Syracuse, New York
Syracuse is a city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States. It is the fifth-most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo and Yonkers. At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,252, its metropolitan area had a population of 662,577, it is the economic and educational hub of Central New York, a region with over one million inhabitants. Syracuse is well-provided with convention sites, with a downtown convention complex. Syracuse was named after the classical Greek city Syracuse, a city on the eastern coast of the Italian island of Sicily; the city has functioned as a major crossroads over the last two centuries, first between the Erie Canal and its branch canals of the railway network. Today, Syracuse is at the intersection of Interstates 81 and 90, its airport is the largest in the region. Syracuse is home to Syracuse University, a major research university, as well as Le Moyne College, a nationally recognized liberal arts college. In 2010, Forbes rated Syracuse fourth among the top 10 places in the U.
S. to raise a family. French missionaries were the first Europeans to come to this area, arriving to work with the Native Americans in the 1600s. At the invitation of the Onondaga Nation, one of the five nations of the Iroquois confederacy, a group of Jesuit priests and coureurs des bois set up a mission, known as Sainte Marie among the Iroquois, or Ste. Marie de Gannentaha, on the northeast shore of Onondaga Lake. Jesuit missionaries reported salty brine springs around the southern end of what they referred to as "Salt Lake", known today as Onondaga Lake in honor of the historic tribe. French fur traders established trade throughout the New York area among the Iroquois. Dutch and English colonists were traders, the English nominally claimed the area, from their upstate base at Albany. During the American Revolutionary War, the decentralized Iroquois divided into groups and bands that supported the British, two tribes that supported the American-born rebels, or patriots. Settlers came into central and western New York from eastern parts of the state and New England after the American Revolutionary War and various treaties with and land sales by Native American tribes.
The subsequent designation of this area by the state of New York as the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation provided the basis for commercial salt production. Such production took place from the late 1700s through the early 1900s. Brine from wells that tapped into halite beds in the Salina shale near Tully, New York, 15 miles south of the city, were developed in the 19th century, it is the north-flowing brine from Tully, the source of salt for the "salty springs" found along the shoreline of Onondaga Lake. The rapid development of this industry in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the nicknaming of this area as "The Salt City"; the original settlement of Syracuse was a conglomeration of several small towns and villages, was not recognized with a post office by the United States Government. Establishing the post office was delayed because the settlement did not have a name. Joshua Forman wanted to name Corinth; when John Wilkinson applied for a post office in that name in 1820, it was denied because the same name was in use in Saratoga County, New York.
Having read a poetical description of Syracuse, Wilkinson saw similarities to the lake and salt springs of this area, which had both "salt and fresh water mingling together". On February 4, 1820, Wilkinson proposed the name "Syracuse" to a group of fellow townsmen; the first Solvay Process Company plant in the United States was erected on the southwestern shore of Onondaga Lake in 1884. The village was called Solvay to commemorate Ernest Solvay. In 1861, he developed the ammonia-soda process for the manufacture of soda ash from brine wells dug in the southern end of Tully valley and limestone; the process was an improvement over the earlier Leblanc process. The Syracuse Solvay plant was the incubator for a large chemical industry complex owned by Allied Signal in Syracuse. While this industry stimulated development and provided many jobs in Syracuse, it left Onondaga Lake as the most polluted in the nation; the salt industry declined after the Civil War. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, numerous businesses and stores were established, including the Franklin Automobile Company, which produced the first air-cooled engine in the world.
The Geneva Medical College was founded in 1834. It is now known as Upstate Medical University, one of four medical colleges in the State University of New York system, one of only five medical schools in the state north of New York City. On March 24, 1870, Syracuse University was founded; the State of New York granted the new university its own charter, independent of Genesee College, which had unsuccessfully tried to move to Syracuse the year before. The university was founded as coeducational. President Peck stated at the opening ceremonies, "The conditions of admission shall be equal to all persons... There shall be no invidious discrimination here against woman.... Brains and heart shall have a fair chance... Syracuse attracted a high proportion of women students. In the College of Liberal Arts, the ratio between
Rochester, New York
Rochester is a city on the southern shore of Lake Ontario in western New York. With a population of 208,046 residents, Rochester is the seat of Monroe County and the third most populous city in New York state, after New York City and Buffalo; the metropolitan area has a population of just over 1 million people. It is about 73 miles east of Buffalo and 87 miles west of Syracuse. Rochester was one of America's first boomtowns due to the fertile Genesee River Valley, which gave rise to numerous flour mills, as a manufacturing hub. Several of the region's universities have renowned research programs. Rochester is the site of many important innovations in consumer products; the Rochester area has been the birthplace to Kodak, Western Union, French's, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox, which conduct extensive research and manufacturing of industrial and consumer products. Until 2010, the Rochester metropolitan area was the second-largest regional economy in New York State, after the New York City metropolitan area.
