A History Of The Sound Film (1893-1923)
The experiments in creating sound films prior to George Groves joining Western Electric Research Laboratories (Bell Labs) in 1923
We do not want now and we shall never want the human voice in our films - {Film Director D.W. Griffiths, 1924}
In March 1895 Edison offered his Kinetophone for sale although only forty-five machines were ever made. It was essentially a Kinetoscope whose modified cabinet included an accompanying cylinder phonograph (see above). Patrons listened through rubber ear tubes and there was no attempt at synchronising picture and sound.
Between 1905-6 Gaumont’s first director, Alice Guy-Blaché, produced and directed over a hundred musical shorts of one or two minutes duration. These one-reel performance films featuring top French music hall artistes were successfully exhibited in theatres, some holding as many as three thousand people, using a novel amplification system.
In 1906 Emile Lauste applied for a patent for his own process which recorded sound directly onto the film strip.
Between 1908-10, Oskar Messter produced hundreds of sound shorts in his native Germany and the USA using a sound-on-disc system. He had, in fact, first projected sound films in Germany at the Apollo Theatre in Berlin in 1903 with his Biophon system.
The early movie sound pioneers had considerable difficulties. Although many employed inventive means of amplifying their soundtracks, their theatrical exhibitions were still often incapable of filling an auditorium. They also had poor sound fidelity, synchronisation problems and the short duration of discs to contend with. The insensitive nature of the recording machines (mainly acoustical horns) also meant that performers had to mime to pre-recorded phonographs, as recording them live would mean the horn being in shot. Performers had to stand as close as possible to the cumbersome recording devices which greatly limited the type of film that could be made.
Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) Oskar Messter (1866-1943) Lee de Forest (1873-1961)
Technical breakthroughs by Ambrose Fleming, Lee de Forest and engineers in Western Electric Research Labs led to the creation of microphone amplification and loudspeaker systems that solved many of the practical difficulties of recording and exhibiting sound films. Serious attempts by a number of experimenters at developing viable systems could now begin in earnest.
However, these experimenters worked in an atmosphere of hostility from the industry to the concept of sound films which continued until the late 1920s. Director Paul Rotha decribed the addition of sound as "a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the use of film" and Charlie Chaplin said "moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics".
Despite this sceptism experiments continued with much research work carried out in New York by Western Electric Research Laboratories (which became Bell Labs in 1925) using electrical, as opposed to acoustical, recording. In 1915 Harold Arnold was placed in charge of a project to improve the quality of sound recordings. He was able to take advantage of technological advances and use vacuum tube amplifiers, condenser microphones and balanced loudspeakers.
Left:
E.B. Craft holding a Vitaphone disc Right:
Stanley Watkins at a radio recital
Under assistant
chief engineer
Edward B. Craft (later vice
president of Bell Labs), two research
groups were created in order to develop the
most effective means of recording sound for the
motion picture industry.
One team headed by
I. B. Crandall experimented with
sound-on-film, and the other led by
J. P. Maxfield was charged with
developing a working sound-on-disc system.
Englishman
Stanley Watkins had worked in the
research labs from 1911 and was
second-in-command under Maxfield. In 1946 in
his Bell recollections entitled
Madam Will You Talk, he stated that
sound-on-disc was adopted as Bell’s
preferred system because of:
The sound reproduction from disc was also, at that time, of a superior quality to sound recorded onto film. Ultimately this decision would prove to be a mistake, as by 1930 sound recordings made directly onto the film strip which could easily be edited, would become the industry standard....forty years experience in the commercial processing of the discs, whereas the past experience in the developing and printing of motion pictures was not much help when it came to processing the soundtrack.
But on December 1st, 1923 when young George Groves was leaving Liverpool to sail 3,140 miles across the Atlantic to join the research team at Western Electric Research Labs in New York, all efforts at 463 West Street were being made to create a viable, synchronised sound-on-disc system to give sound to the silent film.
Next - George Groves at Bell Labs & Vitagraph in New York (1923-26)