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GRAMOPHONE AND MOVIES 241
phone from the same motor. Another employed a dial and pointer photographed in the bottom right-hand corner of the scene in the studio. A dial and pointer were also fitted to the gramophone and the man in charge of the latter was supposed to keep his pointer in synchronisation with that shown on the screen. Sometimes he succeeded, but more often he did not.
The chief drawback to all these immature talkies was the smallness of the voice coming from the gramophone. The pictures were more than life size but the sound certainly was not. To overcome this all kinds of freakish devices were resorted to in order to get volume, for this was, of course, long before the days of amplification by radio valves.
The Gaumont Chronomegaphone actually used compressed air to blow the voice out into the audience. Another used scores of telephone receivers placed all round the auditorium.
The latter was installed throughout one big circuit, Provincial Cinematograph Theatres, and one of the high spots of its temporary vogue was a forty-minute version of Faust. At the London Hippodrome five talkie shorts were included in the bill for eighteen months, and Terry's Theatre in the Strand — a chain store stands on the site to-day — was given over exclusively to Hepworth's talkies for several seasons.
But, taking it all in all, the early talkies were a failure. They began to bore audiences and, before the outbreak of World War I, the cinema industry refused to countenance any further developments, although experiments continued in America and several early stars — Jack Mulhall, Gladys Hulette and Rex Ingram among them — appeared in items which were still being shown on the Continent as late as 1922.
There was also one attempt in New York to synchronise a full length film with a musical accompaniment on discs. Otherwise, the talkies were dead by 19 14.
A great pity, because, unknown to cinema audiences, Eugene Lauste, the man who had worked in the cinema-cum-stable in Soho, in the dawn years of the electric theatre, had, by 19 13, perfected the sound-on-film talkies which we have to-day.
The inventor carried out his work in a typical Brixton villa. His workshop was not large. To finance his experiments he had to sell many items of expensive electrical equipment and he spent many weary months trying to convince people that he really could do what