Rochester's GMP has since ranked just below Buffalo, New York, while exceeding it in per-capita income. The 25th edition of the Places Rated Almanac rated Rochester as the "most livable city" in 2007, among 379 U. S. metropolitan areas. In 2010 Forbes rated Rochester as the third-best place to raise a family in the United States. In 2012 Kiplinger rated Rochester as the fifth-best city in the United States for families, citing low cost of living, top public schools, a low jobless rate. Rochester is a Global city with Sufficiency status; the Seneca tribe of Native Americans lived in and around Rochester until they lost their claim to most of this land in the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797. Settlement before the Seneca tribe is unknown. Development of Rochester followed the American Revolution, forced cession of their territory by the Iroquois after the defeat of Great Britain. Allied with the British, four major Iroquois tribes were forced out of New York; as a reward for their loyalty to the British Crown, they were given a large land grant on the Grand River in Canada.
Rochester was founded shortly after the American Revolution by a wave of English-Puritan descended immigrants from New England who were looking for new agricultural land. They would be the dominant cultural group in Rochester for over a century. On November 8, 1803, Col. Nathaniel Rochester, Maj. Charles Carroll, Col. William Fitzhugh, Jr. all of Hagerstown, purchased a 100-acre tract from the state in Western New York along the Genesee River. They chose the site because its three cataracts on the Genesee offered great potential for water power. Beginning in 1811, with a population of 15, the three founders surveyed the land and laid out streets and tracts. In 1817, the Brown brothers and other landowners joined their lands with the Hundred Acre Tract to form the village of Rochesterville. By 1821, Rochesterville was the seat of Monroe County. In 1823, Rochesterville consisted of 1,012 acres and 2,500 residents, the Village of Rochesterville became known as Rochester. In 1823, the Erie Canal aqueduct over the Genesee River was completed, the Erie Canal east to the Hudson River was opened.
In the early 20th century, after the advent of railroads, the presence of the canal in the center city was an obstacle. By 1830, Rochester's population was 9,200 and in 1834, it was re-chartered as a city. Rochester was first known as "the Young Lion of the West", as the "Flour City". By 1838, Rochester was the largest flour-producing city in the United States. Having doubled its population in only 10 years, Rochester became America's first "boomtown". In 1830-31, Rochester experienced one of the nation's biggest Protestant revivalist movements, led by Charles Finney; the revival has been noted as inspiring other revivals of the Second Great Awakening. A leading pastor in New York, converted in the Rochester meetings gave the following account of the effects of Finney's meetings in that city: "The whole community was stirred. Religion was the topic of conversation in the house, in the office and on the street; the only theater in the city was converted into a livery stable. Grog shops were closed.
Nurseries ringed the city, the most famous of, started in 1840 by immigrants Georg Ellwanger from Germany and Patrick Barry from Ireland. In 1847, Frederick Douglass founded the abolitionist newspaper The North Star in Rochester. Douglass, a former slave and an antislavery speaker and writer, gained a circulation of over 4,000 readers in the United States and the Caribbean; the North Star served as a forum for abolitionist views. The Douglass home burnt down in 1872, but a marker for it is found in Highland Park off South Avenue. Susan B. Anthony, a national leader of the women's suffrage movement, was from Rochester; the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guaranteed the right of women to vote in 1920, was known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because of her work toward its passage, which she did not live to see. Anthony's home is a National Historic Landmark known as the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House. At the end of the 19th century, anarchi
Movie projector
A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras; the first movie projector was the Zoopraxiscope, invented by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion; the stop-motion images were painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892–94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically colored by hand. Kazimierz Prószyński, born in Warsaw, was a Polish inventor active in the field of cinema, he patented his first film camera, called Pleograph, before the Lumière brothers, went on to improve the cinema projector for the Gaumont company, as well as invent the used hand-held Aeroscope camera. A more sophisticated movie projector was invented by Frenchman Louis Le Prince while working in Leeds.
