Kinetophone

Kinetophone

At the turn of the twentieth century, European and American inventors were on the brink of combining sight and sound in the motion picture. In 1895 Thomas Edison joined his phonograph with his Kinetoscope, a motion-picture viewer. As watchers looked through the Kinetoscope's eyepiece, they heard sounds from ear tubes connected to a phonograph. Although there were insurmountable problems involved in synchronizing sight and sound in the Kinetophone, as the hybrid was called, it set an important precedent for sound motion-picture viewers. In 1899, after producing a commercial film projector, Edison resumed work on the Kinetophone. The film projector was linked to a special long-playing phonograph. The Kinetophone was developed around oversized cylinders of about 4.25 in. (11 cm) in diameter and 7.5 in. (19 cm) in length, which ran for approximately six minutes. In 1908 Edison hired an inventor, Daniel Higham, to work on the Kinetophone. Higham increased the Kinetophone's volume by using a special valve to improve the performance of the diaphragm that amplified the sound vibrations made by the needle on the phonograph cylinder. Edison's close associate, Miller Reese Hutchison (1876-1944), directed the Kinetophone project, and by 1910 a working Kinetophone was shown to the press.

An earlier design that used an electrical control system had been abandoned for a mechanical control to synchronize the sight and sound. Declaring that he had perfected talking pictures, Thomas Edison on February 17, 1913 demonstrated his new Kinetophone in a New York theater by projecting a scene from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar synchronized with the actors' voices for seven minutes of the one-hour silent movie. When the sound got out of synchronization with the actors' gestures or facial expressions, an operator in a projection room used a long fishing line to adjust the speed of the phonograph, which was hidden behind the viewing screen. Despite the crude methods of synchronization and the short duration of the sound, talking motion pictures had a great impact on audiences. Audible gasps were said to be heard in the theater when the audience first heard sound coming from behind the moving picture screen. The Kinetophone was Edison's leading profit maker in 1913, exceeding the income earned from silent pictures, phonographs, and records. However, the Kinetophone's popularity was short-lived. After their initial enthusiasm, audiences became intolerant of its defects. They wanted sound to be heard throughout a film, and they noticed the synchronization problems. For another year, Edison tried to improve the Kinetophone, but after 1914, he made no further attempts to perfect talking pictures. Nevertheless, Edison had introduced the concept of sound motion pictures. Within ten years talking pictures became a reality. In 1927, The Jazz Singer, the first full-length sound motion picture, came to the big screen.