Shortly after the development of the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing machine, Thomas Edison put his technicians, headed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to work to find a method for adding sound to the new motion picture using the Edison cylinder phonograph then being commercially produced. Early demonstrations were made in the 1890s, but much more development was required prior to the Kinetophone’s public unveiling, on February 17, 1913.

An area was set up in Edison’s New York motion picture studio in the Bronx for the filming and recording of Kinetophones. The film negatives and master sound cylinders were then shipped to Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey, facility for post-production work to prepare the films for exhibition. This included adding titles and a one-second synchronization mark of blank frames to the negative; making prints; re-recording a new master cylinder with additional amplification, and molding new release cylinders. American Kinetophone productions were directed by Allen Ramsay, with orchestral accompaniments (when needed) led by Eugene. A. Jaudas, musical director at Edison’s principal recording studio at 79 5th Avenue, in Manhattan, who conducted an orchestra, selected from Edison’s regular musicians, off-screen during the filming of Kinetophones.

The Edison Company made a decision to exhibit these films separately from the standard Edison Studio silent film productions, making them available to vaudeville houses as an act on the program. To that end, The American Talking Picture Company was formed to sell Kinetophone equipment and distribute the films and cylinders. Three Kinetophone films made up a program. These films would be mounted on a single reel, with 100 ft of black film spliced in between to allow the phonograph operator time to switch sound cylinders. 

The debut of the Kinetophone in New York was very successful. At least three films were presented: Edison Kinetophone (The Lecture), The Five Bachelors and The Edison Minstrels. Newspaper reports note that audiences gave the Kinetophone performance a 15-minute ovation and tried to get Mr. Edison to come out on stage, which he refused to do. Within a short amount of time, however, the complaints started. The main complaint was the lack of sound synchronization. Mechanical difficulties aside, the human element of needing two operators to man the film projector and phonograph often resulted in picture and sound being out of sync. The other complaint was with the sound: some patrons found it metallic-sounding and unpleasant. In viewing the films today, a third issue becomes apparent: the primitive shooting style. By 1913, film had already begun to develop its unique cinematic language of editing and shot composition. The Kinetophone, by virtue of its sound component, took all that away, creating six-minute “stage presentations”, in which the camera is static and there are no cuts.

The Edison Company filmed around 200 Kinetophones, both in the United States and in Europe, where, according to the Edison Company log, some 29 Kinetophones were made – mostly of operatic selections. None of the European films are known to survive, but a selection of the sound cylinders exists in the archive of the Swedish Radio Corporation and one cylinder bearing a Cyrillic title, which translates to “Ghosts”, is in a private collection. But, after the initial excitement of talking pictures, the popularity waned quickly. In a letter to Thomas Edison dated July 25, 1913, six months after the premiere, M. R. Hutchinson, the man in charge of the Kinetophone project wrote: “The public is interested in seeing Talking Pictures as a Novelty, once or twice, and then they want Longer Subjects and First Class Acting.” Within a year of release, and after the disastrous fire at the Edison plant on December 9, 1914, the Kinetophone system was quietly set aside. As for Kinetophone in Europe, a letter from C. H. Wilson, Edison’s vice president and general manager to Thomas Graf, manager of Edison’s Berlin office, discusses the closing of the Paris and Berlin Kinetophone offices due to a drop in business and the expansion of World War I. This letter is dated October 10, 1914 – almost two months, to the day, from the Edison Fire.

One interesting side note, found in an article by Jan Olsson in Film History (Olsson, 1999), is that an independent producer in Sweden set up a Kinetophone studio and produced a short run of film, which premiered in Stockholm in February of 1914. However, due to Edison’s decision to discontinue Kinetophone, causing a lack of materials and the ever-worsening situation with World War I, the Swedish concern was bankrupt and gone by 1916.