Talkies

Talkies - Motion pictures that featured the innovative addition of sound.

The synchronization of motion pictures with sound, producing what were referred to at the time as "talkies" was first demonstrated at the Paris Exposition in 1900. Further demonstration were occasionally held after that but the technical difficulties involved in the process-which basically worked by crudely synchronizing the starting of the movie projector with an audio playback cylinder made widespread commercial screenings all but impossible for two decades. However, in 1919, U.S. electrical engineering Lee de Forest patented his Phonofilm sound on film process which recorded sound directly onto the movie strip in the form of parallel lines of variable density. The lines recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone photographically and were translated back into sound when the movie was projected.

The first commercial screening of talkies came on April 15 1923 at the Rivoli Theater, New York City, with a set of short movies promoted by De Forest Phonofilms. The first commercial hit for talkies, The Jass Singer, appeared four years later, in 1927, although its sound system was not de Forest's. The movie had fewer than 400 spoken words, but its success was undeniable and within three years 95 percent of all new movies made used talkie technology. This proved a momentous change in the movie industry, simultaneously raising the cost of film production, which drove many small production companies out of business and reducing the availability of jobs for many silent film stars, because the addition of sound to movies brought radical changes in the style of acting required. The bringing together of motion pictures and sound caused a revolution in film technology, the impact of which can be seen in the almost complete absence of professionally made silent films today.