Fh - The Coming Of Sound And Color, 1926-1935 (Cook 205-230)

Front 1

Thomas Edison

Back 1

Initially commissioned the invention of the Kinetograph with the notion of providing a visual accompaniment for his phonograph

Front 2

Paris World Expositioned, 1900 - 3 Seperate Systems to Syncronize Phonograph recordings with projected film stips.

Back 2

-The Phonorama of L.A. Berthon, C.F. Dussaud, and G.F. Jaubert.

-Leon Gaumont's Chronophone

- The Phono-Cinema Theatre

Front 3

Oskar Messter

Back 3

German producer of short synchronized sound films as novelty items in 1903.

Front 4

Popular Ways of Sound in Britain

Back 4

Gaumont Chronophone, Cecil Hepworth's Vivaphone

Front 5

United States - The edison Corporation and sound

Back 5

Achieved modest technical success with two phonogilm systems - Cinephonograph and Kinetoscope.

Front 6

Phonograph

Back 6

Earlier ones used wax cylinders and later used discs, all had 3 difficulties in common: syncronizing the sound recording withe the filmed event, amplifying the sound for presentation to a large audience, and reconciling the brevity of the cylinder and disk formats with the standard lengths of motion pictures.

Front 7

Eugene Augustin Lauste - 1910

Back 7

First successful attempt to record sound directly on a film strip, side by side with the image track. Based on a 1907 British Patent for converting sound-modulated light beams into electrical impulses by means of a photoconductive selenium cell.

No financial backing for his systems called Photocinematophome, Lauste's experiments were to become the basis for RCA Photophone.

Front 8

Joseph T. Tykociner

Back 8

Polish American inventor, experimented with a sound-modulated gas flume as a light source as early as 1896, but the first workable sound-on-film, or optical sound systems were not perfected until after the war.

Front 9

German Inventors (3), 1919

Back 9

Joseph Engl, Joseph Massole, and Hans Vog3t. Patented the Tri-Ergon Process, sound-on-film system that used a photoelectric cell to convert sound waves into electric impulses and electric inpulses into light waves that were recorded photographically on the edge of the film stip. American rights eventually sold to William Fox of Fox Film Corporation in 1927. Ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1935.

Front 10

Dr. Lee de Forrest

Back 10

Patented a sound system similar to the Tri-Ergon process. The Audion 3-Electrode Amplifier Tube, a vacuum tube that amplified the sound it recieved electronically and drove it into a speaker.

Front 11

The Audion Tube

Back 11

Became essential to the technology of all sound systems requiring amplification. By 1922, De Frost worked out enough bugs to test the system out commercially. In November that year, he founded the De Forest Phonofilm Company to produce a series of short sound films.

Front 12

Vitaphone

Back 12

Sound-on-disc developed at great expense by Western Electric and Bell Telephone Labratories.

Front 13

The Jazz Singer

Back 13

Was adapted from a successful Broadway play. Conceived as a singing rather than a talking

Front 14

Fox-Case Corporation (July 1926)

Back 14

Formed by Fox Film's President, William Fox to make short sound films with the system and exhibit thrm in his theaters under the name Fox Movietone. Several News Reals Followed.

Front 15

Charles Pathé

Back 15

Invented the Pathécolor stencil process (renamed Pathéchrome in 1929) to mechanize thr application of color.

Front 16

James Clerk Maxwell (1855)

Back 16

Scottish physicist introduced the principles on which color photography was based. Discovered that all natural colors in the spectrum are composed of different combinations of three primary colors: red, green and blue.

Front 17

Charles Urban

Back 17

First process to employ James Clerk Maxwell's principles in Motion Picture photography successfully by a two-color sequential additive system, Kinemacolor.

Front 18

G.A. Smith (1906)

Back 18

Discovered that by fusing two primary colors (red and green) through persistence of vision, he could obtain a range of colors nearby equivalent to those produced by three.

Front 19

First entirely successful motion picture color system

Back 19

Two-strip subtractive Technicolor

Front 20

The Technicolor Corporation (1915)

Back 20

Formed in 1915 in Boston by Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, Dr. Daniel F. Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott.

Front 21

Technicolor in 1932

Back 21

Perfected the three color system.

Front 22

Problems of Early Sound Recordings

Back 22

Three competing systems (Western Electric Vitaphone, Fox Movietone, and RCA Photophone) were not compatible with each other. Equipment was constantly being modified/redesigned.

Early microphones were terrible at recording sound due to limited range but still highlu sensitive to the noises within the range.

Front 23

Postsynchronization or Dubbing

Back 23

Permitted synchronous and asynchronous sound to be used together consistently and simultaneously within the same film. First used by the American Director, King Vidor in Hallelujah!

Front 24

Blimps (1931)

Back 24

Lightweight sound proof boxes that encased the cameras to muffle the clatter of their motors and enable them to record synchronous sound outside the booth. Within several years, smaller, quieter, and self insulating cameras were ptoduced, eliminating the need for external sound priifing altogether.