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The era of talking pictures experienced a false dawn in January 1913 when Thomas Edison introduced his revamped Kinetophone, a sound-synchronisation system he had first tried marketing in 1899.   The new Kinetophone was the product of a number of years of development, and upon its introduction in February 1913 it caused something of a sensation.   Sadly, technological shortcomings quickly spelled the end of sound’s false dawn within a couple of years.

In January 1908 Daniel Higham, a sound engineer who had successfully developed and patented a mechanical sound amplifier which had been licensed to the American Gramophone Company, wrote to The Edison Company to suggest that ‘the time was right to perfect talking pictures.’   A number of letters were exchanged between Higham and Frank L. Dyer, the Edison Company’s president, in which they discussed the need for playback amplification, speed regulation and synchronisation.   Shortly after, Higham was offered a position with Edison at a wage of $50 per week.

The amplifier that Higham had invented enabled a phonograph to play more loudly, and he planned to use the same principles to amplify the sound from Edison’s Kinetophone.  Working under the leadership of Project Manager Miller Reese Hutchison, Higham used a specially designed valve to amplify the sound vibrations made by the needle on the phonograph cylinder, which had replaced the discs used on the Kinetophone’s previous incarnations.   This oversized cylinder was approximately 11cm long and was made from celluloid instead of wax to minimise noise and enhance durability.

Papers from the Edison Company indicate that phonographic films were made at the Edison Studio on 21^st Street in Manhattan as early as December 1909.   These films were intended to illustrate existing recordings.

On Friday 26^th August 1910, a demonstration of the Kinetophone was staged for the press at Edison’s West Orange laboratory.   Higham, who by all accounts was the creative force behind the development of the Kinetophone, was introduced only as Edison’s assistant at this demonstration (and to add insult to injury, The New York Times report of the event the following day mistakenly referred to him as Mr. Hyams).   The system used an electrical phonograph positioned to the side or the rear or the screen which was regulated via a rheostat operated by the projectionist.

Edison predicted great things for his new invention: the recording of Grand Opera, and of the great performers of the stage, their voices audible to those in even the smallest or most remote areas of the country.   Edison even suggested the possibility of the films being produced in colour.   Strangely, however, there is no known record of any further demonstrations of the Kinetophone until just before its commercial launch three years later.

Edison made plans for the commercial exploitation of his new invention in 1912.   On 1^st October of that year he formed the American Talking Picture Company with vaudeville entrepreneurs John J. Murdock and Martin Beck, who backed the venture to the tune of $500,000 between them.   The duo agreed to lease 50 Kinetophones, and installed machines in four Keith-Albee New York vaudeville theatres: the Colonial, the Fifth Avenue, Union Square and the Alhambra.  Edison also agreed Canadian rights with the entrepreneurs, while other foreign rights were set up with various companies in Europe, Asia and South America.

By November, films to be projected by the Kinetophone were being filmed, mostly at a studio on Decatur Avenue in The Bronx.   While the shooting of a film took place, a spring-driven cylinder recorder was positioned on an elevated stand, with a synchronising cord running between the recorder and the camera, which was situated in a booth at the rear of the studio.   Most of the films were directed by Allen Ramsey and filmed by Joseph Physioc.   Ramsey instructed the actors to use their ordinary stage voices and to resist the urge to shout their lines.   A makeshift clapperboard of two halves of coconut shells indicated the synchronisation of image and sound.   The heat in the studios was unbearable, sometimes melting the wax masters according to Eddie O’Connor, one of the actors to appear in the films.   Another problem encountered by these sound pioneers was the tendency of the recorders’ sound horn to pick up stray sounds.

In early January 1913 (the 3^rd or 4^th, according to different sources), Edison staged a demonstration of the finished product to press and theatre impresarios at his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, and was gratified by their enthusiastic response.   Two short subjects were shown to his guests: in the first, appropriately known as Lecture, a lecturer described the concept of the Kinetophone and demonstrated its capabilities by blowing whistles and horns, breaking plates, and dropping weights.   The second short film featured a scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Encouraged by the enthusiasm with which his new Kinetophone had been greeted, Edison introduced it to the public on 17^th February 1913 with a blaze of publicity.   ‘There have been and will continue to be offered so called talking pictures in which the phonograph record and the picture film are made separately.   Harry Lauder has stated that in an effort to produce a picture by this method he made no less than one hundred attempts to sing in synchronism with a record of his own voice and found it impossible.   By this method only “near” synchronism and absolutely no illusion is obtained.   THE EDISON TALKING PICTURES ARE GENUINE, that is, the film and record are taken simultaneously, and every sound and every action is faithfully reproduced.’

This first public demonstration took place at a New York theatre (probably the Colonial) and featured the same lecture film shown to the press the month before; a singer then performed ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ accompanied by a pianist and violinist.   The barking of dogs concluded the first film.   The next film featured Mr. Bones and Mr Jambo, a minstrel act, performing ‘When the Midnight Choo Leaves for Alabam’.   The two short films – no longer than six minutes due to the constraints of the cylinder’s running time – received thunderous applause from the audience, who were reported to have awarded the demonstration a fifteen-minute standing ovation.

However, the new Kinetophone’s inaugural outing wasn’t without its problems.   The New York Times of the 18^th February 1913 reported that the ‘talk fell behind the picture,’ a fault Edison blamed on the projectionist for failing to correctly adjust the speed of the phonograph.   According to his son Theodore, who was about 14 at the time, Edison suspected the projectionists of deliberately attempting to sabotage the screenings because they had been refused a wage rise to operate the new machine.

