Movietone sound system
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The Movietone sound system is an
optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...
sound-on-film Sound-on-film is a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying a picture is recorded on photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an analog ...
method of recording sound for motion pictures that guarantees synchronization between sound and picture. It achieves this by recording the sound as a variable-density optical track on the same strip of film that records the pictures. The initial version was capable of a frequency response of 8500 Hz. Although sound films today use variable-area tracks, any modern motion picture theater (excluding those that have transitioned to
digital cinema Digital cinema refers to adoption of digital technology within the film industry to distribute or project motion pictures as opposed to the historical use of reels of motion picture film, such as 35 mm film. Whereas film reels have to be sh ...
) can play a Movietone film without modification to the projector (though if the projector's sound unit has been fitted with red LED or laser light sources, the reproduction quality from a variable density track will be significantly impaired). Movietone was one of four motion picture sound systems under development in the U.S. during the 1920s, the others being DeForest
Phonofilm Phonofilm is an optical sound-on-film system developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the early 1920s. Introduction In 1919 and 1920, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patents on a sound-on-film proce ...
,
Warner Brothers Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American Film studio, film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, Califo ...
'
Vitaphone Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one th ...
, and
RCA Photophone RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was an opt ...
, though Phonofilm was primarily an early version of Movietone.


History

As a student,
Theodore Case Theodore Willard Case (December 12, 1888 – May 13, 1944) was an American chemist and inventor known for the invention of the Movietone sound-on-film system. Early life and education Theodore Willard Case was born in 1888 in Auburn, New Yo ...
became interested in the use of modulated light to carry speech, and in 1916 set up a laboratory to study the photo-electric properties of materials. He developed the ''Thalofide cell'', a sensitive photocell, which was used as part of an infrared communication system by the U.S. Navy during, and for some years after WW1. In 1922 Case and his assistant Earl I. Sponable turned their attention to "talking pictures". In that same year Case was approached by
Lee de Forest Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first electronic device for controlling current flow; the three-element "Audion" triode va ...
who had been attempting since 1919 to create an optical soundtrack for motion picture film in a system he called ''
Phonofilm Phonofilm is an optical sound-on-film system developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the early 1920s. Introduction In 1919 and 1920, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patents on a sound-on-film proce ...
''. De Forest was having little success and turned to Case for help, so from 1922 until 1925 Case and de Forest collaborated in the development of the Phonofilm system. Amongst other Case inventions Case contributed the Thalofide photocell and also the ''Aeo-light'', a light source that could be readily modulated by audio signals and was used to expose the soundtrack in sound cameras. In 1925, however, Case ended his relationship with de Forest due in the main to de Forest's tendency to claim the entire credit for the Phonofilm system for himself despite the fact that most of the critical inventions had come from Case. Documents supporting this, including a signed letter by De Forest that states that Phonofilms are only possible because of the inventions of Case Research Lab, are located at the Case Research Lab Museum in
Auburn, New York Auburn is a city in Cayuga County, New York, United States. Located at the north end of Owasco Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in Central New York, the city had a population of 26,866 at the 2020 census. It is the largest city of Cayuga County, the ...
. In 1925, therefore, Case and Sponable continued the development of their own system, now called "Movietone". From 1924 onwards Sponable had turned his attention to the design of single-system cameras, in which the sound and picture are recorded on the same negative. He asked
Bell & Howell Bell and Howell LLC is a U.S.-based services organization and former manufacturer of cameras, lenses, and motion picture machinery, founded in 1907 by two projectionists, and originally headquartered in Wheeling, Illinois. The company is now ...
to modify one of their cameras to his design, but the results were unsatisfactory. Consequently, the Wall machine shop in
Syracuse, New York Syracuse ( ) is a City (New York), city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, Onondaga County, New York, United States. It is the fifth-most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffa ...
was asked to rebuild this camera and the results were much improved. Subsequently, many single-system 35mm cameras were produced by Wall Camera Corporation, which much later produced the three-film
Cinerama Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporati ...
cameras. Wall initially converted some Bell & Howell
Design 2709 A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...
cameras to single-system, but most were Wall designed and produced. Single-system cameras were also produced by
Mitchell Camera Mitchell Camera Corporation was a motion picture camera manufacturing company established in Los Angeles in 1919. It was a primary supplier of newsreel and movie cameras for decades, until its closure in 1979. History The Mitchell Camera Corpor ...
Corporation during World War II for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, although these cameras were quite rare. Partly as a result of the single system experiments, the aspect ratio of approximately 1.19:1 that is created by printing an optical soundtrack on top of the 35mm full aperture became known colloquially as the "Movietone ratio". It was used extensively by Hollywood and European studios (apart from those that adopted sound-on-disc) between the late 1920s and May 1932, when the Academy ratio of 1.37:1 was introduced to restore the effective shape of the silent frame. The 1950s brought the first 35mm kinescope camera with sound-on-film rather than separate, from Photo-Sonics, with a Davis Loop Drive mechanism built within the camera box. This camera was essential for TV network time-shifting in the years before Videotape. The sound galvanometer was made by RCA and was designed for good to excellent results when the kinescope negative was projected, thereby avoiding making a print before the delayed replay. The Davis mechanism was a Western Electric development. After the split with de Forest, Case adopted a revised position for the projector soundhead, which was now placed below the picture head, with a sound-picture offset of 14 ½ inches (368 mm) (which is close to the present day standard), rather than being placed above the picture head as had been the phonofilm practice. Case also adopted the 24 frames/sec speed for Movietone, bringing it in line with the speed already chosen for the Western Electric
Vitaphone Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one th ...
sound-on-disc system, and thus establishing 24 frames/sec as the standard speed for all sound films, whether sound-on-disc or sound-on-film. With a few exceptions, this has remained the standard speed for professional sound films ever since.Earl I. Sponable, "Historical Development of Sound Films", The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (April 1947), Vol. 48, No. 4Edward Kellogg, "History of Sound Motion in Pictures", The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (June 1955), Vol. 64, p. 295 At this point, the Movietone system was adopted by the
AMPAS The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motion ...
as the Academy's standard. It and the later RCA Photophone system were interchangeable in most respects. See
RCA Photophone RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was an opt ...
for technical details and lists of the industry adopters.


