Flickers.

The 1920s were the golden age of silent films, which flickered on the screen as a pianist played to enhance the mood set by the action. Large metropolitan theaters even had full orchestras to play live music for their patrons. There were rumors that a marriage might be arranged between the flickers and the phonograph, but the greatest American inventor of all time, Thomas A. Edison, had been working on the problem since 1888 and had succeeded in producing only the 1895 and 1913 Kinetophones — ignominious failures. The problem of synchronizing sound and picture seemed insurmountable, and other early-twentieth-century attempts — the Synchroscope, the Cinematophone, and the Cameraphone — had also failed.

Silence Is Golden.

 The sound fidelity of available audio systems was not good. Screen actors had been selected for their ability to act out roles physically, not for their speaking voices, while stage...