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NOTES FROM THE FIELD
THE OLDEST TALKIE
A program of early motion-picture experiments includes a synchronized sound film from 1895
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
AS THOMAS HUNTington details elsewhere in this issue, three-dimensional movies experienced their first brief boom in the 1920s. Last fall the Museum of Modern Art’s film division showed a test reel made with that era’s Plastigram process, giving modern viewers a chance to experience 3-D just as those in 1921 did. Sure enough, the initial images of baseballs being thrown at the audience, a long line of marchers parting around the camera, and a whip uncoiling toward viewers’ eyes elicited moans, self-conscious shrieks, and nervous laughter. By the midpoint of the seven-minute reel, however, a pall had descended on the audience, and by the end it was distinctly torpid, showing that however much things may change, a novelty remains a novelty.
The same MoMA program brought to light a number of other early experiments in film technology. They included the oldestknown sound movie of black musicians, with Noble Sissle singing and Eubie Blake accompanying him at the piano in a 1923 test of Lee de Forest’s Phonofilm method, which most historians think was technically superior to Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone process. A series of test reels from the engineers Theodore Case and Earl Sponable, the inventors of a rival sound-on-film process, shows Case trying to explain his technology to a lay audience and doing about as good a job as most engineers do in that situation. In other Case-Sponable reels, a singer performs while holding a duck that quacks on cue, and a Chinese man in full Celestial costume strums a ukulele and sings “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.”
The leading attraction, however, was a 10-second film clip that would appear thoroughly insignificant to anyone who did not know its history. In it, a man is seen and heard playing a violin as two other men dance and a fourth one walks across the background. What makes the clip special is that it was shot in Thomas Edison’s laboratory in late 1894 or early 1895, making it the world’s oldest synchronized sound film by a good quartercentury. The violinist is most likely William K. L. Dickson, Edison’s chief motion-picture researcher.
The film clip, without sound, has been available to scholars for decades. Historians knew that a wax-cylinder recording had been made as the film was shot, but it was thought to have disappeared. In the mid-1990s, however, curators at the Edison National Historic Site, in West Orange, New Jersey, found and identified the cylinder, which had broken into several pieces. They reassembled it, played it, and made a digital recording of the sound. Then they sent the recording to Walter Murch, the most respected editor in Hollywood and the winner of three Academy Awards.
Murch cleaned up the sound, digitally compressed the film (which had been provided by the Library of Congress) to 30 frames per second from the 40 fps it was shot at, and carefully examined the movements of Dickson and the dancers to find synchronization points with the music. That done, it was a simple matter, using modern sound equipment, to stretch the soundtrack digitally so that it coincided with the film. The results are strikingly realistic. A voice can even be heard faintly at the beginning saying, “The rest of you fellows ready? Go ahead!”
The entire reel, including a printed introductory message, three showings of the Dickson clip, and credits, lasts only about a minute. And unlike the Plastigrams and other items on the program, it is not experienced today as it was by the original viewers, who were probably limited to Edison and his lab workers. It took 1990s technology to make the synchronization possible. Yet there is no escaping the fact that you are seeing and hearing images and sound that were recorded when Grover Cleveland was President. Even in our modern videosaturated culture, that’s a wondrous thing to contemplate.
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ALCHEMY GETS ITS DUE
A pair of books examine alchemy and chemistry from an artistic standpoint
DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER (1610-90), THE painter of Alchemist in His Workshop (1650), a portion of which is reproduced at right, made about 350 canvases of alchemical subjects during his long and rather specialized career. He was part of a flourishing tradition of such paintings, whose creators included such masters as Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Now the Chemical Heritage Foundation (www.chemheritage.org) has published Transmutations: Alchemy in Art, by Lawrence M. Principe and Lloyd DeWitt (40 pages, $25.00), a booklet that collects some of the best examples of alchemical painting and explains both the art and the science behind them. Another recent book, The Art of Chemistry: Myths, Medicines, and Materials, by Arthur Greenberg (Wiley, 345 pages, $59.95), explores how artists and scientists have depicted the principles, practitioners, and apparatus of chemistry—for purposes ranging from instruction to mysticism—from the Renaissance to the present day. Along with 180-plus pictures, Greenberg, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, gives an episodic and very idiosyncratic history of chemistry and related fields.
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WHY THE ARMADA ACCOMPLISHED NADA
Philip II wanted to give England and Spain a single ruler—but he should have done that for his ships
AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE METRIC system in our Fall 2002 issue mentioned the Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed to work properly because of a misunderstanding over whether metric or Anglo-American units were being used. Now archeological research has uncovered a much earlier failure caused by the lack of a standard measuring system, one that may have changed the course of history in a very important way.
In 1588 the mighty Spanish Armada sailed for England, planning to land troops and conquer the territory for the Spanish crown. The outnumbered Royal Navy’s stout resistance drove the Armada away, never to return, and for the next four centuries it was all downhill for Spain.
Why did the Armada, seemingly much superior to the English fleet, fail so ignominiously? Historians have attributed the defeat to unfavorable weather, superior English tactics, and poor planning by the Spanish. Now Colin Martin, an archeologist at the University of St. Andrew’s, in Scotland, has uncovered another reason.
In the April 2002 issue of British Archeology, Martin tells how artifacts recovered from the Spanish ships San Juan de Sicilia and La Trinidad Valencera exhibit an appalling, and ultimately fatal, lack of uniformity. He examined rulers and shot gauges, which were used to calculate the proper size and weight of projectiles for a gun’s bore, and found that “devices from both ships are inaccurate in random, different ways.”
Martin explains: “Unrelated weighing and measuring systems were used in different parts of Europe, and the Armada’s guns were a chaotic jumble of types and sizes obtained from many countries. The apparently simple process of matching shot to guns, and distributing the right sizes to each ship, seems to have broken down almost completely.” Many other factors were at work in the Armada’s defeat, but in view of this basic failure, it is unsurprising that “some of the ships which returned [to Spain] had fired less than 25 per cent of the ammunition issued to them.” If not for this fatal inconsistency, you could be reading this magazine in Spanish, a point to remember the next time someone questions the importance of establishing technical standards.
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