As reported by the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, on November 13, 1908, the Hepworth Manufacturing Company (HMC) held a demonstration at their central London sales office. The film they showed featured a series of dances performed by Miss de Forest Leonard, which had been recorded to a live musical accompaniment on set. The HMC pitch was that they would provide the sheet music with the film print so that any piano player, or orchestra, accompanying the film, could play the score in time with the dances (Anon., 1908).

The title of the film, and whether it was commercially shown, is unknown, but the significance of this experiment lies not in the idea of supplying sheet music, but rather in capturing a live performance responding to a musical recording played on set, then providing both picture and sound for projection purposes. Such was the basis of the Vivaphone, a system that was, by 1908, already in development at the Hepworth Studios in Walton-on-Thames and which represented Hepworth’s contribution to the series of contemporaneous experiments in synchronous sound films that included Will Barker’s Cinephone and the Gaumont Chronophone.

Invented by the HMC’s founder and director, Cecil Milton Hepworth, the Vivaphone was shown to the trade in February 1909 and launched in the spring of the same year. At the launch, around 20 Vivaphone films were available, with the number quickly expanding. According to the Hepworth actor Chrissie White, the company had what she called ‘Viv Days’ on which they would film several Vivaphone shorts. These usually happened when Hepworth was not at the studio and were overseen by two members of Hepworth’s stock company, Harry Buss and Hay Plumb. (White) Hepworth declared the Vivaphone to be, “easy to do and not worth doing … But I was overruled by the business interests … for out of it we made a great deal of money which was available for worthier purposes.” (Hepworth, 1951)

While Hepworth is referring to other film projects or inventions, one worthy purpose to which he did put the Vivaphone was in the political arena. In January 1910 a press show took place at London’s prestigious Theatre De Luxe in the Strand, at which the HMC demonstrated two films featuring politicians Andrew Bonar Law and Frederick Edwin Smith (later Lord Birkenhead), speaking in favour of tariff reform – an important political topic of the day. According to Hepworth, the two men first visited The Gramophone Company’s studios in Hayes, Middlesex (The Gramophone Company was later colloquially known in the UK by the name of its trademark “His Master’s Voice”, or HMV), to record their speeches onto a Vivaphone disc and then went to the Hepworth studios where they were filmed lip-synching to their own speeches. While these were made commercially available for hire, the films, produced in conjunction with the Daily Mail, were pieces of political propaganda aimed at meetings of the Liberal Unionist Party (which was in favour of tariff reform and opposed to free trade) in the run-up to the 1910 General Election (Hepworth, 1951).

While it was not necessarily the most commercially successful early sound system, the Vivaphone proved to be a popular attraction for exhibitors and audiences, between 1909 and its gradual demise during World War I, with many reports in the trade press of exhibitors adopting it for their shows. The relative cheapness of the system made it very attractive and the use of popular recordings could be crowd pleasing. In 1911, the Kine Weekly reported that over 100 venues in the UK had fitted the Vivaphone – and this grew to, potentially as many as, 500 by 1912 (Anon., 1911; Anon., 1935).

The Vivaphone also had some international success. In 1916 Picturegoer reported that a member of the Hepworth publicity team was told by some wounded Anzac soldiers that the Vivaphone was ‘extremely popular in Australia’ (Anon., 1916). Three years earlier, in January 1913, Albert Blinkhorn, an Englishman who had run a number of London cinemas, left for America to set up a US sales office for British films. Blinkhorn secured the rights to Hepworth’s invention for the US and Canada, and, in the spring of 1913, he gave a private exhibition of the system to the trade in New York City (Anon., 1913a). In August, by which time Blinkhorn’s company was called The Vivaphone Film and Sales Co and was the sales agent for all Hepworth films in the US and Canada, he travelled back to the UK to make a deal with Hepworth to start making his own Vivaphone films in America (Anon., 1913c). The London Evening News reported in May 1913 that, ‘Americans are taking to the English Vivaphone like a duck takes to water. They are clamouring for it all over the States.’ (Anon., 1913b)

There is no specific date as to when the Vivaphone died out, but between 1915 and 1916 the number of mentions in the trade press dropped off dramatically. There are many possible reasons for this. The technology was not infallible, and even if it were, the fact that, as noted in the Technology section below, the system relied upon the use of gramophone players in venues, rather than speakers, limited the amplification – this rendered the audibility of the recordings poor in the larger venues. More important, perhaps, was the status of the Vivaphone as a novelty. After five or six years, the novelty had most likely worn off, meaning either its presence simply wasn’t worth reporting any more, or that enthusiasm among audiences had waned and exhibitors stopped showing Vivaphone films. As Richard Abel and Rick Altman have suggested, the rise to prominence of synchronous sound systems in the years before World War I coincided with a representational shift in films away from attractions and novelty, towards longer, more-integrated narratives. (Abel & Altman 1999) Like many of its competitors, the attraction of the Vivaphone relied almost exclusively on the performers miming to popular recordings of the day and was limited by the length of the material that could be captured on a single disc. As cinema moved increasingly towards storytelling and feature films during the latter half of World War I, interest in the Vivaphone slowly ebbed away.