Vitaphone discs

Since the beginning of motion pictures, there had been many attempts to create the ‘talkies’. From William Dickson’s experiments in the mid-1890s with the Kinetophone to Alice Guy-Blaché work with Gaumont's Chronophone system from 1902, not to mention the Phonofilm and the Vivaphone, the Phonorama, the Synchroscope and the Biophon. But it wasn’t until Western Electric’s Vitaphone in 1926 that a sound system had truly been commercially successful or revolutionised the industry. In fact, earlier failed attempts had damaged the notion of talking pictures with poor synchronisation and low sound quality disappointing audiences. Instead theatres would hire musicians and often even have their own in-house orchestras to accompany silent film screenings.

Vitaphone used a sound-on-disc system which means the soundtrack was not printed on the film but was housed separately on phonograph records. The turntable that played the discs and the film projector ran off the same motor at the same speed. The projectionist only needed to line up the cuing mark on the disc with the cuing mark on the film for the sound to be correctly synchronised with the picture. Vitaphone also used electrical recoding and amplification methods, giving superior sound quality and the ability to throw sound all around huge cinema palaces.

An early adopter of new technology, Sam Warner of Warner Brothers convinced his eldest brother Harry along with financers Goldman-Sachs to purchase Western Electric’s sound system, forming the Vitaphone Company in 1925. On the 5th of August 1926, at the Warner Brothers Theatre in New York City, the studio released the first Vitaphone feature film, Don Juan which included an orchestral score and sound effects but no spoken dialogue. The night’s program also included eight short Vitaphone films starring the opera tenor Giovanni Martinelli, violinists Mischa Elman and Efrem Zimbalist, and Al Jolson. Johnson, who according to Hollywood legend instantly transitioned the industry to the talkies in The Jazz Singer (1927) with his famous line, “You ain’t heard nothing yet”, in fact spoke this same line in the short A Plantation Act (1926) which was shown as part of the festivities. The success of the evening lead to the release of The Jazz Singer a year later, which like Don Juan featured an orchestral soundtrack, sound effects but also included two minutes of spoken word, making it a part-talkie.

The success of the Vitaphone system paved the way for the transition to sound pictures, however the sound-on-disc process itself was short-lived, soon to be replaced with an improved sound-on-film system. Between 1929 and 1933, Western Electric, RCA, Fox-Movietone, and the Tri-Ergon, Tonfilm and Klangfilm had all developed versions of optical sound-on-film quickly making sound-on-disc obsolete.

– Curator Chelsey O'Brien