The talkies (1930)

l8 THE TALKIES Lauste discovered that no rent had been paid, and that the whole of his plant had been mortgaged for $1,000. The courage of inventors is proverbial, and Lauste is still working away in America on a new form of sound reproducing device, and, at the age of seventy-two, watches with interest the legal battles of the huge concerns in the Talkie world of to-day, the representatives of some of whom were frequent visitors to his laboratory while he was ill, years ago. Some years before the War, still further activity was showing itself in England. Mr. Hep worth, a very early photographic pioneer and the inventor of the automatic development of cinema film, now used all over the world, succeeded in getting, anyhow, a plausible imitation of a Talkie by rather a different system called the Vivaphone. He used to secure gramophone records of such famous artists as Vesta Tilley and Harry Lauder, and get them to sing in front of the camera with their records; these records were then synchronized with the resulting film by means of a most ingenious electrical signalling device up to the operating room. This was, however, not true synchronization, and although some measure of success was obtained, one occasionally beheld the