#kinetophone

[strangeorangetage]

Kinetophone

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“‘Talkie’ Pictures Have Now Grown To 'Shaving Age’,” Ottawa Journal. February 17, 1930. Page 4. ---- Celebrate 17th Anniversary of First Appearance as Novelty in New York Feb. 17, 1913. --- By HUBBARD KEAVY Associated Press Feature Service Writer HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Feb. 17. - The howling infant called talkie is, contrary to popular belief, really a youth at the thinking-of-shaving age. Today talking pictures are celebrating their 17th birthday.

There was no indication that an entertainment novelty, introduced to the public in New York on Monday afternoon, Feb. 17, 1913, was the forerunner of revolutionary change in the motion picture that has caused Hollywood to open its mouth and the rest of the world to open its ears and eyes. 

First Projected. Seventeen years ago, combined sight and sound was projected by means of a machine called the Kinetophone, perfected by Thomas A. Edison. It was more than a device - it was two devices, the motion picture projector and the  phonograph. A belt ran from the motor of the projection machine to the phonograph back of the screen, operating them together.

For a short time it amused audiences in New York and elsewhere, but it was looked upon as an oddity and soon was removed from the market. 

Little was heard of the talking pictures after the demise of the Kinetophone, known also as the Cameraphone, until about 1925, when it became known that a motion picture company had acquired the rights to a newly-perfected sound recording and reproducing system. In 1926 the first of the new type of talking pictures was shown publicly. 

For the pioneer talking picture of 1913 a phonograph record was first made the actor's voice. Then as the record was played the actor sang or talked again, this time for the camera. When the action was in fairly good synchronization with the record, the talkie was completed.

It was easy for the record and film to get out of alignment in the showing and the result was farcical. Even present day talkies are not immune, and the effect is just as ludicrous.

Even Before 1913 Talking pictures date back even farther than 1913, but they were of a different variety. Another cameraphone, later called the Actophone, traceable to the Edison experiments had been perfected by 1905.

The 1905 talkie did not project its picture on a screen, but ran them in a peep-show affair which accommodated only one customer at a time. As the flickering pictures ran before his eyes, the patron got an ear full of the accompanying sound through two small tubes.

[natehoodreviews]

THE KINETOPHONE! A FACT! A REALITY! -

One of the more curious early experiments with cinematic sound technology was Thomas Edison’s Kinetophone, a massively complicated mechanism involving a cylinder player and a film projector placed at the front and back of a theater and connected with a system of linen cords and pulleys hand-operated by several on-sight technicians. The device was cumbersome and difficult to maintain—when the linen cords weren’t being eaten by rats, the technicians struggled to keep the film and audio synchronized, a task complicated by the projector’s obtuse design which placed the hand-crank perilously close to the flaming-hot projector lights. More often than not, the films made for the Kinetophone system in Edison’s Bronx studios failed to synchronize at all. Yet when the stars aligned and everything worked properly, the effect was eerily uncanny for 1913 audiences: as one newspaper described, the films were “so amazingly perfect they are really weird.”

But thanks to a combination of the untimely outbreak of World War One and finicky audience tastes—the films were largely financed by and screened in vaudeville halls for crowds who saw the Kinetophone as a mere novelty—the technology was ultimately shelved and forgotten, dooming progress in the development of sound cinema for another decade. Of the dozens of films produced, only eight of these historical treasures have survived due to preservation efforts by the Library of Congress and the museum of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. For the first time ever, they are now available to own thanks to their release by Undercrank Productions on their new DVD entitled The Kinetophone: A Fact! A Reality!

To read the rest of this review, click on the link!

Published on TheRetroSet.com

[elafini]

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This is strange... #strangerthings #kinetophone #lights

[generalelectric]

Ever since the inception of the motion picture, numerous inventors have attempted to unify sound and image into a single experience. This experimental film was made using a Kinetophone — a combination of the kinetoscope and phonograph. It features Scottish inventor and Edison’s employee, W.K.L Dickson playing a violin near the mouth of a large phonograph horn connected to an off-screen reader while two men dance together. The rather humorous image is just one of Dickson’s many sound-synchronization experiments.

[walzerjahrhundert]

Publicity photograph of man using Edison Kinetophone, ca. 1895

[curiousaboutcreativity]

[After the Kinetophone, s]ynchronized sound films were hardly heard from again until D.W. Griffith experimented with Orlando E. Kellum's Talking Pictures as curtain-raisers for the New York premiere of his 1921 Dream Street. (178)

Altman R. 2004. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press.

[curiousaboutcreativity]

In spite of substantial effort on the part of Edison's team, the Kinetophone would never enjoy the careful synchronization promised by Edison's proclamations over the preceding five years. Unable to produce precise synchronization, the new machine did, however, offer a more generalized synchronization, thanks to savvy production choices. Instead of offering speeches or opera arias, the Kinetophone was regularly outfitted with films featuring dancers or marching bands. Of the fifty-five titles listed in Edison's mid-1895 catalog, one third are march or dance films - and we know from newspaper references that these are the films most often installed in Kinetophones. [...] Instead of making sounds [...], dance and band films portray people keeping in time to sounds. Whereas people making sounds require exact instantaneous synchronization, dancers and marching bands easily tolerate loose synchronization. (81)

Altman R. 2004. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press.