In 1888 Le Prince took out a patent for a 16-lens device that combined a motion picture camera with a projector. In 1888, he used an updated version of his camera to film the first motion picture, the Roundhay Garden Scene; the pictures were exhibited in Hunslet. The Lumière brothers invented the first successful movie projector, they made their first film, Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon, in 1894, publicly screened at L'Eden, La Ciotat a year later. The first commercial, public screening of cinematographic films happened in Paris on 28 December 1895; the cinematograph was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. At the Exhibition, films made by the Lumière Brothers were projected onto a large screen measuring 16 by 21 meters. In 1999, digital cinema projectors were being tried out in some movie theatres; these early projectors played the movie stored on a computer, sent to the projector electronically. Due to their low resolution compared to digital cinema systems, the images at the time had visible pixels.
By 2006, the advent of much higher 4K resolution digital projection reduced pixel visibility. The systems became more compact over time. By 2009, movie theatres started replacing film projectors with digital projectors. In 2013, it was estimated that 92% of movie theatres in the United States had converted to digital, with 8% still playing film. In 2015, numerous popular filmmakers—including Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan—lobbied large studios to commit to purchase a minimum amount of 35 mm film from Kodak; the decision ensured. Although more expensive than film projectors, high-resolution digital projectors offer many advantages over traditional film units. For example, digital projectors contain no moving parts except fans, can be operated remotely, are compact and have no film to break, scratch or change reels of, they allow for much easier, less expensive, more reliable storage and distribution of content. All-electronic distribution eliminates all physical media shipments. There is the ability to display live broadcasts in theaters so equipped.
In 1912 Max Wertheimer discovered the phi phenomenon. In each the brain constitutes an experience of apparent movement when presented with a sequence of near-identical still images; this theory is said to account for the illusion of motion which results when a series of film images is displayed in quick succession, rather than the perception of the individual frames in the series. Persistence of vision should be compared with the related phenomena of beta movement and phi movement. A critical part of understanding these visual perception phenomena is that the eye is not a camera, i.e.: there is no frame rate for the human eye or brain. Instead, the eye/brain system has a combination of motion detectors, detail detectors and pattern detectors, the outputs of all of which are combined to create the visual experience; the frequency at which flicker becomes invisible is called the flicker fusion threshold, is dependent on the level of illumination. The frame rate of 16 frames per second is regarded as the lowest frequency at which continuous motion is perceived by humans.
This threshold varies across different species. Because the eye and brain have no fixed capture rate, this is an elastic limit, so different viewers can be more or less sensitive in perceiving frame rates, it is possible to view the black space between frames and the passing of the shutter by blinking ones eyes at a certain rate. If done fast enough, the viewer will be able to randomly "trap" the image between frames, or during shutter motion; this will not work with cathode ray tube displays due to the persistence of the phosphors nor with LCD or DLP light projectors because they refresh the image with no blackout intervals as with film projectors. Silent films were not projected at constant speeds, but rather were varied throughout the show at the discretion of the projectionist with some notes provided by the distributor; this was more a function of hand-cranked projectors than the silence. When the electric motor supplanted hand cranking in both movie cameras and projectors, a more uniform frame rate became possible.
Speeds ranged from about 18 frame/s on up - sometimes faster than modern sound film speed. 16 frame/s - though sometimes used as a camera shooting speed - was inadvisable for projection, due to the high risk of the nitrate-base pri
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a film and charitable organisation which promotes and preserves filmmaking and television in the United Kingdom. It was established by Royal Charter to: Encourage the development of the arts of film and the moving image throughout the United Kingdom, to promote their use as a record of contemporary life and manners, to promote education about film and the moving image and their impact on society, to promote access to and appreciation of the widest possible range of British and world cinema and to establish, care for and develop collections reflecting the moving image history and heritage of the United Kingdom; the BFI maintains the world's largest film archive, the BFI National Archive called National Film Library, National Film Archive, National Film and Television Archive. The archive contains more than 50,000 fiction films, over 100,000 non-fiction titles, around 625,000 television programmes; the majority of the collection is British material but it features internationally significant holdings from around the world.
