BORN BEFORE TIME

Taranaki Daily News, 26 October 1935, Page 19 (Supplement)

BORN BEFORE TIME

TRAGEDY OF FORGOTTEN PIONEER. INVENTORS OF TALKING FILMS. One of the biggest industries in the world is that of the talking picture; the old squawky of a few years ago has come into its own. Now one of the men who began it has passed away: Eugene Lauste has died. Two names associated with the early experiments in talking films are those of Mr. Bawtree, an English photographer, and M. Lauste, the Frenchman. Mr. Bawtree in 1911 published to the world ideas of how this invention could be carried out, and actually made photographic records of sound which proved that the reproduction of speech and music by photography was possible. Today he stands unrecognised, without fortune and with very little fame for the work he did. About the same time M. Lauste was experimenting on the same problem, and in 1913 was able to demonstrate in a small hall at Brixton pictures in which both speech and music were quite well reproduced. Each member of the audience had to wear headpiece telephones, for the loud-speaker had not yet been invented. Both Bawtree and Lauste had, in fact, anticipated the time when other inventions indispensable to the talking picture as we know to-day had come about. M. Lauste came to be recognised just in time, for he was accepted a few years ago as the father of the talkies in America and for seven years was a consultant at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York. He held 53 French patents. There is nothing new under the sun, and we can go back six thousand years and still find inventors thinking about the talking photograph. About 4000 B.C. a high Chinese potentate wanted to send a message in his own voice to a distant friend. A teak box with a hole in it was made, and the prince spoke his message into it. The box, we are, told, was then delivered by courier to his friend in the distant land, who placed His ear to the hole and turned a crank, when the message was reproduced. This ancient fable at any rate shows us that the idea of a talking machine had occurred to the magicians of thousands of years ago. The early endeavours to make talking pictures were not very long before their time, for Sir Ambrose Fleming invented the wireless valve in 1904, and shortly afterwards Lee De Forest converted it into an amplifier, with the result that Alexander Graham Bell was able to speak from New'York to San Francisco. The American Telegraph and Telephone Company to-day uses more than 50,000 amplifiers on its long-distance telephone lines. , Immediately it was possible to amplify the feeble currents given by photoelectric cells the early work of such people as Bawtree and Lauste became practical, for it meant that loud-speakers could be used and the speech and music reproduced by photography could be made to fill a theatre. Many examples might be quoted of the failure to realise fame and fortune, by. inventors who conceived their inventions too soon. The Danish engineer Hans Knudsen, for example, gave a demonstration at London, in 1909 in which he telegraphed photographs by wireless, but the photographs were very crude and they could only be sent from one. side of a room to the other. Television is another example., A German inventor called Nipkow laid down the principles of television in 1884 and invented the scanning disc. The scanning disc is indeed often called to-day the Nipkow wheel; but, while Nipkow was able to divide up the image of a face or a scene into thousands of tiny segments, there was no high-speed telegraphy available for him to transmit them and no photo-electric cell to tum the light into electricity. The selenium cell was far too sluggish to respond to the enormously rapid light changes, which have to be transmitted in television; but with -the modem photo-electric cell, which will respond to a change in strength of light in a millionth of a second, and with that greatest of all modern wizards the amplifying valve, Baird set to work in 1923 to make the Nipkow disc a reality, and so the basis of modern television was achieved. There is a tragedy behind many great inventions, the tragedy Of the pioneer who was too soon.