Creating the Twentieth Century

by Vaclav Smil

  But if the Lumières’ apparatus was highly derivative, their promotion effort was very effective. Indeed, Sauvage (1985) saw it as the biggest stunt in the film history. In any case, by the mid-1890s the public interest was piqued by the Kinetoscope, and it was clear that the market was ready for a new commercial display of moving images. The first demonstration of the Cinématographe took place on March 22, 1895, in a lecture at the Societé d’Encouragement l’Industrie Nationale in Paris (CineFrance 2003). Three days before that, the brothers shot their first, 52-second movie, La sortie des usines, which showed workers passing through the front gate of the Lumière et fils factory in Lyon. During the subsequent months, they were preparing for the commercialization of their invention by making more short films and lecturing to select groups to generate widespread interest. The first public screening of 10 short clips they filmed between March and December 1895 was in the Salon Indien in the basement of the Grand Cafeé on the Boulevard des Capucines on December 28, 1895, and it was attended by 33 people.

  The show lasted only 20 minutes, and it consisted mainly of scenes of everyday Parisian life. By January 1896, up to 2,500 people a day were paying for the show, whose most impressive clip was L’arrivéee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, filmed in June 1895. This consisted of nothing else but a steam locomotive pulling carriages and moving diagonally across the screen as it approached the platform in a town on the Cote d’Azur, where the Lumières had a summer residence. Many spectators felt that the machine will leave the screen, and O’Brien (1995:34) rightly argued that this was

  an incomparable and unrepeatable shock effect that filmmakers have perennially, and with ever more difficulty, tried to emulate: the roller-coaster dynamics of Die Hard or Speed deploy a century’s worth of technological advances toward achieving the same visceral surprise that the Lumières accomplished less strenuously by planting a camera on the platform of La Ciotat Station as a train was arriving.

  London saw the first Lumière movies on February 20, 1896, New York on June 29, and by the end of summer shows took place in cities from Madrid to Helsinki. Cinématographe and Vitascope movies were incompatible, as the former used film with a single pair of round perforations for each frame, while the latter had two perforations. After a New York showing, some critics found that the Cinématographe produced clearer images with less vibration. The Lumières eventually made more than 1,500 films, each lasting about 50 seconds. A representative selection of 85 of Lumière vignettes is now available from Kino on Video (Kino International 2003), while the Library of Congress now has 341 early Edison motion pictures on its Inventing Entertainment website (LOC 1999).

  Movie shows eventually ceased to be dependent on saloons, theaters, and arcades as specialized movie theaters proliferated by the turn of the century (LOC 1999). By 1908 there were about 8,000 of these establishments in the United States (nickelodeons, usually for fewer than 200 people), and this created such a huge demand for new films that it could be satisfied only by imports, mainly from France, where by the end of 1906 at least one new film was finished every day, with Pathé-Frères studio in Vincennes being the leading producer. Georges Mélièes (1861-1938), a magician and theater impresario, became the first great innovator of cinematographic art (Conreur 1995). He pioneered narrative cinema, fantastic subjects, and science fiction, and he also developed such special effects as double exposure (in La caverne maudite in 1898), actors performing with themselves on a split screen (in Un homme de tête in the same year), and the dissolve (in Cendrillon in 1899).

  Among the technical innovations tried before WWI were wide screens (7075 mm film), which became popular only during the 1950s, and the first talking movies (Edison’s Kinetophone in 1913). The earliest short films included most of the subjects that became staples of 20th-century cinematography: mundane events, trivia, beauty, conflicts. And the Spanish-American War of 1898 was the first conflict whose preparations were shown on screen: actual armed engagements were reenacted in New Jersey using the National Guard troops. As the movies lengthened (to 5-10 minutes by 1905, and to about 15 minutes by 1910) storytelling became common. In 1906 the world’s first feature film (The Story of the Kelly Gang) that lasted more than one hour was not made either in France or in New York but in Australia by J. & N. Tait theatrical company (Vasey 1996).

  By the end of 1900s, a number of film companies opened their studios in the western suburb of Los Angeles, and within a decade these Hollywood newcomers dominated not only America’s but the world’s moviemaking (Gomery 1996). Their success broke up the power of the Motion Pictures Patents Co., a combination of leading U.S. and European equipment and moviemakers that was formed in order to charge inflated prices for cameras, projectors, and movies. But that short-lived monopoly group had at least one salutary effect: in 1909 it adopted 35-mm film as its standard-size stock (pélicule format standard), and a century later, after every aspect of moviemaking had changed drastically, the 35-mm film is still with us (Rogge 2003).

  Only historians of cinema are now aware of the trust’s brief existence, but every movie fan recognizes the name Paramount, the company that was established by Adolph Zukor in July 1912. And so the pattern of 20th-century Hollywood moviemaking was essentially set before WWI: use newspapers and pulp magazines, classical novels whose copyright had expired, and successful theatrical plays for suitable plots, integrate vertically all the activities from production to promotion, and go after foreign markets. Nearly a century later, they are still playing the same show, except that the potential for success and failure has been greatly magnified. And just one last notable pre-WWI movie event before I turn to sound: during his tour of the United States, Charlie Chaplin was eventually persuaded to join Mack Sennett’s independent Keystone Co. late in 1913.