The Archive collects films which feature key British actors and the work of British directors. The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and London IMAX cinema, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London; the IMAX has the largest cinema screen in the UK and shows popular recent releases and short films showcasing its technology, which includes 3D screenings and 11,600 watts of digital surround sound. BFI Southbank shows films from all over the world critically acclaimed historical & specialised films that may not otherwise get a cinema showing; the BFI distributes archival and cultural cinema to other venues – each year to more than 800 venues all across the UK, as well as to a substantial number of overseas venues. The BFI offers a range of education initiatives, in particular to support the teaching of film and media studies in schools. In late 2012, the BFI received money from the Department For Education to create the BFI Film Academy Network; the BFI runs the annual London Film Festival along with BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival and the youth-orientated Future Film Festival.
The BFI publishes the monthly Sound magazine as well as films on Blu-ray, DVD and books. It runs the BFI National Library, maintains the BFI Film & TV Database and Summary of Information on Film and Television, which are databases of credits and other information about film and television productions. SIFT has a collection of about 7 million still frames from television; the BFI has co-produced a number of television series featuring footage from the BFI National Archive, in partnership with the BBC, including The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon, The Lost World of Friese-Greene, The Lost World of Tibet. The institute was founded in 1933. Despite its foundation resulting from a recommendation in a report on Film in National Life, at that time the institute was a private company, though it has received public money throughout its history—from the Privy Council and Treasury until 1965 and the various culture departments since then; the institute was restructured following the Radcliffe Report of 1948 which recommended that it should concentrate on developing the appreciation of filmic art, rather than creating film itself.
Thus control of educational film production passed to the National Committee for Visual Aids in Education and the British Film Academy assumed control for promoting production. From 1952–2000, the BFI provided funding for new and experimental filmmakers via the BFI Production Board; the institute received a Royal Charter in 1983. This was updated in 2000, in the same year the newly established UK Film Council took responsibility for providing the BFI's annual grant-in-aid; as an independent registered charity, the BFI is regulated by the Charity Commission and the Privy Council. In 1988, the BFI opened the London Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank. MOMI was acclaimed internationally and set new standards for education through entertainment, but subsequently it did not receive the high levels of continuing investment that might have enabled it to keep pace with technological developments and ever-rising audience expectations; the Museum was "temporarily" closed in 1999. This did not happen, MOMI's closure became permanent in 2002 when it was decided to redevelop the South Bank site.
This redevelopment was itself further delayed. The BFI is managed on a day-to-day basis by its chief executive, Amanda Nevill. Supreme decision-making authority rests with a board of up to 14 governors; the current chair is Josh Berger, who took up the post in February 2016. He succeeded Greg Dyke, who took office on 1 March 2008. Dyke succeeded the late Anthony Minghella, chair from 2003 until 31 December 2007; the chair of the board is appointed by the BFI's own Board of Governors but requires the consent of the Secretary of State for Culture and Sport. Other Governors are co-opted by existing board members; the BFI operates with three sources of income. The largest is public money allocated by the Department for Culture and Sport. In 2011–12, this funding amounted to £20m; the second largest source is commercial activity such as receipts from ticket sales at BFI Southbank or the BFI London IMAX theatre, sales of DVDs, etc. Thirdly and sponsorship of around £5m
Digital cinema
Digital cinema refers to the use of digital technology to distribute or project motion pictures as opposed to the historical use of reels of motion picture film, such as 35 mm film. Whereas film reels have to be shipped to movie theaters, a digital movie can be distributed to cinemas in a number of ways: over the Internet or dedicated satellite links, or by sending hard drives or optical discs such as Blu-ray discs. Digital movies are projected using a digital video projector instead of a film projector. Digital cinema is distinct from high-definition television and does not use traditional television or other traditional high-definition video standards, aspect ratios, or frame rates. In digital cinema, resolutions are represented by the horizontal pixel count 2K or 4K; as digital-cinema technology improved in the early 2010s, most of the theaters across the world converted to digital video projection. Digital media playback of high-resolution 2K files has at least a 20-year history. Early video data storage units fed custom frame buffer systems with large memories.
