American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.

Sergei Eisenstein.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music century. Episode 274. Start talking and stop moving.

We've discussed motion pictures several times in the podcast, most recently, in episode 242.

Throughout these discussions, I've kept reminding you that films of this era were silent films.

You may well have wondered why silent films persisted as long as they did.

The technology of sound recording emerged in the late 19th century

at the same time as the technology of moving pictures,

yet it would take more than 30 years before these two technologies would combine

to create talking pictures.

There were three technical problems that needed to be overcome to make

talking pictures a reality. First, there was the problem of reproducing sound at a sufficient

volume. Early phonographs were mechanical devices, and they weren't very loud.

Only one or two people at a time could really listen to them.

This was okay for Thomas Edison's kinetoscope, which was a motion picture machine in a cabinet,

meant to be viewed by just one person at a time, and Edison did indeed experiment with adding sound to it,

creating what he called a kinetophone. But the future of motion pictures was in projecting them

onto a screen, to be viewed by dozens of people at a time, and later hundreds, and later still,

thousands. Playback of recorded sound just wasn't

loud enough to fill those kinds of spaces. This began to change with the advent of vacuum

tube amplification. By the 1920s, it was indeed possible to produce electronic sound loud enough to be heard in a packed theater.

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