TALKING PICTURE

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 August 1931, Page 4

TALKING PICTURE

WHO WAS FIRST? Already legend is busy with the origin of talking pictures, with conjectures as to who and how and when they were invented. Eric M. Knight, in the “Philadelphia Public Ledger,” .has made an exhaustive study of the subject, a most interesting study, involving the many elements that havecome into the making of the presentday talkie. After he traced the attempts back for a century, he gave up and decided it was perhaps Leonardo da Vinci who firf>t had the idea, for Da Vinci was a great engineer as well as a great painter. The world of to-day asked the question, would probably answer that the talkie was created with the synchronisation of sight and sound in “The Jazz Singer,” which was released in February, 1928. In this a disc was used. Four years earlier another firm nad. financed a system with the sound on the film, but this w - as not perfected, for a year after the rival instrument was on the market. But a third man comes to the front, showing that in 1923 lie showed talking pictures in the theatre, and Vladimir Tovelson, a Dane, says discoveries in talkie mechanics were made in his country in 1922. Sweden showed a talkie the year before that, an invention of Sven Bergland. And the line does not stop there. William H. Bristol took out a patent in the United States and in Europe in 1917 for the Michalke device. But Edison had exhibited talking pictures in the vaudeville theatres of America in 1910. They were made with the moving picture and a phonograph record, synchronised. At Keith’s in New York this device was shown for sixteen weeks, and these talking pictures were seen in other vaudeville houses over the country. One of the pictures had Enrico Caruso in the first act of Gounod’s “Faust.”

Further into the past the record goes, for John Drinkwater tells in his life of Carl Laemmle, recently published, that shrewd and far-seeing man urged his clients in the picture •distributing business to buy Greenbaum’s Synchroscope. That was in 1908 —the talking device ifi pushing into the “dark backward abyss of time.’’ Laemmle made a prophecy that has come true. “If you believe I am a good pifiphct,” he said, “order a Synchroscope now, for I tell you that talking pictures are the coming craze in all America.” Eugene Augustin Lauste, a worker with Edison, patented a process for sound and sight on the same film in London in 1906. He called his machine the Photocinematophone, and he showed it publicly in London. But even here the record does not end. Jaumant’s Cronophonc, using disc and picture, was shown in Paris in 1905, and a man named Whitman exhibited a device in 1904 in New York. It was called the Cameraphone. There is yet another group. Messters Projection Company took out a patent in Germany in 1903; the Gaumont Company did the same thing in France in 1901, and George W. Brown took a patent for synchronised disc and 'film in the United States in 1897. And now it turns out that talking pictures were invented before Edison took out his patents for his cinematograph in 1894. Dement showed his chronophotophonc in Paris in 1892. That seems to end the combination of sight and sound machine, but 4t is a long way back from 1928. The story of motion pictures, or devices for making figures soems to move farther and farther into the fiast. As long ago as 1861 a PhiladelIphia man, Coleman Sellers, patented the kinematoscope, and there were beginnings before. the photophone was invented by Daguerre, animated drawings, much like the present-day cartoons, were arranged to seem to move on a screen.