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.
25
paui Thompson Dr. Lee De Forest and his motion-picture camera equipped for making PhonoflUns.
The Movies Speak Up at Last
After many years of experimenting Dr. Lee De Forest has invented talking motion pictures in which the film literally does the talking.
K
By Barbara Little
T last it has come — the motion picture that talks, sings, and reproduces sound of all sorts. For years inventors have been experimenting with various devices for synchronizing phonograph records with motion pictures, but it remained for Doctor Lee De Forest, the wireless telegraph expert, to make the motion pictures themselves actually do the talking.
Doctor De Forest is the inventor of the Phonofilm, which records pictures and sound waves on the same strip of film, as illustrated in the film clipping below. The sound record is on the margin of the film on a strip about three-thirty seconds of an inch wide. .When this film is projected on the screen the players talk, sing, and play musical instruments quite naturally. At the Rivoli Theater in New York several of these have been shown, including dance numbers wherein the musical accompaniment was recorded on the film, scenes from several operas, orchestral numbers, and Lincoln's Gettysburg address enacted by Frank McGlyn. The earliest Phonofilms shown were accompanied by an unpleasant scraping sound quite as the first phonographs were, but now much of this fault has been eliminated.
Doctor De Forest explains his marvelous invention in this way :
"An especially designed gas-filled lamp, called the Photion light, is inserted in the moving-picture camera a short distance away from the usual objective lens. The light from this Photion tube passes through an extremely narrow slit and falls, directly upon one margin of the film. The margin is screened from the picture itself so that only the light from the Photion falls upon it. The film is driven continuously with an even speed in front of this narrow slit, but with the usual step-bv-step
motion in front of the picture aperture.
"Now the light in the Photion tube is generated by the electric current which is passing through the gas enclosed therein. The intensity of the light depends on the intensity of the electric current. Therefore, if a powerful telephonic current is passed through the Photion the light emitted varies exactly in accordance with the strength of the telephonic current at anv instant. The light, therefore, fluctuates in brightness hundreds of thousands of times a second in perfect rhythm with the telephonic current pulses, and Continued on page 111
Above is a strin of the film with the sound waves recorded on the right side. At the left is an enlargement of the way in which the vowel sounds register on the film.