A BETTER LIFE - The Collectors
Interview of Collectors
A BETTER LIFE - The Collectors
Inventing Motion Pictures with Sound: Thomas Edison, WKL Dixon, and a Broken Cylinder
The remarkable story of how a stick of Wrigley's chewing gum rescued a priceless piece of cinema history unfolds in this fascinating exploration of Edison, innovation, and overlooked genius. When historian Jack Stanley joins us to discuss a historic photograph from Edison's laboratory, what emerges is an incredible tale of rediscovery and ingenuity spanning over a century.
While Thomas Edison gets credit for inventing motion pictures, the real pioneer was his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dixon. As Stanley reveals, Edison's true genius was "being brilliant enough to realize he wasn't brilliant" – surrounding himself with specialized talent like Dixon who developed film sprockets, created the first film studio (the "Black Maria"), and ultimately produced the first synchronized sound film in 1894, showing men dancing while Dixon played violin.
The story takes an extraordinary turn when Stanley shares his firsthand account of being present in 1995 when the original sound cylinder for this historic film was discovered in the Edison archives. Broken in three pieces and sitting forgotten in a cigar box for decades, the cylinder seemed unplayable – until sound engineer Peter Dilge had a flash of inspiration while chewing gum after a dental appointment. Using ordinary Wrigley's gum to temporarily hold the cylinder fragments together, they successfully recovered the audio, reuniting sound and image for the first time since the 1890s.
This little-known historical treasure isn't just fascinating trivia – it represents a pivotal moment in media technology that predated "The Jazz Singer" by 33 years. Subscribe to hear more extraordinary stories about innovation, unsung heroes, and the surprising ways history gets preserved and rediscovered when you least expect it.
The first words I spoke in the original pornograph, a little piece of practical poetry. Mary had a little lamb. Its feet were quite as slow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome back to A Better Life the Collectors. Today I have Jack with me again Jack Stanley, those of you who've been watching and listening to us. Jack is such an amazing historian and a treasure trove of information. Strangely enough, I recently purchased a photo at auction that was labeled Edison's Experimental Room or something like that, and it was signed for by. It's. Signed on there had WKL Dixon. Of course. When I showed it to Jack, he knew everything about that and let me see if I can get the photo up here. We can talk about it. There it is and that's the infamous photo. There is some writing at the bottom and unfortunately the scan didn't get it, but I'll leave the description up to you, jack.
Speaker 3:It's the music room, and hello everyone, it's nice to be here again with you. It's the music room which was the third floor of the main laboratory building. It's the music room which was the third floor of the main laboratory building and that's where they did the experiments. And Dixon, of course, is so very important in motion pictures. He was a photographer and he took lots of photographs all over and actually put out a book of various pictures of stuff dealing with Edison, and this is one of them. That was in that book actually and it's a very famous picture. You can see cylinders all over the place, wax cylinders and various horns and phonographs and pianos and various instruments, I think even an organ, all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2:There's a tinfoil machine in the back on the second shelf. I'm not quite sure why, but it is there and which one it is. It was my understanding that he gave the original away in London or something and then he got it back much later, but I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they got it back in 1927. The original? That can't be it. No, that's a much larger one. It's almost like a Bergman or something like that.
Speaker 2:Which is interesting.
Speaker 3:But it's an interesting photograph and, if you ever get the chance, there is a book that was written by Dixon, all about Edison, and it's filled with photographs that he took at this period of time. And I guess, to start this off, we have to explain who WKL Dixon was and there used to be an old joke at the laboratory don't you dare forget one of those initials but WKL Dixon, for all intents and purposes, is the fellow that develops the motion picture. We think of Edison as the inventor of a lot of this, but we have to remember something with Edison the brilliance of Edison is that he was brilliant enough to realize he wasn't brilliant, and that's brilliant if you think about it. And so he surrounded himself with people who had various talents, who could excel in various fields mathematics, science, sound photography, etc. And there was a fellow before this by the name of Muybridge, and Muybridge went into a bet with an individual as to does a horse, when it runs, lift all four feet off the ground? And he said I'll have to try to prove it. And so he set up a series of cameras and with various triggers that would be touched by going by, and he had like about 16, 20 photographs and in those it proved that the horse at one point was totally airborne and he won the bet.
Speaker 3:I've seen that. But what that illustrated for the first time really was motion. And he created something called a zoetroboscope, I believe it was called. It was a circular thing and you'd spin it around and you could watch that horse run, and that was the first kind of form of motion. He went to Edison, actually a number of years later and said we should mix my invention with your phonograph. And Edison basically said no, it would never work. No, and so Muybridge left the world. The smoke from Edison's cigar was still whirling around after Muybridge walked out the door and Edison said I have an idea. Oh sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:Spoken like a true Edison thief, that he was about motion pictures.
