Sound History – 1900-1923
THE EARLY HISTORY OF SOUND
From the very early days of moving pictures, experimenters had attempted to add sound to the silent film. Pioneer Leon Gaumont was one of at least three exhibitors at the 1900 Paris Exposition, who demonstrated their own rudimentary movie sound systems to intrigued members of the public.
In 1906 Emile Lauste applied for a patent for his own process, which recorded sound directly onto the film strip. However, Gaumont’s first director, Alice Guy-Blache, like most of the other early experimenters, used discs to make sound recordings which she crudely synchronised to her films. Between 1906-7 she produced and directed over one hundred, one or two minute musical shorts, using a device called the ‘Chronophone‘.
During 1908-10, Oskar Messter produced hundreds of sound shorts in Germany and in the USA, also using a sound-on-disc system. But like Guy-Blanche, his presentations were limited by the lack of amplification for the gramophone and the short playing time of the discs. The insensitive nature of the recording machines also meant that performers had to mime to pre-recorded phonographs. To record them live would mean the phonograph’s horn would be in shot.
Technical breakthroughs by Ambrose Fleming, Lee de Forest and others led to the creation of microphone amplification and loudspeaker systems that solved many of the practical difficulties of recording and exhibiting sound films. Serious attempts by a number of experimenters at developing viable systems could now begin in earnest.
Particularly notable was the research work of Danish engineers Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen (pictured above), who in 1923 devised their own method of recording sound onto 35mm film.
However, these experimenters worked in an atmosphere of hostility from the industry to the concept of sound films which continued until the late 1920s. Director Paul Rotha decribed the addition of sound as:
…a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the use of film
Acclaimed Director D.W. Griffiths said:
We don’t want and never shall have the human voice in our movies
Actor Charlie Chaplin said:
Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics
Despite this sceptism experiments continued with much research work carried out in New York by Western Electric Research Laboratories (which became Bell Labs in 1925). In 1915, Harold Arnold was placed in charge of a project to improve the quality of sound recordings. He was able to take advantage of recent technological advances and use vacuum tube amplifiers, condenser microphones and balanced loudspeakers.
Under assistant chief engineer Edward B. Craft (later vice president of Bell Labs), two research groups were created in order to develop the most effective means of recording sound for the motion picture industry.
One team headed by I. B. Crandall experimented with sound-on-film, and the other led by J. P. Maxfield was charged with developing a working sound-on-disc system. Englishman Stanley Watkins had worked in the research labs from 1911 and was second-in-command under Maxfield. In 1946 in his Bell recollections entitled Madam Will You Talk, he stated that sound-on-disc was adopted as Bell’s preferred system because of:
…forty years of experience in the commercial processing of the discs, whereas the past experience in the developing and printing of motion pictures was not much help when it came to processing the soundtrack.
The sound reproduction from disc was also, at that time, of a superior quality to sound recorded onto film. Ultimately this decision would prove to be a mistake, as by 1930 sound recordings made directly onto the film strip alongside the pictures, would become the industry standard.
But on December 1st, 1923 when young George Groves was leaving Liverpool to sail 3,140 miles across the Atlantic to join the research team at Western Electric Research Labs in New York, all efforts at 463 West Street were being made to create a viable, synchronised sound-on-disc system to give sound to the silent film.
