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arrangements ,' so to speak, was right before the eyes of the audience. If the synchronism went wrong they could see why. They probably got more fun watching the race between the two little clocks than they did out of the picture, but at least they were amused either way.
I originated a method which I thought was better.1 It was a private electrical connection between the machine and the man in the box. A simple commutator, laid on the gramophone when the record was in place, sent electrical signals through a wire to a synchroniser in the operating box. The synchroniser had a little lamp behind a slot, which was normally covered by a movable hand just wide enough to hide the light. That hand had two little windows of gelatine attached to it, green on one side and red on the other. The signals from the distant gramophone tended to pull the hand to one side and thus show a green light. A similar commutator on the projector tended to pull the indicator hand in the other direction. As long as the picture was in exact synchronism with the gramophone the needle covered the slot and no light showed but the moment the two machines got out of step, even by an eighth of a second, a red or a green flash warned the operator and he varied his speed at once to bring them into step again.
All methods of this kind, however, were at the mercy of the man in charge of the gramophone, for if he did not start the needle on the record at the right point all hope of synchronism was lost. In some cinemas a programme boy was given the job — and a lot of things went wrong!
These of course were not 'talking pictures' in the proper meaning of the words. They were an interesting little side-line — perhaps an ingenious attempt to peep into the future and see whether picture and sound were likely ever to get married. It was a little flirtation which might or might not lead on to more serious things.
We called our instrument the 'Vivaphone' because we had to call it something. It was installed in a considerable number of small halls — the gramophone's gentle bleating was too faint for anything larger — and we supplied them with a steady stream of films, two a week for several years. You wouldn't have liked them even if they had been good. For the 'talkies,' properly so called (if anything can be 'properly' called by such an outrageous name),
1 Patent application No. 10417. April 28th, 1910.
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