In early digital video units, content was restricted to several minutes of material. Transfer of content between remote locations had limited capacity, it was not until the late 1990s that feature-length films could be sent over the "wire". On October 23, 1998, Digital Light Processing projector technology was publicly demonstrated with the release of The Last Broadcast, the first feature-length movie, shot and distributed digitally. In conjunction with Texas Instruments, the movie was publicly demonstrated in five theaters across the United States. In the United States, on June 18, 1999, Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema projector technology was publicly demonstrated on two screens in Los Angeles and New York for the release of Lucasfilm's Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In Europe, on February 2, 2000, Texas Instruments' DLP Cinema projector technology was publicly demonstrated, by Philippe Binant, on one screen in Paris for the release of Toy Story 2. On January 19, 2000, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, in the United States, initiated the first standards group dedicated towards developing digital cinema.
By December 2000, there were 15 digital cinema screens in the United States and Canada, 11 in Western Europe, 4 in Asia, 1 in South America. Digital Cinema Initiatives was formed in March 2002 as a joint project of many motion picture studios to develop a system specification for digital cinema. In April 2004, in cooperation with the American Society of Cinematographers, DCI created standard evaluation material for testing of 2K and 4K playback and compression technologies. DCI selected JPEG2000 as the basis for the compression in the system the same year. In China, in June 2005, an e-cinema system called "dMs" was established and was used in over 15,000 screens spread across China's 30 provinces. DMs estimated that the system would expand to 40,000 screens in 2009. In 2005 the UK Film Council Digital Screen Network launched in the UK by Arts Alliance Media creating a chain of 250 2K digital cinema systems; the roll-out was completed in 2006. This was the first mass roll-out in Europe. AccessIT/Christie Digital started a roll-out in the United States and Canada.
By mid 2006, about 400 theaters were equipped with 2K digital projectors with the number increasing every month. Several digital 3D films surfaced in 2006 and several prominent filmmakers committed to making their next productions in stereo 3D. VUE West End was one of the first 3D digital cinemas along with Odeon Printworks Manchester and VUE Cheshire Oaks with the RealD equipment installed. All sites supported at the time by Arts Alliance Media. In August 2006, the Malayalam digital movie Moonnamathoral, produced by Benzy Martin, was distributed via satellite to cinemas, thus becoming the first Indian digital cinema; this was done by Emil and Eric Digital Films, a company based at Thrissur using the end-to-end digital cinema system developed by Singapore-based DG2L Technologies. In January 2007, Guru became the first Indian movie mastered in the DCI-compliant Jpeg2000 Interop format and the first Indian film to be previewed digitally, internationally, at the Elgin Winter Garden in Toronto; this film was digitally mastered at Real Image Media Technologies in India.
In 2007, the UK became home to Europe's first DCI-compliant digital multiplex cinemas. By March 2007, with the release of Disney's Meet the Robinsons, about 600 screens had been equipped with digital projectors. In June 2007, Arts Alliance Media announced the first European commercial digital cinema Virtual Print Fee agreements. In March 2009 AMC Theatres announced that it closed a $315 million deal with Sony to replace all of its movie projectors with 4K digital projectors starting in the second quarter of 2009. In January 2011, the total number of digital screens worldwide was 36,242, up from 16,339 at end 2009 or a growth rate of 121.8 percent during the year. There were 10,083 d-screens in Europe as a whole, 16,522 in the United States and Canada and 7,703 in Asia. Worldwide progress was slower as in some territories Latin America and Africa; as of 31 M
Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company that served as the primary supplier to AT&T from 1881 to 1996, to the local Bell Operating Companies until 1984. The company was responsible for many technological innovations and seminal developments in industrial management, it served as the purchasing agent for the member companies of the Bell System. In 1856, George Shawk purchased an electrical engineering business in Ohio. On December 31, 1869, he became partners with Enos M. Barton and the same year, sold his share to inventor Elisha Gray. In 1872 Barton, Gray moved the business to Clinton Street, Chicago and incorporated it as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, they manufactured a variety of electrical products including typewriters and lighting and had a close relationship with telegraph company Western Union, to whom they supplied relays and other equipment. In 1875, Gray sold his interests to Western Union, including the caveat that he had filed against Alexander Graham Bell's patent application for the telephone.
