Sound motion pictures : from the laboratory to their presentation (1929)

THE COMING OF SOUND 7 material used in one of the standard "sound on film" recording and reproducing systems — the R. C. A.-Photophone. Professor Herman, however, used sensitized paper, not film. Demeny's "Chronophotophone" was brought out in Paris in 1892 and showed the first real talking picture. It consisted of a series of lantern slides for projecting the picture on the screen, combined with a lantern and a cylinder phonograph and mechanism. The beginning of the sound pictures of a photographic combination of synchronized sound and action on film came in 1906 when Eugene Augustin Lauste, an electrical engineer, who was employed by Edison as well as the old Biograph Company in experimental work, filed an application for a patent in London, which was described as follows: "A new and improved method of a means for simultaneously recording and reproducing movements and sounds." A patent was granted to Lauste in 1906 on the records of the British Patent Office. The preamble in the patent office reads : It has been proposed to patent No. 18057, A. D. 1906, a device to record simultaneously the movements of persons and objects, and the sounds relating to them optically upon the same photographic records running side by side with, and at the same rate as, the image is received. This description makes clear the importance of Lauste's disclosure in the light of claims which have since been made relative to sound pictures and their development. The Lauste device was called the " Photocinematophone," and the method was demonstrated in London on several occasions, at which voice and music were photographed simultaneously, while the action was recorded on sensitive negative film. Lauste was the first to employ the selenium