Towards a Single Support for Every Sound and Image: Oscillography and What Came After it - Text 4
The earliest work whose goal was manifestly to develop a system for the simultaneous recording of sounds and images was carried out by the Frenchmen Henri Joly and Eugène Laust who, separately, patented two methods for “recording sound while simultaneously recording movement with a kinematograph.”[9] For the moment, however, these were only patents. In addition, this was already as late as 1905 for Henri Joly (patent no. 361,373, filed on 13 April 1905, a phonographic recording system for light[10]) and 1906 for Eugène Laust (Lauste, Haines and Pletts, patent application no. 18,057, granted 10 August 1907, “A New and Improved Method or Means for Simultaneously Recording and Reproducing Movements and Sounds”).[11]
The sound film was developed in the 1910s and 20s, when many other patent applications were filed in succession: alongside the names mentioned above, we should add Haines and J. Saint-Vincent (patent application no. 18057, “Nouvelle méthode perfectionnée d’enregistrement et de reproduction simultanée des mouvements et des sons”); Lee De Forest, to whom we owe the invention in 1907 of the “Audion” lamp, which made it possible to amplify the sound signal; and the work of Theodore W. Case on photoelectric cells beginning in 1911, culminating in a patent application filed in 1917 (no. 1,309,181) on a new bismuth sulfide cell named “Thalofide.”
