AS THOMAS HUNT ington details elsewhere in this issue, three-dimensional movies experienced their first brief boom in the 1920s. Last fall the Museum of Modern Art’s film division showed a test reel made with that era’s Plastigram process, giving modern viewers a chance to experience 3-D just as those in 1921 did. Sure enough, the initial images of baseballs being thrown at the audience, a long line of marchers parting around the camera, and a whip uncoiling toward viewers’ eyes elicited moans, self-conscious shrieks, and nervous laughter. By the midpoint of the seven-minute reel, however, a pall had descended on the audience, and by the end it was distinctly torpid, showing that however much things may change, a novelty remains a novelty.

The same MoMA program brought to light a number of other early experiments in film technology. They included the oldestknown sound movie of black musicians, with Noble Sissle singing and Eubie Blake accompanying him at the piano in a 1923 test of Lee de Forest’s Phonofilm method, which most historians think was technically superior to Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone process. A series of test reels from the engineers Theodore Case and Earl Sponable, the inventors of a rival sound-on-film process, shows Case trying to explain his technology to a lay audience and doing about as good a job as most engineers do in that situation. In other Case-Sponable reels, a singer performs while holding a duck that quacks on cue, and a Chinese man in full Celestial costume strums a ukulele and sings “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”

The leading attraction, however, was a 10-second film clip that would appear thoroughly insignificant to anyone who did not know its history. In it, a man is seen and heard playing a violin as two other men dance and a fourth one walks across the background. What makes the clip special is that it was shot in Thomas Edison’s laboratory in late 1894 or early 1895, making it the world’s oldest synchronized sound film by a good quartercentury. The violinist is most likely William K. L. Dickson, Edison’s chief motion-picture researcher.

The film clip, without sound, has been available to scholars for decades. Historians knew that a wax-cylinder recording had been made as the film was shot, but it was thought to have disappeared. In the mid-1990s, however, curators at the Edison National Historic Site, in West Orange, New Jersey, found and identified the cylinder, which had broken into several pieces. They reassembled it, played it, and made a digital recording of the sound. Then they sent the recording to Walter Murch, the most respected editor in Hollywood and the winner of three Academy Awards.

Murch cleaned up the sound, digitally compressed the film (which had been provided by the Library of Congress) to 30 frames per second from the 40 fps it was shot at, and carefully examined the movements of Dickson and the dancers to find synchronization points with the music. That done, it was a simple matter, using modern sound equipment, to stretch the soundtrack digitally so that it coincided with the film. The results are strikingly realistic. A voice can even be heard faintly at the beginning saying, “The rest of you fellows ready? Go ahead!”

The entire reel, including a printed introductory message, three showings of the Dickson clip, and credits, lasts only about a minute. And unlike the Plastigrams and other items on the program, it is not experienced today as it was by the original viewers, who were probably limited to Edison and his lab workers. It took 1990s technology to make the synchronization possible. Yet there is no escaping the fact that you are seeing and hearing images and sound that were recorded when Grover Cleveland was President. Even in our modern videosaturated culture, that’s a wondrous thing to contemplate.