Motion Picture Herald (May-Jun 1946)

cer Chaplin ;and the development of the "vamp" or femme fatale by Winfield Sheehan with Theda Bara. One should also record the able ' findings of Cecil Blount DeMille on the cinematographic significance of the bath tub. That w^as all akin to the current studies that Howard Hughes, able technician on deep drilling and high flying, is making in the realm of lobby displays. A lot of that sort of exploration had to be had before the industry and the art were ready for new tools. Showmen are never inventors, and inventors are rarely showmen. Showmanship is ever concerned with exploiting the status quo and things in hand. Inventors are not satisfied with either the status quo or the things in hand. The motion picture had reached an approximate saturation of public attention under the administration of showmen by the later 1920's, and the box office was showing it, sometimes painfully. But relief was on the way. Invention was coming to the rescue, with, one may add, great alarm to the showmen! Inevitably, it had to be from the outside. Between the two great talk and sound industries, the Telephone Company and the Radio Corporation of America, a vast array of inventions and techniques had been evolved for making noises. A merging of the arts of making noises, and tlie art of making faces, was in gestation. You will be remembering that it was the brothers Warner, whose concern was not exactly what we call "a major" then, who invited sound into the picture theatre. They were out to improve their status quo with a new thing. They surely did. Anyway, most of those present in the audience of this page can remember that all at once this became a business all fussed up with gadgets of a new order, infiltrated by technicians of a new order, and mightily bewildered and concerned with photo-electric cells, electrons, and audio frequencies— to say nothing of acoustics, and it would be best to say very little about that, anyway. The acoustic is still not completely housebroken. Right about then a new opportunity, which of course means a new necessity, fell upon the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. Right away it needed a lot more 0) 0) 0) a> 0) 2200 2000 1800 a I600 f 1400 a. 1200 UJ m lOOO Z HI OUO 2 oOO 400 20O O Charting the growth of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers since its founding in 1916. Henry Anderson, chairman of the new subcommittee on Theatre Engineering, Construction and Operation. J. G. Bradley of The National Archives, chairman of the Committee on Film Preservation. engineering. Also, if you will consult the rolls, you will discover it began to acquire membership at a rate unprecedented in its first decade. In the pattern of inevitability, the rise of the electron brought into active participation with the industry and the Society one of the electron's most intimate friends, Dr. Alfred Norton Goldsmith, then general engineer and technological chief of the Radio Corporation of America. He was found immediately to be a man of parts, none of them spare parts. In his background were assorted achievements of scholarship and science, mingled with a skill of presentation and persuasion that must have been fun for his classes when he was a professor of electrical engineering. Just by way of documentation pertaining to this Dr. Goldsmith, let us turn to the file of The Physical Review, volume 64. It is a publication for bedside reading slightly divergent in policy from Life, Look and Click. There he has a piece about "Quantanized Probably," being a most abstruse discourse on quanta and their mathematical habits, presenting the theory that "there exists a finite unit of probability, representing the lower limit of probability." He suggests "chance quantum" as the name for the unit. "Thus if the probability of an event is equal to or greater than one cq., it may ultimately occur. If it is less than one cq., it will never occur." This is obviously a sharp and unorthodox break with the classic probability theory. He cites the famous old mathematical hypothesis that a big enough cage full of monkeys operating enough typewriters at random would ultimately reproduce the master-works of literature in the British Museum. Dr. Goldsmith postulates that the probability falls below one chance-quantum. One hesitates to take issue, hut it is clear enough that the impossible has already happened, which is to say that a flock of monkeys of the species H. Sap, have already achieved it, and there are the books to prove it. The trouble is that the monkeys do not know about chancequanta, because they don't read enough Goldsmith. A lot of them would not know Alfred from Oliver. He is, however, well supported by some personal experience of this writer engaged in research among a lot of monkeys on the probability of filling a royal flush open in the middle. That runs damn close to less than 1 cq. Anyway, it was this expert on all manner of monkeys and electrons who arrived on the tide of development which brought sound over the Society's horizon. Dr. Goldsmith became president of the Society for three terms, 1931-34. Right there on the accompanying membership graph vein be discovered the sharp upturn which denoted the motion picture's swiftly 22 BEHER THEATRES. MAY 4. 1946