Eugène Augustin Lauste (1857–1935) worked, from the early 1900s to the end of his life, on a series of experiments using both variable-area and variable-density to create some of the first sound-on-film with synchronized picture recordings.

Lauste claims that he first had the idea to record sound photographically in 1888, after reading an account in the Scientific American Supplement (May 21, 1881) of the invention of the Photophone by Alexander Graham Bell and Sumner Tainter. Lauste’s reasoning was that “if sound could be transmitted through space by means of radiant energy these electrical sound waves could also be recorded photographically and reproduced, using the selenium cell in the same manner as Dr. Bell had used it.” (Crawford, 1932) The French-born Lauste was at that time working as an electrician for Edison in New Jersey and claims that he kept his experiments secret for fear of being ridiculed, which makes it difficult to verify his statement.

It seems that Lauste devoted an increasing amount of time to his experimentations in sound recording from 1900 onwards, after having successfully worked for Edison and the Lathams and, subsequently, with William Kennedy Laurie Dickson at the British and French Mutoscope & Biograph companies in London and Paris. From 1903, Lauste worked as an independent engineer and inventor, first from W. K. L. Dickson’s research laboratory in London, then setting up his own laboratory in Brixton, South London, supported by a succession of investors (Spehr, 1999). In 1905, Lauste secured his first investment and filed an application with the British Patent Office in 1906, which was granted to him in 1907. The patent, titled “A new and improved Method of and Means for Simultaneously Recording and Reproducing Movements and Sounds”, records Lauste and his financial backers, Robert Haines (an Australian contact of Dickson) and a British engineer John St. Vincent Pletts, as the inventors. Lauste, however, later claimed that he was the sole inventor.

1908 was an important year for Lauste, as he moved from Dickson’s laboratory to set up his own in Brixton, secured investments from Mr. George W. Jones, then general manager of the London Cinematograph Company – and visited German engineer Ernst Ruhmer in Berlin for the first time, with whom he had entertained a long correspondence. He returned to London with Ruhmer’s Photographophone and acquired an alternative selenium cell, manufactured by Bidwell in England, to study. Interestingly, both Lauste and Ruhmer were convinced that the other’s invention would never work for motion pictures. Lauste thought that Ruhmer’s ‘singing arc’ was not suitable for recording talking pictures, while Ruhmer thought that Lauste’s mechanical-grate light valves couldn’t work – the induced vibrations being too slow to record sound accurately (Crawford 1932).

By 1910 Lauste had almost abandoned his experiments, but then had the idea of experimenting with a string galvanometer in the building of an electro diamagnetic recorder. The exact chronology of Lauste’s inventions from 1910 to 1913 is difficult to establish, but it seems that these were his most successful years and he was able to secure new investment to develop his Sound and Scene camera, thanks to the diamagnetic method. By 1913, Lauste’s system was working to his satisfaction, and he now set his sights on solving his last issue – finding an adequate sound-amplification system, the only way to make his technology commercially viable. Unfortunately, the arrival of World War I in Europe put a stop to his experiments. The Lauste family moved to the United States in 1916, where he was hoping to secure new investors, but he was ultimately not successful.

Between 1920 and 1930, Lauste met Merrit Crawford and Francis Doublier in New Jersey who, he discovered, shared his passion for film history and technology. Lauste was, by then, then running a boarding house in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Merrit Crawford published several articles on Lauste’s work and pushed Bell Laboratories to purchase Lauste’s technologies, patents and apparatus (which he partially reconstructed for preservation). Bell later donated the Lauste collection to the Smithsonian. Francis Doublier recorded several home movies with Lauste, his wife Méline Lauste, Louise Doublier and Merrit Crawford, shortly before Lauste’s death in 1935. Seemingly, Lauste also entrusted Doublier with some of his test films, which are now held as part of the Francis Doublier collection at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (Auclair, 2023). A preservation of these experiments, in addition to closer study of Lauste’s apparatus preserved at the Smithonian, could teach us more about the technological breakthroughs Lauste achieved that contributed so much to the invention of sound cinema.