Pallophotophone - Engineering the talkies.

Back in 1927, sound recorded on film was a big new thing. It eliminated sync problems during movie playback, since both sound and picture were run on the same machine. Here's an article from the May 1927 issue of Popular Science Monthly, after the first public demonstration of the new technology. Of the two sound-on-film recording techniques (Fox/Western Electric and RCA Photophone), the invention of C.A. Hoxie, reported here, was to become the dominant technology in the industry. To hear the machine described, it's kind of a freaky achievement for 1927. Apparently, people were smarter than we generally give them credit for.

If this isn't interesting to you, then you may want to come back tomorrow, when there'll maybe be some jokes or something.

The P.A.G! Images and Scanning Them Team apologizes for the visible binding in the left side of the image. Instead of cutting out the pages out of the magazine for a super clean scan, it was scanned intact, in accordance with our catch-and-release policy of sustainable magazine imaging.

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