See Anything “Interesting” In This 1907 Photo?

Yes…a microphone! Believe it or not, Thomas Edison had been working on adding sound to film as early as 1895 with the Kinetophone. Basically it was a wax cylinder recording that was not synchronized with the images and debuted in the peep show style, single viewer, flip book consoles that predated the projection of film.

Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome. In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the “Vitaphone” system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this process was actually accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that “talking pictures”, or “talkies”, were the future. A lot of attempts were made before the success of the Jazz Singer,

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