictures with a mixture of titles and spoken dialogue. Then, in July 1928, came the gangster melodrama The Lights of New York , the first “all-talkie.” The technological advance was its main selling point; after Warner Brothers advertised it as “100% Talking,” Variety ’s reviewer called it “100% Crude.”

WARNER BROTHERS WAS not alone in the soundmovie business. De Forest’s Phonofilm company was still making short subjects, and in early 1927 the Fox Film Corporation introduced Movietone, an optical sound-on-film system quite similar to de Forest’s. This system had been developed by Theodore Case and Earl Sponable, who had shared equipment and ideas with de Forest. Litigation over rights to Movietone would drag on well into the 1930s.

Fox negotiated with Western Electric, the makers of Vitaphone, to use that company’s amplifiers. The ensuing deal left Western Electric with the power to license the use of both Movietone and Vitaphone. The following year Western Electric licensed Movietone to Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and United Artists, among others. By the end of 1928 more than a thousand movie theaters across the country were rigged for sound. The rush was on.

A number of other systems jockeyed for position as Hollywood retooled for sound: Vocafilm, Firnatone, Bristolphone, and Titanifrone, among others. Walt Disney used an optical sound-on-film system called Cinephone in the first non-silent cartoon, Steamboat Willie , which featured the sound debut of a mouse named Mickey. Fox announced in March 1929 that it was discontinuing production of silent movies. The rest of the industry gasped at the audacity but soon followed suit.

Arriving late on the scene was RCA’s Photophone system, which appeared in 1928. Photophone had grown out of research conducted for the U.S. Navy during World War I by Charles Hoxie of General Electric. Hoxie had invented a photographic system for the high-speed recording of radio-telegraph signals. After the war, research continued with an eye toward developing an electric phonograph and, later, a soundmovie system.

Like Fox’s Movietone, Photophone employed an optical soundtrack. But there was a crucial difference: Movietone recorded variations in the brightness of a light source that had been modulated by an audio signal. In Photophone the audio signal controlled the vibration of a mirror; a light beam was reflected off the mirror and “drew” the soundtrack as a wavy line along the edge of the film.

PHOTOPHONE CREATED LESS background noise than Movietone, and unlike Movietone, sound quality was not seriously degraded by over- or underexposure of the film. Both optical sound-on-film systems boasted considerably more flexibility and reliability than disk-based systems like Vitaphone.

In disk-based systems the needle was prone to jump out of its groove if disturbed. During exhibition, disks and reels were often mixed up, and the audience would end up watching one scene while listening to the dialogue from another. Then there was the matter of breaking film. Reels broke all the time, requiring the projectionist to snip out a frame or two and splice the ends back together—a simple, routine matter. With disk-based sound systems, however, the loss of a few frames meant a small loss of synchronization. This became a nuisance with much-used prints scarred by numerous splices. Projectionists sometimes resorted to substituting pieces of blank film for the lost frames.

Sound-on-film didn’t have this drawback. Splices did create an audible “pop” when they crossed the soundhead, but this could be easily remedied by blacking out the soundtrack across the splice with a marker or an adhesive spot. This technique, called blooping, created a scarcely noticeable split second of silence. Producers and exhibitors quickly realized the advantages of sound-on-film systems, and Vitaphone and other disk systems disappeared by the mid-1930s.

Not surprisingly, the advent of sound created enormous upheaval in practically every area of the motion-picture industry. Motion-picture companies had to build new soundproof studios, which became known as soundstages. Theater designers and owners had to adjust their acoustics. While sound opened up new opportunities for cinematic expression, it also imposed limitations in the early years. Actors had to stay close to the insensitive microphone, which was sometimes hidden inside a prop, such as a telephone, which the characters would mysteriously huddle around. Since soundproofed cameras were bulky and hard to move, pans and tracking shots were difficult, and directors often settled for a static camera style. Microphones and lighting equipment had to be tediously adjusted. Filming outside was fraught with complications, and many producers chose instead to create elaborate studio simulations of outdoor locations.

Actors trained in the silent cinema had learned to convey emotion through exaggerated gestures and facial expressions. Now they had to talk clearly and naturally. Stage actors, taught how to project their voices out to live audiences, also had to adjust. Screenwriters had to learn how to craft realistic dialogue. Droves of vaudevillians and movie-theater musicians found themselves out of work.

Conservative critics complained that the addition of sound had corrupted a unique art form. It may have, but it also created a new art form—or, more modestly, a new medium. Sound movies provided a far more intimate and powerful experience than the mute apparitions of the silent screen or the disembodied voices of radio and the phonograph.

The story of sound movies doesn’t end with the triumph of sound-on-film, of course. Engineers and technicians lavished considerable attention on refining the hardware. Better film stock improved the quality of optical soundtracks in the 1930s. After World War II magnetic sound recording had finally advanced to the point that it could be used economically in motion pictures. Today magnetic soundtracks, much more sophisticated than the postwar variety, remain standard. But that’s changing as well. Some recent big-budget extravaganzas, like Jurassic Park , have used a digital soundtrack recorded on a laser disk, a distant echo of Edison’s Kinetophone a century later.