The ensuing legal battle between Western Union and the Bell Telephone Company over patent rights ended in 1879 with Western Union withdrawing from the telephone market and Bell acquiring Western Electric in 1881. Western Electric was the first company to join in a Japanese joint venture with foreign capital. In 1899, it invested in a 54 % share of Ltd.. Western Electric's representative in Japan was Walter Tenney Carleton. In 1901, Western Electric secretly purchased a controlling interest in a principal competitor, the Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company, but in 1909 was forced by a lawsuit to sell back to Milo Kellogg. On July 24, 1915, employees of the Hawthorne Works boarded the SS Eastland in downtown Chicago for a company picnic; the ship rolled over at the dock and over 800 people died. In 1920, Alice Heacock Seidel was the first of Western Electric's female employees to be given permission to stay on after she had married; this set a precedent in the company, which had not allowed married women in their employ.
Miss Heacock had worked for Western Electric for sixteen years before her marriage, was at the time the highest-paid secretary in the company. In her memoirs, she wrote that the decision to allow her to stay on "required a meeting of the top executives to decide whether I might remain with the Company, for it established a precedent and a new policy for the Company - that of married women in their employ. If the women at the top were permitted to remain after marriage all women would expect the same privilege. How far and how fast the policy was expanded is shown by the fact that a few years women were given maternity leaves with no loss of time on their service records."In 1925, ITT purchased the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company of Brussels and other worldwide subsidiaries from AT&T, to avoid an antitrust action. The company manufactured rotary system switching equipment under the Western Electric brand. Early on, Western Electric managed an electrical equipment distribution business, furnishing its customers with non-telephone products made by other manufacturers.
This electrical distribution business was spun off from Western Electric in 1925 and organized into a separate company, Graybar Electric Company, in honor of the company's founders, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton. Bell Telephone Laboratories was half-owned by Western Electric, the other half belonging to AT&T. Western Electric used various logos during its existence. Starting in 1914 it used an image of AT&T's statue Spirit of Communication. In 1915, the assets of Western Electric Manufacturing were transferred to a newly incorporated company in New York, New York named Western Electric Company, Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T; the sole reason for the transfer was to provide for the issuance of a non-voting preferred class of capital stock, disallowed under the statutes of the state of Illinois. All telephones in areas where AT&T subsidiaries provided local service, all components of the public switched telephone network, all devices connected to the network were made by Western Electric and no other devices were allowed to be connected to AT&T's network.
AT&T and Bell System companies were rumored to employ small armies of inspectors to check household line impedance levels to determine if non-leased phones were in use by consumers. Western Electric telephones were owned not by end customers but by the local Bell System telephone companies—all of which were subsidiaries of AT&T, which owned Western Electric; each phone was leased from the phone company on a monthly basis by customers who paid for their phone as part of the recurring lease fees. This system had the effect of subsidizing basic telephone service, keeping local phone service inexpensive, under $10 per month, including the leased phone. After divestiture, basic service prices increased, customers were now responsible for inside building wiring and telephone equipment; the Bell System had an extensive policy and infrastructure to recycle or refurbish phones taken out of service, replacing all defective, weak, or otherwise unusable parts for new installations. This resulted in an extraordinary longevity of Western Electric telephone models and limited the variety of new designs introduced into the market place.