  Reproducing Sound

  Invention of the first of the two distinct ways of reproducing sound—its conversion into electromagnetic waves, virtually instantaneous transmission across increasingly long distances, and reconversion to audible frequencies by the means of telephony—led in a matter of months to the success of the second method whereby words or music were stored ingeniously for later replay by the first of many possible recording techniques. The first invention, as already noted in chapter 1, is certainly the best-known instance of nearly simultaneous independent filing in the history of patenting: Alexander Graham Bell (18471922) of Salem, Massachusetts, filed his application for “transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically” on February 15, 1876, just two hours ahead of patent caveat submitted by Elisha Gray (1835-1901) of Chicago. The second invention, finalized just before the end of 1877, further increased Edison’s fame, built on his improved stock ticker and quadruplex telegraph, and only his demonstration of a complete system of practical incandescent light received a greater acclaim when it was unveiled two years later.

  And much as in the case of incandescent lights, or internal combustion engines, the appearance of practical telephony was preceded by several decades of interesting experiments and proposals. These developments failed to reach commercial stage but provided essential stepping stones toward an invention whose many socioeconomic impacts have not been dulled even more than 125 years later. The latest stage in the evolution of telephones—the worldwide diffusion of wireless devices whose latest models can also receive and transmit Internet messages and take and send digital images—has rejuvenated and reconfigured this now classic technique. As a result, telephones have become, once again, one of the most desirable personal possessions.

  The phonograph, despite Edison’s determined effort, was never a great commercial success, and it was gramophone, Emile Berliner’s most famous invention, which became the standard means of music and voice reproduction for most of the 20th century. Its dominance began to decline only during the 1960s with the introduction of compact audiocassettes (by Philips in 1963), and its nearly complete demise came with the introduction of compact discs in the early 1980s. Many gramophones are still around, but the entire field of recorded
sound is one of the best examples of how some key innovations of the pre-WWI period were transformed during the 20th century into new, and qualitatively superior, systems.

  Wireless transmission of sound and faithful reproduction of words and music at receiving points that were increasingly distant from transmitters rank among the most significant innovations of the Age of Synergy. Although regular radio broadcasts began to take place only during the early 1920s, all of the key components and procedures for widespread diffusion of wireless transmission were put in place before 1914. And it is a much less appreciated fact that the same was true as far as television was concerned: nearly all critical components for wireless transmission of images were either proposed or invented by 1912.

  Inventing Telephones

  The gestation period of devices that could successfully transmit human voice was less than half a century, a span shorter than the time that elapsed between the first failed trials of incandescent lights and Edison’s 1879 success. The first known rudimentary demonstration of telephony was a magic lyre that Charles Wheatsone (1802-1875) showed in 1831: when he connected two instruments by a rod of pine wood, a tune played on one was faithfully reproduced by the other. Wheatstone did not pursue the implications of this short-distance nonelectric telephony, but in 1837 he became famous as one of the co-inventors of the telegraph. The first possibility of electric telephony was noted in 1837 by Charles G. Page, who heard the sound produced by an electromagnet at the instant when the electric circuit is closed and described the phenomenon as Galvanic music (Gray 1890).

  The first explicit formulation of the idea of electric telephony came in 1854, when Charles Bourseul concluded that a flexible plate that would vibrate in response to the fluctuating air pressure generated by voice could be used to open and close an electric circuit and that the transmitted signals could be reproduced electromagnetically by a similar plate at the receiving end. Philip Reis was the first experimenter who tried to make the idea work (and who coined the term telephony). In an 1861 lecture to the Frankfurt Physical Society, he described an apparatus whose receiving electromagnet produced a sound of a pitch that corresponded to the frequency of on and off switchings.

  The quest was renewed by two Americans during the 1870s, by Alexander Graham Bell (figure 5.10), an amateur inventor, and Elisha Gray, a partner in the Western Electric Manufacturing Co. in Chicago. Bell and Gray eventually found about each other, and the Bell’s triumph was not a result of superior design, and fundamentally not even of luck in filing the patent application just hours ahead of Gray’s caveat, but of a very different perception of the importance of telephony (Hounshell 1981; Garcke 1911b; Gray 1890). Both inventors were initially motivated by coming up with a multiplex system for telegraphic transmissions: after decades of sending just one message in one direction at a time, a duplex system, introduced in 1872, effectively doubled the capacity of telegraphic networks, and multiplexing could multiply it even more dramatically and become one of the most lucrative inventions.

  FIGURE 5.10. Alexander Graham Bell and the key figure of his patent application for “improvement in telegraphy.” The photograph was taken in 1904 when Bell was 57 years old. The patent drawing is reproduced from Bell (1876b).

