Radio pioneer Lee de Forest demonstrates his Phonofilm movie process, bringing the world of synchronized sound to the movies.
Inventors who’d tried to link the phonograph and the moving picture found it nearly impossible to synchronize the sound with moving lips on the screen. The first sound films had recorded musical accompaniment but still used full-screen dialogue titles. They weren’t talkies.
De Forest’s technical advance was synchronizing sound and motion by placing the sound recording directly on the film in an optical soundtrack. Analog blips of light represented sound frequency and volume. It was the prototype of the optical sound-on-film process used from the 1930s onward, with continued improvements like high fidelity and stereo, until digital sound began to replace it in the 1990s. De Forest equipped thirty theaters around the world with Phonofilm. He didn’t have a big budget for film production and couldn’t seriously interest Hollywood in his invention. De Forest solved the sound-synch issue, but his fidelity was subpar even by 1920s standards.
The movie that introduced most of the public to talkies, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, used the Warner Bros. Vitaphone. That system was essentially a phonograph hooked up to a projector and piped into loudspeakers. Meant to showcase Al Jolson’s singing, the film instead amazed audiences with bits of spoken dialogue.
Fox Movietone, RCA, AT&T, and German companies were also developing sound-on-film, and their systems soon left de Forest’s low-fi Phonofilm in the acoustical dust. De Forest had likewise been unable to capitalize on his earlier work in vacuum-tube technology and voice radio, spending years fighting lawsuits and even staving off charges of criminal fraud.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored de Forest in 1959 with a special Oscar for the “pioneer invention which brought sound to the motion picture.”—RA