Edison came to the motion picture through his Talking Phonograph, which he had developed not as an entertainment machine but as a device which would be a substitute for the court reporter and in other proceedings requiring exact recording. The motion picture experiments were made rather as a hobby and a diversion from more serious research and invention; the aim was to combine the automatic hearing and speaking of the phonograph with the sight and action of the motion picture.
Curiously enough Plateau, a man who went blind, made the first motion picture possible; Edison who was quite deaf made a great contribution to recording and reproducing sound.
Edison, in November of 1877, sent to his friend Alfred Hopkins, editor of the Scientific American, several sketches of models of his new invention in which “speech was capable of indefinite repetition from automatic records.” The next month a model was perfected. The incident was described as follows in the December 22, 1877, issue of the Scientific American: “Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came into this office, placed a little machine on our desk, turned the crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was well, and bid us a cordial good night.” It was noted that the sound was fully audible to a dozen members of the staff who gathered around. The writer also noted, “When it becomes possible to magnify the sound, as it doubtless will, the witness in court will have his own testimony repeated. The testator will repeat his own will.”
The editor of the Scientific American concluded his comment on the Edison “Talking” phonograph by saying: “It is already possible to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience (i.e., still pictures). Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further.”
The description of the Edison phonograph attracted wide attention. The article referred to above was quoted fully in Nature, a British publication. This led Wordsworth Donisthorpe to set down the first complete plan of the talking motion picture. Others, of course, had had the idea but up to that time the plan had never been expressed so clearly and completely.
Wordsworth Donisthorpe, born in 1847, was an English lawyer who throughout life maintained a lively interest in many affairs. He was an outspoken individualist, being a firm believer in local government. He wrote books on such subjects as Law in a Free State, and Love and Law, as well as on scientific matters. When he designed his device, the Kinesigraph, he was living at Princes Park, Liverpool.
After reading about Edison’s phonograph, Donisthorpe wrote to the Nature magazine and referred to the idea of combining the phonograph and still projection suggested by the Editor of the Scientific American. Donisthorpe quoted that comment and then said:
Ingenious as this suggested combination is, I believe I am in a position to cap it. By combining the phonograph and the Kinesigraph I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of Mr. Gladstone which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression, shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone. Not only this, but the life-size phonograph itself shall move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making the speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in real life. Surely this is an advance upon the conception of the Scientific American!
The mode in which I effect this is described in the accompanying provisional specifications, which may be briefly summed up thus: Instantaneous photographs of bodies or groups of bodies in motion are taken at equal short intervals—say quarter or half seconds, the exposure of the plate occupying not more than an eighth of a second. After fixing, the prints from these plates are taken one below the other on a long strip of ribbon or paper. The strip is wound from one cylinder to another so as to cause the several photographs to pass before the eye successively at the same intervals of time as those at which they were taken.
Each picture as is passes the eye is instantaneously lighted up by an electric spark. Thus the picture is made to appear stationary while the people or things in it appear to move as in nature. I need not enter more into detail beyond saying that if the intervals between the presentation of the successive pictures are found to be too short the gaps can be filled up by duplicates or triplicates of each succeeding print. This will not perceptibly alter the general effect.