‘Edison’s Speaking Photographs’ (1894)

122 years ago a writer for the Boston Evening Transcript described a strange new technological advance: motion pictures combined with sound. His reactions are fascinating:

The article’s long so the best parts are below:

“A group of actors, we will say, are on a theatre stage: a series of living instantaneous photographs of them is taken at the rate of forty-six a second and at the same time a phonographic or sound record is taken, a certain perforated film of celluloid flashing out its pictures synchronously with the sounds uttered, both machines moving at the same rate of speed and being electrically and mechanically linked together. Very well. You have, then, your actors bottled up for representation anywhere and any time.”

“You put your cylinders into your phonograph (with megaphonic trumpet attachment to magnify the sound) and electrically link with it your photographic film band or cylinder with its hundred and fifty thousand or so tiny pictures. Then you start up the motive power, project your pictures (say stereoscopic ones) on a magic-lantern screen, and lo, human life, motion and sound in facsimile! A figure stalks across the scene, gesturing and talking: then another and another. It is startling in the extreme. The profound magic of the Orient is outdone: necromancy is in the shade. By virtue of the lightning-swift moving series 0f pictures all actions blend into each other: the lifted arm descends on the screen just as it did in reality and the voice accompanies it in proper relation. It is the idealization of Master Peter’s puppet show. But imagine the infinite superiority of the kineto — phonographic illusion to that of the miserable puppets jerked about the stage by the hair of their heads (or by rods in their heads, to be accurate), while the voice of one speaker behind the scene must stand for that of each actor on the stage, male or female. Is this marvellous toy to have higher and extensive applications? Edison does not doubt it.”