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284 CINEMATOGRAPHIC ANNUAL ^
other sciences and devices, and owes almost nothing to the earlier attempts in the talkie art. Edison contributed much to the sound picture of today but his contribution came through the phonograph rather than through his own sound picture attempts as represented in his Kinetophone and his Cameraphone. The incandescent lamp invented by Edison is also an indispensable component of the modern talking picture machine. The casual historian of the talkie is apt to refer to these early talking picture ventures, such as Edison's, and then jump lightly to the talkie as we now know it. ' The early talkie experiments themselves left no trail, but in the days when they were being attempted, the real talkie development in other fields had its beginnings.
Every industry has periods of apparent development and periods of apparent stagnation. Often in the quiet intervals basic ideas are being developed which later make possible spectacular achievement. For long years the talkie outwardly stood still. Its sudden attainment of commercial success was, however, but the culmination of a long period of incubation. The talkie is not a primary development, it is an hybrid of other growths.
In 1857 Leon Scott, in France, recorded sound waves on his phonautograph but he could not reproduce sound from his wavy line on smoked paper.
In 1877 Thomas A. Edison announced the successful recording of sound on a cylinder coated with tinfoil, and even more important, the reproduction of sound therefrom. Much time, thought and patient research were put into this device, to be known as the phonograph. The next two important developments in the phonograph were: first, the introduction of wax in the form of a cylinder or disc as the substance on which the record was engraved, and second, a method of duplicating records in any desired quantity from the wax.
Because of the inability to play it more than a few times before it wore out, the original wax cylinder was obviously of no commercial value, and without duplication it could serve but few listeners. At this juncture the electrotyping art came to the aid of the phonograph and made possible by successive electroplating steps, the production of the stampers under which the flat disc records are now pressed wholesale.
In those days bear in mind that the sole source of power available to cut the record in the wax, and later to reproduce the audible sounds therefrom, was in the case of a speaker, the power of his vocal cords. The average vocal power of a human being is only tenmillionths of a watt — an amount of energy hopelessly impotent