Speaker 3:You've got to understand it's not really a thief, but it's like working for AT&T or Bell Labs or Microsoft. When you work for the corporation, the corporation is the inventor Right. They pay you for your brain. That's what Edison was doing. He was the first to really do that and that's misunderstood by lots of people, especially the folks that are arguing about him and Tesla, which I'm not going to go into.
Speaker 3:But the thing is that Edison would often come up with an idea or a theory and then pass it along to his brain trust and make some developments. And so he immediately applied for an idea in the patent office about to create a device that would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. And I didn't know what to call it yet, didn't know anything because nothing existed. And WKL Dixon was put on the task and he was brilliant and he created the first motion pictures. He created the camera. He felt that it should be put on a screen. Edison said no, it should stay in one machine. They have to purchase a machine from me and they have to look in a little scope and watch it, and then I'll sell lots of machines. That's the way Edison kind of thought, and Dixon of course didn't agree with that, but Dixon was working on all.
Speaker 2:What year are we talking about?
Speaker 3:About 1891. Amazing 1891. When Dixon's doing a lot of this. In fact, he does his first film in 1891. And the film that we're going to talk about here was done in 1894. Idea at least his initial idea, ie Moe Bridge, is to mix motion pictures and sound, and that's a lot more difficult than you would think, and they discovered it was very difficult. And so Dixon was working on various things, and he had come up with something called sprockets in the film. That was his development too, to keep the film steady, because otherwise it would just slide by. You just get a big blur. And so he also worked on designing something else called the black Mariah yeah, which is the first film studio, and Edison had ideas with it too, of course, and it was made of canvas, painted black, on a wooden base that would revolve, which ran into a slight problem. They found out whenever there was a storm. The darn thing was spinning around like crazy, and it was pretty it was.
Speaker 2:It spun around for the light, correct?
Speaker 3:Yes, To follow the sun, except they followed the wind too, which was a big problem. So they had to develop anchors for the thing to hold it in place. But in this, in this room, is where they filmed this and we often thought for years you'd see this film of these two guys dancing and a fellow playing the violin. But there was never any sound and according to just about everyone, the recording was lost. And this is where it starts getting interesting.
Speaker 3:In 1995, three of us Peter Dilge, myself and Jerry Fabris, who was the curator of sound recordings, went into the vault down below. We were just looking at stuff and taking a little tour and we came to a cigar box and on it it said Dixon vial film. And we looked inside it and it was a cylinder broken in three pieces and we were surmising because we weren't sure this might be the sound recording for that film, which is amazing if it was true. Of course. The cylinder was smashed up and was put back in its place in its cigar box. It's interesting because Edison always put things in cigar boxes because he was always smoking cigars, so he had cigar boxes filled with all kinds of this, that and everything else. I was a observer in this whole thing. I am not a participant in what would happen next, but I was there when we were all looking at it and talking about it and the spark was lit and peter was rather excited about it and jerry was rather excited about it and eventually explain who they are.
Speaker 3:Peter dilge is a sound recording. Oh god, he's everything. He's brilliant as I. He's been a friend of mine for 45 years.
Speaker 2:So was he an employee there.
Speaker 3:No, he was a volunteer. He was a volunteer who would make recordings For when we recorded Les Paul and we recorded Christopher Lee and we recorded a number of other people, he always did the recordings and he did a lot of stuff on his own. He recorded Hillary Clinton and he's done so much and he's advanced our knowledge so much on the history of sound recording. Brilliant guy and a dear friend who I admire and have always been influenced by.
Speaker 2:And Jerry.
Speaker 3:The other person was Jerry Fabris. Jerry Fabris was the curator of sound recordings at Edison. He was the fellow that had control over the cylinders, the discs, the stampers, everything dealing with sound recording, and both of these gentlemen were dear friends and I always enjoyed their company. Jerry and I used to sing together sometimes. We actually made a couple of cylinders singing and Peter said he's going to find a recording of it, which will be fun. But nonetheless I was at that point at the Edison National Historic Site.
Speaker 3:I worked there for two years and after I was gone from there in 1998, I believe they decided to record the early original cylinders that were done in Little Manilow In England. Which Colonel, what was his name? Colonel Gerard, who did all the recording in England Of Gladstone and Sir Arthur Sullivan etc. And stuff like that. And they decided they were going to go to the Lincoln Center recording department in New York and they did all these copies of the recording and Jerry brought the broken cylinder with him in whatever box it was in. I'm sure it wasn't in the cigar box anymore, I'm sure it was put into a very safe spectacle.