  Gray began by investigating the possibility of a telegraph wire carrying several frequencies; this musical telegraph could become a multiple transmitter, given a receiver that could segregate the individual tones. And if sending several tones at once, why not human voice? By 1874 reports on Gray’s experiments anticipated that once perfected the invention will do away with telegraph keys as the operators will simply talk over the wire. At the same time, there was a widespread skepticism about the usefulness of voice communication: after all, Reis’s experiments led nowhere, and Gray’s own patent attorney believed that telephony would be just a toy. In the summer of 1874 Gray demonstrated one practical result of his work, a keyboard device with single-tone transmitters that covered an octave range, but subsequently he concentrated on developing the phenomenon into a multiplex telegraph.

  Meanwhile, Bell was pursuing the same goal, approaching the task from an acoustical point of view: his appreciation of speech properties came from his father, a professor of elocution and a creator of a system for teaching the deaf. After he learned about Gray’s work, in the spring of 1874, he was able to get financial support from Gardiner G. Hubbard, whose deaf daughter he was tutoring, and by July of 1875 he was able to transmit sounds by shouting into the diaphragm of the transmitter (Rhodes 1929; Bruce 1973). This caused the attached reed to vibrate and generate weak currents in the transmitting electromagnet, which were then reproduced by the receiving diaphragm. Gray, still pursuing his multiplex goal, finally decided to file at least a caveat, the formal notice of telephone’s basic concept: he did so on February 14, 1876, and was preceded by just two hours by Bell’s full patent application. Comparison of the two concepts, both using a liquid transmitter, shows how nearly identical they were (figure 5.11).

  But there was no immediate legal contest: as soon as Gray learned that Bell anticipated him by just hours, he agreed with his attorney and with his financial sponsor against going ahead with an immediate filing of a patent and contesting Bell’s claim. Less than a month after the patent filing, and on the evening of the day when the first sentences were exchanged telephonically between Bell and Watson, exultant Bell wrote to his father: “I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem—and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas—and friends converse with each other without leaving home” (Bell 1876a:3).

  Bell’s specification for “improvement in telegraphy” described “undulatory currents” that are produced “by gradually increasing and diminishing the resistance of the circuit” and that, unlike the intermittent ones, can transmit simultaneously a much larger number of signals and hence can be used to construct an apparatus for “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically” (Bell 1876b). The last of seven figures of Bell’s patent application sketched the simple operating principle of such a device (figure 5.10):

  FIGURE 5.11. Comparison of Gray’s (top) and Bell’s concepts of the telephone shows two near-identical designs with liquid-bath transmitters. Gray’s sketch was done on February 11, 1876; Bell’s on March 9, 1876, more than three weeks after the two men filed their patent applications. Reproduced from Hounshell (1981).

  The armature c is fastened loosely by an extremity to the uncovered leg d of the electro-magnet b, and its other extremity is attached to the center of a stretched membrane, a. A cone, A, is used to converge sound-vibrations upon the membrane. When a sound is uttered in the cone the membrane a is set in vibration, the armature c is forced to partake of the motion, and thus electrical undulations are created upon the circuit A b e f g… The undulatory current passing through the electromagnet f influences its armature h to copy the motion of the armature c. A similar sound to that uttered into A is then heard to proceed from L. (Bell 1876b:3)

  You could build your own basic telephone following these simple instructions—but it would be a very primitive electromechanical device. You would have to shout into it, and a single apparatus at each end would have the double duty of both transmitter and receiver. Still, this great novelty got enthusiastic reception at the 1876 Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia, and a few months later Bell was demonstrating an improved design (see the frontispiece to this chapter). But it was Edison, rather than Bell, who came up with the first practical transmitter. Edison’s involvement began after the Western Union had second thoughts about entering into the telephone business once it saw the attention Bell’s device got in Philadelphia. Initially, this leader of telegraph industry declined to invest in a new form of telecommunication and rejected Bell’s offer to sell his patents to the company and thus to get the telephone monopoly. Once Western Union reconsidered its telephone policy, it turned to Edison to come up with a commercial device (Josephson 1959).

 
; Belatedly, Edison, who built himself a replica of Reis’s device in 1875, reentered the field of telephony. After several months of intensive experimentation (in which he was greatly disadvantaged due to his poor hearing), he was able to replace Bell’s liquid transmitter by a superior variable-resistance carbon device, essentially a microphone controlled by the received sound as the vibration of a diaphragm modulated an externally supplied electric current. This was achieved by changing the resistance of carbon granules enclosed in a small button due to the changing pressure applied by a plunger attached to the diaphragm (figure 5.12). This design produced much higher volume of sound and with sharper articulation than did Bell’s primitive device; a caller could thus speak into what was essentially a microphone while listening at the same time through the receiver.

  FIGURE 5.12. Edison filed his application for speaking telegraph on April 27, 1877, but it was granted only on May 3, 1892. The illustration shows transmitter (top) and receiver. Resonators are marked A and B, sheet metal diaphragms c and d; clamping rings (e and f) and tightening screws (g) keep the diaphragms tensioned; the disk n, made of conducting material, was placed in front of the transmitter diagram, and the electromagnet o in front of the receiver diaphragm.