We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
must be simultaneously photographed — generally on two films, the 'track' and the 'mute,' and the marriage is consummated when they are combined in the prints which go to the cinemas. The metaphor must now be dropped or questions of morality might arise when half a dozen tracks are united with one mute, which is quite usual practice.
The 'Vivaphone' was sold or leased in complete sets consisting of synchroniser, gramophone attachment, projector handle, coil of wire and a fourvolt battery. Anyone could rig the arrangement up, or call upon us to show him how. One of our men once took a set to a customer by train; it was in a bag by itself and he put it on the luggage rack. Suddenly it caught fire spontaneously, sent out dense clouds of evil-smelling smoke and had to be pitched out of the window — luckily in open country. The railway company recovered it and, naturally, asked us what it meant. I went to see them — and it — but couldn't suggest any explanation. We were all nonplussed. Then I went back and did some furious thinking. The bag had contained only the four-volt battery, some wire and a tin box with the film in it — the customer already had the other parts. At last I tried putting a film-box on the top of the battery, the metal touching both the terminals. Almost at once the mystery was explained: the metal short-circuited the current and became red hot.
Nobody had thought of this possibility beforehand, but evidently what had happened was that in placing the bag on the rack, or in the jolting of the train, the tin box had got into position on the top of the battery, and then further jolting had caused it to make contact and fire the celluloid.
Although the 'Vivaphone' had only a short life of three or four years, it had its moments of glory. One of these was when that important politician, Bonar Law, made a gramophone record specially for us, but with an eye, of course, to the value of propaganda. He had to make a journey to The Gramophone Company and deliver his speech into a long funnel — there was no electrical recording then — and then come out to our studio and re-deliver it word by word in step with his own record on the gramophone attached to our camera. This is now called 'post-synchronisation' and it isn't at all an easy thing to do. Truth to tell he was not very good at it. But it was good enough to pass with people who were not too critical and I have little doubt that it served its purpose.
99