The Kinetophone quickly (and briefly) became something of a sensation, and a variety of films were quickly released to capitalise on its popularity.   American Talking Pictures heavily publicised the famous vaudeville stars it had recorded and began adapting more artistic works such as The Transformation of Faust, Act 1, Scene 1, and Wolsey’s soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.   Political leaders clamoured to get their voices heard on the screen, and in April 1913, the mayor, police and fire commissioners of New York each recorded three minute speeches.   Newspapers trumpeted the wonder and importance of Edison’s new invention and pointed to its value as an educational tool.   The lecture film was shot in Japanese, Spanish, German and French versions, and production studios were set up in Vienna and St. Petersburg, although breakages of the masters that had to be shipped to West Orange for processing became a major problem.

A number of films from this period are worth mentioning:  Jack’s Joke made clever use of its plot to overcome technical difficulties by having a practical joker arrange a blind date between two friends, telling each of them that the other was hard of hearing.   The couple spend the rest of the film yelling at one another – a definite boon to the recording engineer still plagued by inadequate amplification.    A film called The Suffragette was booed by audiences at the Union Square Theatre, an unfortunate occurrence which prompted Mary Ware Dennet of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to request that Edison withdraw the film.   Attempting to put her concerns to rest, Edison claimed the jeers were directed, not at the Suffragette movement, but at the distorted images on the screen he claimed were being deliberately projected by the exhibitors.    The Deaf Mute by Rupert Hughes, a Civil War story about a Confederate spy masquerading as a deaf peddlar in a Union Army camp, was actually shot on location in either Bronx Park or Cortlandt Park.   Hughes was the uncle of Howard Hughes, and his involvement in motion pictures is supposedly the source of the future tycoon’s interest in film production.

Within two weeks of the Kinetophone’s first public demonstration, Moving Picture World published Edison’s filmscript guidelines ‘for those who wish to submit plays for the Edison Kinetophone.’

·    Each play should be figured to run six minutes, making due allowance for the time taken in movement or incidental business.

·  The characters should be few and the action laid in one set.

·    Either dramas or comedies will be considered for acceptance provided they are clean and free from offence.   Great care should be exercised to avoid infringement upon any copyrighted work, either story or play.

The success of Edison’s new invention seemed assured.   An article in Moving Picture News noted,

'The Kinetophone is now operating in nearly one hundred of the largest cities in the United States.   Sixty installers are scattered all over the country placing machines and teaching the house operators.   The press and managers’ reports from all places are uniform in their enthusiastic comments.   All records for attendance have been broken in every theatre where they have been shown.’

The remarkable success of the Kinetophone quickly spawned a number of rivals: The Protective Amusement Co. showed Webb’s Electrical Pictures in New York’s Aerial Theater which incorporated a sound-on-film system based on Eugene Lauste’s Phonocinematophone, while Selig Polyscope released seventeen films of Scottish singer Harry Lauder to cash in on his successful tour of the States.

Despite the Kinetophone’s apparent success – it was Edison’s profit leader in 1913 – its days were already numbered: cinema managers were disinterested in the device, as if they believed any popular entertainment containing sound belonged in the vaudeville houses.   And in the summer, many vaudeville houses closed down, leaving the Kinetophone with a vastly reduced outlet.   More damaging than this were the technical problems that plagued the system.   The major problem – as with all early sound devices – was synchronisation.   A newspaper reported a typical, unfortunate event at New York’s Union Square: ‘the real sensation of the day was scored quite unintentionally by the operator of the machine [who] inadvertently set his pictures some ten or twelve seconds ahead of his sounds, and the result was amazing.   The interlocutor [of the evening’s second film, a minstrel show first part]… would rise pompously, his lips would move, he would bow and sit down.   Then his speech would float out over the audience.’   In 1921, early film historian Austin Celestin Lescarboura recalled another unfortunate incident: ‘It was a scene from Julius Caesar – the quarrel scene, to be exact.   One of the characters suddenly sheathed his sword, and a few seconds later came the commanding voice from the phonograph somewhere behind the screen, saying: “sheathe thy sword, Brutus!”   The audience roared, of course.’   The Kinetophone’s amplification, although vastly improved over previous sound systems, was still inadequate, and the sound issuing from it had a hollow, metallic quality.   And it wasn’t just the big issues that spelled the end of the Kinetophone: a memo to Edison dated 15^th April 1913, asked his advice about a suitable rat repellent to stop them eating through the synchroniser cords…

Edison’s production of Kinetophone films limped on through 1914, but Murdoch and Beck withdrew their support in the spring of that year.   Then, in the latter half of the year, two major incidents conspired to convince Edison that it was time to abandon the project for good.   In August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany, and Europe was plunged into a devastating war which severely damaged export demand for the Kinetophone.   Then, in December, much of Edison’s factory in West Orange, New Jersey, was destroyed in a fire.    While Edison was quick to rebuild most areas of the business, he failed to replace the Kinetophone masters.

By the end of 1916, only one Kinetophone was known to still be in use.   It didn’t work properly, and there were no more spare parts available to fix it…

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[Sources: The Coming of Sound: A History. Contributors: Douglas Gomery - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2004. Page Number: 29; The Trouble with Kinetophone. Contributors: Art Shifrin - author. Magazine Title: American Cinematographer. Volume: 64. Issue: 9. Publication Date: September 1983. Page Number: 50+; See and Hear. Contributors: Will H. Hays - author. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1929. Page Number: 41-42.; Silent Film Sound by Rick Altman, Columbia University Press 2007, pp175-178