Years prior to Thomas Edison's work on moving pictures, people were making crude hand drawn motion pictures, much like how animated cartoons are drawn. Eventually photographers began to experiment with taking a series of pictures of a subject in motion, and then showing them back in sequence.
British photographer Eadweard Muybridge 
was
a pioneer in this process. He had 700 cameras set up in sequence, to photograph
a trotting horse. This major undertaking yielded just 60 seconds of motion
picture when all the photographs were viewed back in sequence.
In 1888 Thomas Edison met with Muybridge to discuss adding sound to his moving pictures. Edison wanted to record sound on his phonograph and then synchronize it with the moving picture. Muybridge wasn't much interested because be felt the phonograph wouldn't be loud enough for a large audience to hear.
The
meeting with Muybridge didn't discourage Edison, in fact it gave him an
idea for developing his own motion picture device. Edison installed a cylinder
similiar to those used on his phonograph, inside a camera and coated it
with a light sensitive material. Every time a picture was taken the cyliner
turned slightly, taking another picture. Edison would then process the
crude film and run it through a viewer which showed motion. Thus, the invention
of the "Kinetoscope". Edison applied for the patent in 1891,
but it wasn't granted until 1897. Edison neglected to include rights for
the patent outside the United States and the idea of projection, which
proved to be a costly mistake in the years to follow.
About this time George Eastman unveiled his new celluloid film which began to replace the system of using light sensitive plates and large bulky cameras. This led Eastman to manufacture the "Brownie" camera, making it possible for ordinary people to take photographs. In 1889 Thomas Edison ordered some of the new film cut into long strips. His associate William Dickson worked on a sprocket system for a camera that would cause the film to move past the lens when turned by a crank.
One of the first films Edison made was of a laboratory worker in his
Newark laboratory. Edison turned the crank on his kinetoscope and shot
frames of Fred Ott
acting out a sneeze. Edison even recorded the sound of a sneeze on his
phonograph to be played back with "The Sneeze" film. In order
to see the film Edison invented a viewer to go along with it.
Soon he began churning out movies in a studio he had built at the West Orange laboratory. The "Black Maria" (.wav/153kb) as he called it, was a large structure covered with tar paper. A hole in the ceiling allowed the sun to shine through and illuminated the stage.
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The entire building was on a set of tracks so that it could be moved around to follow the sun. Edison employed circus performers, dancers and animals in his films that lasted only a few seconds. His first movie with a plot was "The Great Train Robbery" and it lasted 15 minutes. The films were being shown all around the country in arcades and drugs stores. He churned out more than 2000 short films from the "Black Maria". |
Leon Gaumont, in France, began as early as 1901 to work on combining the phonograph and motion picture. He worked on the project during several widely seperated intervals (a series of shows of the "Film Parlant" at the Gaumont Palace in Paris in 1913 and demonstrations in the U.S. were the biggest accomplishments).
An attempt by Carl Laemmle of Paramount in 1907 to exploit a combination of phonograph and motion picture resulted in a German development called "Syncroscope." It was handicapped by the short time which the record would play and, after some apparently successful demonstrations, was dropped for want of a supply of pictures with sound to maintain programs in the theaters where it was tried.
In 1907, Dr. Lee De Forest patended the audion tube. It was the first vacuum tube in which a control grid as well as a cathode and an anode was incorporated. The audion tube allowed a very small electric signal to be amplified and played over loudspeakers. It was used for radio, public address, television, and film sound.
It was after John Stone's demonstration of the de Forest tube in 1912 that Harold D. Arnold of Bell Labs began his amplifier research project. In 1915, Arnold's new vacuum tube amplifier made it possible for AT&T to inaugurate the first transcontinental telephone service in time for the San Francisco World's Fair.
The condenser microphone was developed at Bell Labs by E.C. Wente in 1917. This microphone translated soundwaves into electrical waves that could be transmitted by the vacuum tube amplifier.
Efforts to provide sound for movies were attempted by Georges Pomerede, who used flexible shafts or other mechanical connections to combine phonograph and motion pictures in 1907, while E. H. Amet in 1912-1918 used electrical methods for the sound. Wm. H. Bristol began his work on synchronous sound in 1917. There were few further efforts in the U.S. to provide sound for pictures by means of mechanical recording until 1926.
Thomas Edison RealAudio discussion
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