Commercial use by William Fox

Movietone entered commercial use when William Fox of the
Fox Film Corporation The Fox Film Corporation (also known as Fox Studios) was an American Independent film production studio formed by William Fox (1879–1952) in 1915, by combining his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attractions Film C ...
bought the entire system including the patents in July 1926. Although Fox owned the Case patents, the work of
Freeman Harrison Owens Freeman Harrison Owens (July 20, 1890 – December 9, 1979) was an early American filmmaker and aerial photographer. Biography was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the only child of Charles H. Owens and Christabel Harrison. He attended Pine Blu ...
, and the American rights to the German
Tri-Ergon The Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system was developed from around 1919 by three German inventors, Josef Engl (1893–1942), Joseph Massolle (1889–1957), and Hans Vogt (1890–1979). The system used a photoelectric recording method and a non-standa ...
patents, the Movietone sound film system uses only the inventions of Case Research Lab. William Fox hired Earl I. Sponable (1895–1977) from Case Research Lab in 1926, when he purchased the sound-on-film patents from Case. The first feature film released using the Fox Movietone system was '' Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans'' (1927) directed by
F. W. Murnau Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe; December 28, 1888March 11, 1931) was a German film director, producer and screenwriter. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at th ...
. It was the first professionally produced feature film with an optical sound track. The sound in the film included only music, sound effects, and very few unsynchronized words. The system was used for sound acting sequences in Mother Knows Best (1928). Less than two years after purchasing the system from Case, Fox bought out all of Case's interests in the Fox-Case company. All of Fox's sound feature films were made using the Movietone system until 1931 when it was superseded by a
Western Electric The Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company officially founded in 1869. A wholly owned subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph for most of its lifespan, it served as the primary equipment ma ...
recording system using the light-valve invented by Edward C. Wente in 1923. However, Fox
Movietone News Movietone News is a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1986, in France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Australia and New Zealand until 197 ...
used the system until 1939, because of the ease of transporting the single-system's sound film equipment.