AT&T strictly enforced policies against using telephone equipment by other manufacturers on their network. A customer who insisted on using a telephone not supplied by the Bell System had to first transfer the phone to the local Bell operating company, who leased the phone back to the customer for a monthly charge in addition to a re-wiring fee. In the 1970s when consumers incr
Phonofilm
Phonofilm is an optical sound-on-film system developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the 1920s. In 1919 and 1920, Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patents on a sound-on-film process, DeForest Phonofilm, which recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines; these parallel lines photographically recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone, which were translated back into sound waves when the movie was projected. Some sources say that DeForest improved on the work of Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt —, granted German patent 309.536 on 28 July 1914 for his sound-on-film work — and on the Tri-Ergon process, patented in 1919 by German inventors Josef Engl, Hans Vogt, Joseph Massole. The Phonofilm system, which recorded synchronized sound directly onto film, was used to record vaudeville acts, musical numbers, political speeches, opera singers; the quality of Phonofilm was poor at first, improved somewhat in years, but was never able to match the fidelity of sound-on-disc systems such as Vitaphone, or sound-on-film systems such as RCA Photophone or Fox Movietone.
The films of DeForest were short films made as demonstrations to try to interest major studios in Phonofilm. These films are valuable to entertainment historians, as they include recordings of a wide variety of both well-known and less famous American vaudeville and British music hall acts which would otherwise have been forgotten; some of the films, such as Flying Jenny Airplane, Barking Dog, a film of DeForest himself explaining the Phonofilm system were experimental films to test the system. Some of the people filmed included vaudevillians Joe Weber and Lew Fields, Eva Puck and Sammy White, Eddie Cantor, Ben Bernie, Oscar Levant, Phil Baker, Frank McHugh, Roy Smeck, jazz musicians Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, "all-girl" bandleader Helen Lewis, harmonicist Borrah Minevitch, Nikita Balieff's company La Chauve-Souris, opera singers Eva Leoni, Abbie Mitchell, Marie Rappold, Broadway stars Helen Menken and Fannie Ward, folklorist Charles Ross Taggart, copla singer Concha Piquer, politicians Calvin Coolidge, Robert La Follette, Al Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Smith and Roosevelt were filmed during the 1924 Democratic National Convention, held June 24 to July 9 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Coolidge became the first U. S. President to appear in a sound motion picture when DeForest filmed him at the White House on 11 August 1924. In November 1922, De Forest founded the De Forest Phonofilm Corporation with studios at 314 East 48th Street in New York City, offices at 220 West 42nd Street in the Candler Building. However, DeForest was unable to interest any of the major Hollywood movie studios in his invention. From October 1921 to September 1922, DeForest lived in Berlin, meeting with the Tri-Ergon developers and investigating other European sound film systems, he announced to the press in April 1922. On 12 March 1923, DeForest presented a demonstration of Phonofilm to the press. On 12 April 1923, DeForest gave a private demonstration of the process to electrical engineers at the Engineering Society Building's Auditorium at 33 West 39th Street in New York City.
On 15 April 1923, DeForest premiered 18 short films made in Phonofilm — including vaudeville acts, musical performers and ballet — at the Rivoli Theater at 1620 Broadway in New York City. The Rivoli's music director Hugo Riesenfeld co-hosted the presentation; the printed program gave credit to the "DeForest-Case Patents", but according to a letter Theodore Case wrote to DeForest after the event, no credit was given to Case during the presentation itself. Case expressed his displeasure that the program credited only the "DeForest-Case Patents", as Phonofilm's success was due to the work of Case and his Case Research Lab. DeForest took his show on the road, pitching Phonofilm directly to the general public at a series of special engagements across the country; the shorts shown at one such demonstration, exact date unknown but circa 1925, were as follows: What the Phonofilm Means A Study in Contrasts From Far Seville Old Melodies The Harlequin's Serenade Stringed Harmony Parade of the Wooden Soldiers A Few Moments With Eddie Cantor, Star of "Kid Boots" A Musical Monologue President Calvin Coolidge Taken on the White House Lawn Ben Bernie's Orchestra Rigoletto, Act Two The Bubble Dance Weber and Fields A Boston Star DeWolfe Hopper Negro Folk Songs Opera Versus Jazz DeForest was forced to show these films in independent theaters such as the Rivoli, since Hollywood movie studios controlled all major U.
S. movie theater chains at the time. De Forest's decision to film short films, not feature films limited the appeal of his process. All or part of the Paramount Pictures features Bella Donna and The Covered Wagon were filmed with Phonofilm as an experiment. However, the Phonofilm versions were only shown at the premiere engagements at