Speaker 3:But the problem was they recorded the other stuff perfectly, but what do you do to get this broken cylinder together. And you've got to remember it's very delicate, it's very old, it's from 1894. And so, as peter put it, I was sitting in the car and he said I had gone to the dentist the day before and had a cap put on my tooth and he, he said I was chewing gum. And he said, as I was sitting in traffic, the gum kept getting stuck to the cap of his tooth. And he said at that instant he had an idea. He said maybe the gum will hold wax together. I mean this is brilliant. And so he said he had a piece of a cylinder nothing historic and he broke it in half and took out a little piece of gum and put it over there and put the two pieces together and he said they stuck. And he said I could wipe it off.
Speaker 2:And he said that's such Edison thinking.
Speaker 3:Yes, of course you know what I mean. That's the amazing thing, like Peter is, he's one of one of the crazy people that do the most amazing things, and you have to be a little bit off-center sometimes to think of these. And so he said to Jerry, I've got it, we will take the gum and put it together. Now what this recording was is what we think is Dixon playing the violin and it only runs for 15, 16 seconds and two guys just dancing and of course, there's an announcement in the beginning Is everyone ready? Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3:Then they record and then you can actually hear probably not in the filtered ones that they put out now you can hear the projector running out of the film going, because it's a short little thing and it moved pretty fast to get good quality. But I find what Peter does is as inventive and as unique as the film itself and something that's never been talked about. There's not a mention of this. Peter just said I just didn't mention it. He said but I think it's the greatest thing I've ever done, and I said I agree, this is brilliant. So they put the cylinder together in the library there, the sound recording library there, and he put it on the cylinder and he had his own electronic playback head that had play in it, because a lot of times those records they don't go exactly steady, they're a little like off here and there. He hooked it up and it worked and they said just to make sure they did it again and it obviously hadn't been played much at all. How many times are you going to play it?
Speaker 1:Maybe they broke it.
Speaker 2:Maybe they broke it right away. So many times I buy especially the black wax cylinders, the old one, especially the old Amarillo's, even more so you break, you look at them, they crumble yeah.
Speaker 3:And so I figured the old man Edison probably put it in a cigar box to save it. Probably put it in a cigar box to save it because it is the first like sound recording with a film that's in time, the first. It's really incredible when you think of this. It is.
Speaker 2:So is the video which we're going to play for you all in a few moments, and you can hear people talking in the background In the beginning. Let's go, it's going, or whatever it is, let's start. I forget what it said. Everybody ready the video from the Library of Congress or wherever it is. The video, part of it's always existed.
Speaker 2:Right, it was saved, but the audio part thought the audio part, thought it was lost throughout time, and here these guys are wandering around Wandering around is a big term In the archives at the Edison Museum or the Historic site or wherever, and they come across a cigar box that no one's ever opened before, or looked at it.
Speaker 3:It was known to exist. It was in an inventory in 1964.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And probably beforehand. But that's as far as it went and for myself I didn't even know it existed. Jerry did, because of course he was the curator, and he pulled it down and said this might be because nobody knew. Nobody knew if that was the recording that went with that film. They found me it was the recording that went with that film. They found me it was the ambulance.
Speaker 3:They always find me, but nonetheless, as I said, I was just an observer. I had nothing to do with this. I didn't make a discovery, it was just something I saw. I saw it in the cigar box that was so amazingly fascinating to see. And it was just the three of us.
Speaker 2:That's an amazing story. How does it get to the next step? How does it get to where someone plays it with the film for the first time?
Speaker 3:to be sure that is done in the library at Lincoln Center.
Speaker 2:So you had the video as well.
Speaker 3:They didn't need the film because they can just match it up eventually, and so the whole idea was recording it. They were recording all the other brown wax cylinders that Edison had from the colonel in Little Menlo and, like Prime Minister Gladstone and others like that, all those cylinders were re-recorded by them and this is important stuff because this preserves it, and it was fortunate that Jerry brought it Developing this simple, very Edison-like fix, taking little pieces of gum and holding it together, and by doing so he rescued the sound of that film.
Speaker 2:Maybe we could just play a little clip. One little clip for it now. It seems like the perfect time to me to put that on. I hopefully got it in the right spot, Thank you. It repeats three times.
Speaker 3:And the second time I guess they use.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they do it three be clicker, I think.
Speaker 3:The final. I think they take horn.
Speaker 2:That's in the picture, or you think it is, I don't think so. So I wonder where that horn went, disappeared to.
Speaker 3:You got to remember it's 1890s. They had an opportunity for many years to throw stuff out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess that's true, you wonder.
