One Summer: America, 1927

events demonstrated, it was easier to fly a man across the Atlantic than to capture his voice on film.
    If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as ‘a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents’ and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developmentswould come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention.
    Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems – Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope – but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and re-splicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization.
    De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly on to the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting ‘Casey at the Bat’. By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation.
    One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his owntriode detector tube because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in cinemas as well. The upshot is that in 1925 Warner Brothers bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer , it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. ‘His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,’ marvelled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times . ‘It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.’
    Despite Hall’s enthusiastic praise, the Vitaphone technology was actually already obsolescent. Vitaphone’s sound was recorded on to discs, as on a record album, and one motor turned both projector and phonograph together, which kept them in synch so long as the disc and film were both positioned exactly right and started at precisely the same instant, which was always easier said than done. Where the system shone was in providing rich, vibrant sound with enough amplitude to fill the largest auditorium, and that is what audiences found miraculous.
    Vitaphone sound itself was soon overtaken by better sound systems, all of which were based on De Forest’s original concept of imprinting sound directly on to film. Had De Forest been more focused, he would have died a much wealthier man.
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