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GEORGE GROVES AT BELL LABS AND THE VITAGRAPH STUDIOS IN NEW YORK (1923-26)

The experimental sound films and the creation of Vitaphone

It was a pretty crude demonstration but nevertheless it worked and you could hear him talk!   -   {George Groves}

George Groves' Vitaphone security pass signed by Walter J. Rich used while in New York

George Groves arrived in New York on December 11th 1923 not knowing where he was going to live and whether Western Electric Research Laboratories (known as Bell Labs from 1925) would actually be able to offer him employment. His entrée into 463 West Street was the business card presented to him by their Director of Research, Dr. Harold Arnold, who had interviewed him in Manchester. Dr. Arnold was impressed by George but couldn't guarantee him a job if he sailed to New York. Fortunately, the head of the Personnel Department at Western Electric Research Labs was sympathetic to the man who had travelled 3,000 miles on an off-chance and offered to place George within their Research Service Department. This was so he could become acquainted with the wide range of research activities that the company was then engaged in and their engineering and support staff.

George found lodgings at the YMCA in Brooklyn where he lived for most of his time in New York. Being a skilled musician and having brought his French horn to the States, music became his means of meeting people and making friends.

George regularly played at the Germania Club in Brooklyn in an orchestra composed mainly of German businessmen. He also played for the American Orchestral Society and in a symphony orchestra at City College, which boasted over one hundred members. George even organised and conducted a small orchestra amongst his engineering colleagues at Bell Labs.

When George began his employment at the labs at 463 West Street, a research team led by J. P. Maxfield had been attempting for five years to develop sound motion pictures using electrical recording and sound-on-disc technology. Their efforts were boosted by important developmental work within the research labs by Dr. Harold Arnold and E.C. Wente amongst others. They were able to develop Lee de Forest's Audion into the first practical vacuum tube amplifier and create a condenser microphone capable of picking up sound much more efficiently. Plus loudspeaking telephone horns - as loudspeakers were initially called - capable of filling an auditorium were being developed in the labs.

However, the creation of an efficient system that could precisely and consistently synchronise a film's sound recordings to its pictures, was still proving to be a stumbling block. In 1922 a set of records was made to provide a running commentary to a Bell System motion picture entitled The Audion. This was an animation which explained the workings of Lee de Forest's vacuum tube. Synchronisation between picture and sound was accurate to within one second, which was only acceptable for a commentary.

George, although initially a junior member of the research group, was able to employ his engineering and technical skills within the team to help improve the efficiency of the technology. His musical talents were also utilised in the test films that they shot. Films and disc recordings were made of George playing his French horn, so that the Bell engineers could practice marrying the sound recordings to their motion picture equivalents. In his oral history of 1973 George said:

As a by-product of research into the telephone, the Western Electric Company and the engineers at the Bell Labs had developed the electrical system of recording phonograph records. The next idea they had was to synchronise these recordings with a motion picture and this happened while I was in the Bell Labs. And having some interest in music and sound plus an engineering education, was apparently a pretty good combination [for an] individual to go into this work.

Early in 1925 Bell Labs had made sufficient improvements with the synchronisation and efficiency of their sound-on-disc system to put on demonstrations to the major movie studios. However, there was little interest as the film studios were making record profits from silent pictures and the investment needed for sound pictures, both in production and exhibition, would be considerable. Why fix something that was far from being broken? The studios disguised their vested interest in the status quo by claiming a lack of public demand for sound films, as British engineer at Bell Labs Stanley Watkins (1888-1975) explained in his 1964 memoirs:   

The movie tycoons said that we had a very clever and amusing toy but it really wasn't of much interest...it wasn't "box office" and...the public didn't want talking pictures.

Harry Warner (1881-1958) Jack Warner (1892-1978) Sam Warner (1887-1927) & Albert Warner (1883-1967)

However, through a Western Electric sales contact, Nathan Levinson, a demonstration of the system's capabilities was provided to Sam Warner of the fledgling Warner Brothers movie studio. George Groves recollected that:

The demonstration that Bell Labs put on was very simple but it showed synchronism in somebody dropping a pencil or something on a table top and you could see it hit and hear the noise and they were in perfect sync ....[Sam Warner] was tremendously impressed and convinced his brothers that they should go ahead and do something about it.

After a further demonstration to Sam's siblings Albert and Harry, the four Warner brothers bought the use of the Bell Labs system and in May 1925, they licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit it for commercial motion picture use. This led to the creation of the Vitaphone Corporation and Rich became president with Warner Bros. acquiring a fifty percent interest in the venture on June 25th. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with Bell Lab's parent company, AT&T, for the exclusive use of its film sound technology.

As a result George Groves and a number of his colleagues were seconded by Bell Labs to Vitaphone to work with Warner Bros. staff in utilising this revolutionary new apparatus.

However, as the nation's musical talent was based mainly in New York, George remained in the city and began working at Warners' newly-acquired Vitagraph studios (pictured above). George recalled in his AFI oral history how cinema star Rin Tin Tin (1918-1932) became involved in Vitaphone's sound experiments:

And, in course of time, Warner Bros took over the development and exploitation of the system and did experimental work in the Vitagraph studios in Brooklyn. It was there that the first experimental job that happened when I was there...was to record Lee Duncan, the owner of Rin Tin Tin, directing his dog from the sidelines. It was a pretty crude demonstration, but nevertheless it worked, and you could hear him talk.

A still from the Volga Boatmen shot at the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn

The first short subject made at Vitagraph for actual theatrical exhibition was called The Volga Boatmen. In this a dozen Russians hauled ropes in a mock-up of the bow of a boat as they sang The Volga Boatmen's Song, a popular traditional Russian folk song. Microphones were strategically placed in front of the actors in static, fixed positions, so no real action was possible. In this production George Groves made his first commercial sound film recording but the Vitagraph studios and the technology used were not fit for purpose:

All very limited in action and with several great flaws. One was that the camera was extremely noisy. Everything was in sync, the camera and sound. But you had camera noise because the camera was a noisy camera, never intended for sound recording. And the Vitagraph studios were never intended as recording studios so there was a constant roar from the elevated trains going by and the building was acoustically very poor. We put up some kind of draperies to try and salvage some of it but it was far from optimum.

Stanley Watkins (right), who for a year became Chief Engineer of the Vitaphone Corporation, also commented that the sound of cooing pigeons perched on the roof girders was another problem. A long pole was required to discourage them!

Incidentally, George Groves and Stanley Watkins share a BFI plaque at a prestigious Warners cinema in London which celebrates their engineering achievements in developing the sound-on-disc technology.

In The Warner Bros. Story, Clive Hirschhorn, archivist for AT&T, praises Stanley Watkins and George Groves, for their work on the sound-on-disc process and in particular their:

...painstaking experiments in the field [of sound which] resulted in as perfectly synchronized a picture as was possible at the time, skillfully varying the density and volume of sound as the performers moved from long-shot to close-up.

George Groves in 1925 working on a disk cutting lathe at the Vitagraph Studios in New York

As the Vitaphone process was being refined it was decided that the only way to prove its capabilities was to use it on a full-length feature film and the lavish John Barrymore action picture, Don Juan, was seen as the ideal guinea pig.

NEXT PAGE - GEORGE GROVES' WORK ON DON JUAN (1926-7)

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