Speaker 3:It's an amazing thing, though that recording and that film are back together and will be for perpetuity, and it was all due to a stick of Wrigley's chewing gum. So the next time you bite into a little stick of Wrigley's gum, just think of what you can do with a stick of gum. That's the the brilliance. It's just thinking outside of the box, which is everything about Edison and everything that we should do today Do things different, try things different. You don't want to be too anal on things, you want to just look in different ways, and of course Edison and Dixon had a parting of the ways because they didn't agree. But to WKL Dixon, who was born in 1860 and died in 1835, he did a yeoman's share of the motion picture. The other thing that's interesting about dixon of course dixon went to biograph. He also invented another system of basic cards that would flop and you would just turn a crank and you could just watch motion. It was something else he developed. It was very inventive when it came to motion pictures and stuff, and of course he was pretty devastated that edison didn't see his vision. But dixon talked about the amazing things that film is going to do and he said in the future, someday they will be taking pictures in Mars and showing it to people, and by golly we do that. Think about that Truly. A great visionary Went to Biograph. He developed a studio with glass tops so they could film. He filmed the first motion pictures of a newcoming president, william McKinley. That was done by Dixon. He did all kinds of stuff in England All over he was involved in.
Speaker 3:And one last thing to mention. It's fascinating in 1929, edison was honored for his work in motion pictures and he was presented with two books. And as I was looking at the books in his personal library I noticed he put a picture of Dixon in the book. Very interesting Because he knew as well as Dixon did that.
Speaker 3:The invention, the development, good deal of it was Dixon, but of course Edison. He was the head guy. He took the credit basically, and eventually he would hire someone to replace Dixon in a sense as a director and that was Edwin Porter. And Edwin Porter would do the Great Train Robbery and that infamous recording of Topsy the Elephant. They're still saying Edison killed the elephant but he didn't. But Porter would become very important in the development of motion pictures. And if you think about it, biograph, which Dixon was in from the beginning took in a fella to work with them. His name was DW Griffith and, of course, before long, he changes the world with motion pictures as well. So WKL Dixon, a name not well known Very few people know it, but oh so very important in the history of motion pictures and his creation, his development, is once again reunited Thanks to the brilliance of Peter Dilge and Jerry Fabris you were lucky to be there, that's all I could say and Jerry Fabris, you were lucky to be there.
Speaker 2:That's all I could say.
Speaker 3:I consider myself blessed to have been there when we were sitting there talking about it, looking at a cigar box. It's just so fun.
Speaker 2:I'm really glad we can memorialize that story and save it for all of us who are Edison fanatics.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and Peter really needs to get an award for this. I really think that he did something really incredible.
Speaker 2:I think we're going to have to coax him to get him on, even if we do it by just. He can talk just audio if he doesn't want to do video, because I'm sure he has many stories of things he sounds and recorded.
Speaker 3:We, as I said, we were sitting on the phone for two hours just talking, because we work at the same kind of wavelength in a sense, and he said you and I would have been working in the laboratory if we were around. I said maybe we did in a previous life, who knows? And he said do you think when we croak we're going to meet the old man? I said I don't. We did in a previous life, who knows? And he said do you think when we croak we're going to meet the old man? I said I don't know, we'll find out, wouldn't that be something? Huh, so he's a fascinating, brilliant guy, and Jerry as well. He's with the Library of Congress now working in the sound recording stuff and he's really brilliant and smart and very musical. As I said, we made some recordings together on Cylinder that Peter recorded.
Speaker 3:And we had a little group we put together called Peter, paul and Murray, so we did one performance, and so we did one performance. That was it. But these are really great, fascinating people who look at the world slightly different like I do, and I was always very happy in their company. That's all I need to say.
Speaker 2:It's an amazing story. I'm glad we could fill in the holes of what we see. We know that we see the film available on youtube or anywhere you want to see it. You can always come back and play our video and get to it as well. This is just as a note. Our podcast is always available available on youtube and it's also available on audio on Apple podcasts, as well as Spotify and all the major regular audio podcasts, but video on YouTube. Thank you again, jack, for a more great moments in recovering Edison or bringing him to the next generation, and I'm glad we could deposit that story in the way it is.
Speaker 3:So I'm glad that photo.
Speaker 2:I'm glad that photo came to me and I knew that you were the person to ask about it and I was right, so I'm glad to have had it.
Speaker 3:Thank you for sharing the file.
Speaker 2:My pleasure and thank you for being on as always. I thank everybody for listening. I look forward to any questions or anything how to reach out to us. You can put comments on YouTube, on the audio podcast. There's a little button you can click and those messages get forwarded to us as well. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, jack, and thank you everyone and have a good day.
Speaker 1:Bye and thank you everyone and have a good day. Bye. The first words I spoke in the original phonograph. A little piece of practical poetry. Mary had a little lamb, its feet were quite as slow. No-transcript.