The invention of recorded sound by Thomas Edison in 1877 predated the successful demonstration of motion pictures by nearly 20 years

Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931)

The American inventor Thomas Edison lived and worked in the United States all his life. he was the most productive inventor ever. During his lifetime, he patented 1,093 different inventions, including the incandescent electric lamp (similar to the ordinary light bulbs we know today). the motion picture projector, and the first industrial research laboratory. Edison had a slow start in life. He was expelled from school because people did not realise that he was deaf, thinking instead that he was unable to learn. His mother taught him at home, where he had built his own laboratory by the time he was 10 years old.

Thomas Edison when he was young

The invention of recorded sound by Thomas Edison in 1877 predated the successful demonstration of motion pictures by nearly 20 years. Edison and dozens of other prominent innovators in the motion picture field tried, without substantial results, to marry sound and picture. Without the aid of electrical amplification, sound motion pictures were limited to short loops viewed, and heard, by a single person in a Nickelodeon type of device called a Kinetophone which Edison developed from 1889 through 1893. The sound was recorded on an Edison cylinder and "loosely" synchronized with the picture. The practicality of the device can be measured by the number of units sold (zero).

In addition to work done by Edison, in France, Pathé introduced a disc based gramophone system similar to Edison's, called the "Berliner". A near identical system was also developed in Berlin by Oscar Messter, though he neglected to call it the "Parisian". Gaumont in France and Goldschmidt in Germany developed improved disc synchronization around 1900, but like all other experimental systems, there was no amplification to allow the sound to be reproduced to a theatre audience. Edison had tried banks of phonographs to achieve amplified sound, and we can only imagine how well synchronized a bank of ten phonographs must have been.

Thomas Edison when he was old

One of the more interesting schemes tried by various people in France, Germany, and America involved notching the edge of the film, (see exaggerated illustration at left), to create a sound record directly on the film. A stylus, acting much like a Victrola needle, would be moved by the passing rough edge of the film, which had been cut in a manner similar to the mastering of an original phonograph record. Exactly how the edge of the film was cut is unknown, but the system would have yielded poor sound that would degrade with every playing. None of the proposed edge cut systems was ever offered commercially.

From about 1908 to 1920, a number of people experimented with photographically recording sound on film. These systems met with limited technical success and commercial failure due to the inability to provide sound loud enough to be heard by more than a few people. Like any complex system, credit for the invention of sound motion pictures cannot be granted to any individual. However, the accumulated inventions of Lee De Forest (left), including the "Audion" tube which allowed amplification of electrical signals, were key to the development of both sound on film and sound on disc systems. DeForest's inventions were refined by companies like American Telephone & Telegraph and the Radio Corporation of America. De Forest, himself, was the first to successfully record sound on motion picture film in a process he called "Phonofilm".