First Installment: History of Sound Motion Pictures
Excellent accounts of the history of the development of sound motion pictures have been published in this Journal by Theisen5 in 1941 and by Sponable5 in 1947. The present paper restates some of the information given in those papers, supplementing it with some hitherto unpublished material, and discusses some of the important advances after 1930. — One of the numerous omissions of topics which undeniably deserve discussion at length, is that, except for some early work, no attempt is made to cover developments abroad. The subject of 16mm developments is discussed with a brevity altogether out-of-keeping with its importance. This has been on the theory that basically the problems are similar to those of 35mm sound, and that whatever has brought improvement to one has been applied to both. — Edison invented the motion pictures as a supplement to his phonograph, in the belief that sound plus a moving picture would provide better entertainment than sound alone. But in a short time the movies proved to be good enough entertainment without sound. It has been said that although the motion picture and the phonograph were intended to be partners, they grew up separately. And it might be added that the motion picture held the phonograph in such low esteem that for years it would not speak. Throughout the long history of efforts to add sound, the success of the silent movie was the great obstacle to commercialization of talking pictures.
- Print ISSN
- 0898-0438
- Published
- 1955-06
- Content type
- Original Research
- DOI
- 10.5594/J12156