George Groves The Movie Sound Pioneer

From the very early days of moving pictures, experimenters had attempted to add sound to the silent film. In July 1893, Thomas Edison and William Dickson presented their Kinetoscope film exhibition system at the Chicago World Fair accompanied by a cylinder phonograph. In 1894 Kinetoscope parlours allowed the public to view brief scenes of celebrities of the day and sometimes these were combined with phonographs. 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. Patrons listened to the soundtrack through rubber ear tubes but there was no attempt at synchronising the pictures and sound.

At the 1900 Paris Exposition, Leon Gaumont was one of at least three exhibitors who demonstrated their own rudimentary movie sound systems to intrigued members of the public. By 1902 he was demonstrating his Chronophone system to the French Photographic Society using an electrical connection between film projector and turntable.

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 of them accommodating as many as three thousand people. A novel amplification system was used to boost the audio levels.

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.

In 1913 an improved version of the Kinetophone was released by Edison and nineteen talking pictures were produced during that year. Large four-inch cylinders now allowed for a six minute running time but the synchronisation between picture and sound was not perfect and would regularly break down. After a fire at the Edison labs in 1914, a decision was made by the company to get out of the talking picture business.

The early movie sound pioneers were faced with considerable challenges. 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.

A series of technical breakthroughs by Ambrose Fleming, Lee de Forest and engineers in the Western Electric's Research Laboratories in New York, 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 experimental engineers in developing viable systems were now able to begin in earnest.

Particularly notable was the research work of Danish engineers Axel Petersen (1887-1971) and Arnold Poulsen (1889-1952) who in 1923 devised their own method of recording sound onto 35mm film as opposed to disc. The sound was recorded on a separate strip of film, which ran parallel with the image reel. Gaumont licensed Petersen and Poulsen's technology and used it commercially under the name of Cinéphone.

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 described 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 scepticism 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. 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: "...40 years experience in commercial processing of discs, whereas the past experience in the developing and printing of motion pictures was not much help when it came to processing the soundtrack."

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.

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.