Later development

The Case Research Lab sound system influenced many industry standards, such as location of the
optical sound Optical sound is a means of storing sound recordings on transparent film. Originally developed for military purposes, the technology first saw widespread use in the 1920s as a sound-on-film format for motion pictures. Optical sound eventually ...
20 frames in advance of the image it accompanies. The current ''
SMPTE The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the m ...
'' standard for 35 mm sound film is +21 frames for optical, but a 46-foot theatre reduces this to +20 frames;Ira Konigsberg, ''The Complete Film Dictionary'' (Second Edition), Bloomsbury (1997) — see Projector article. this was originally done partly to ensure the film runs smoothly past the sound head, but also to ensure that no Phonofilm could again be played in theaters — the Phonofilm system being incompatible with Case Research Lab specifications — and also to ease the modification of projectors already widely in use. Sponable worked at the
Fox Film Corporation The Fox Film Corporation (also known as Fox Studios) was an American Independent film production studio formed by William Fox (1879–1952) in 1915, by combining his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attractions Film C ...
(later
20th Century Fox 20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm of Walt Dis ...
) Movietone studios on 54th Street and 10th Avenue in New York City until he retired in the 1960s, eventually winning an
Academy Award The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment ind ...
for his technical work on the development of CinemaScope. Sponable had many contributions to film technology during his career, including the invention of the perforated motion-picture screen that allowed placing the speakers behind it to enhance the illusion of the sound emanating directly from the film action. During his years at Fox, Sponable also served for a time as an officer of the
Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the m ...
. He published a concise history of sound film in the April 1947 issue of ''The SMPE Journal'' (''The SMPTE Journal'' after 1950). The history of Case Research Lab has long been unheralded for numerous reasons. Theodore Case died in 1944, after donating his home and laboratory to be preserved as a museum to the inventions of Case Research Lab. The museum's first director, who oversaw the museum for 50 years, put the laboratory's contents into storage and converted the building into an art studio. The Case Research Lab sound studio was located on the second floor of the estate's carriage house and that was rented to the local model train club until the early 1990s. Fox was seriously injured in a July 1929 car accident, lost his company in 1930 when his loans were called in and lost the 1936 lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court against the film industry for violating the Tri-Ergon patents he owned. Sponable did little to establish the record of Case Research Lab inventions, other than his April 1947 article in ''The Journal of the SMPE''. Incredibly, it was also in 1947 that the Davis Loop Drive was first introduced to Western Electric licensees, including Twentieth Century-Fox (WECo RA-1231; and still made to this day by a successor company). Recently, Case Research Lab, the adjoining carriage house, and Case's home have been restored and research is ongoing with the collections of the lab that include all receipts, notebooks, correspondence, and much of the laboratory's original equipment, including the first recording device created to test the AEO light. In the collections are also letters from
Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
, an original copy of the Tri-Ergon patents, and an internal document from Fox Films written in the 1930s. This latter document says that once it became public knowledge that Sponable perfected the variable-area system of sound-on-film at the Fox Studios, that system became the standard and replaced the inventions of Case Research Lab. A number of films owned by Case Research Lab and Museum and restored by
George Eastman House The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as ''George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film'', the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in ...
in
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, are in the collections of both of those institutions. The Case Research Lab and Museum has additional sound-film footage of Theodore Case, and recently discovered copies of the same films at the Eastman House, are in a much higher state of preservation. Movietone News films are in the collections of 20th-Century Fox and the University of South Carolina at Columbia, including the only known footage of Earl I. Sponable talking. Sponable can also be seen in footage of the premiere of the film ''
The Robe ''The Robe'' is a 1942 historical novel about the Crucifixion of Jesus, written by Lloyd C. Douglas. The book was one of the best-selling titles of the 1940s. It entered the ''New York Times'' Best Seller list in October 1942, four weeks later ...
''. Phonofilms that were produced using Case Research Lab inventions are in the collections of the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
and the
British Film Institute The British Film Institute (BFI) is a film and television charitable organisation which promotes and preserves film-making and television in the United Kingdom. The BFI uses funds provided by the National Lottery to encourage film production, ...
. Variable density (VD) recording systems developed from Movietone gradually lost market share to variable area (VA) ones developed from Photophone from the 1940s onwards, a process that gathered pace as VA-related
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
s expired. Though both methods are theoretically capable of achieving similar standards of recording, duplication and reproduction, quality control in the lab proved to be far more critical in the duplication of VD tracks than VA ones: slight errors in printer light settings and sensitometry and densitometry control will affect the
signal-to-noise ratio Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in deci ...
far more on a VD track than on a VA one. For this reason
archives An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...
have tended to remaster original VD tracks to VA negatives for preservation and the creation of new prints.


See also

*
Phonofilm Phonofilm is an optical sound-on-film system developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the early 1920s. Introduction In 1919 and 1920, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patents on a sound-on-film proce ...
*
Vitaphone Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone was the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one th ...
*
RCA Photophone RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was an opt ...
*
Photokinema ''Photo-Kinema'' (some sources say ''Phono-Kinema'') was a sound-on-disc system for motion pictures invented by Orlando Kellum. 1921 introduction The system was first used for a small number of short films, mostly made in 1921. These films presen ...
*
Movietone News Movietone News is a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1986, in France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Australia and New Zealand until 197 ...
*
Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner (also known as Joseph T. Tykociner; 5 October 1877, in Włocławek, Congress Poland – 11 June 1969, in Urbana, Illinois, United States) was a Polish engineer and a pioneer of sound-on-film technology. In 1921 he bec ...
*
Eric Tigerstedt Eric Magnus Campbell Tigerstedt (August 14, 1887 – April 20, 1925) was one of the most significant inventors in Finland at the beginning of the 20th century and has been called the "Thomas Edison of Finland". He was a pioneer of sound-on- ...
*
Sound film A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before ...
*
Movie projector A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras. Mod ...
*
Sound-on-disc Sound-on-disc is a class of sound film processes using a phonograph or other disc to record or play back sound in sync with a motion picture. Early sound-on-disc systems used a mechanical interlock with the movie projector, while more recent syste ...
*
List of film formats This list of motion picture film formats catalogues formats developed for shooting or viewing motion pictures, ranging from the Chronophotographe format from 1888, to mid-20th century Film format, formats such as the 1953 CinemaScope format, to m ...


References

{{Reflist


External links


List of Early Sound Films 1894–1929 at Silent Era website
Film sound production Film and video technology History of film Motion picture film formats