Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the Coming of Sound

Abstract

Most film historians credit Warner Bros. and Western Electric with providing the major impetus for the coming of sound. A few allocate a paragraph or two to the European based patents, then go on to devote a large amount of space to an analysis of films using sound systems based on these patents. The discussion in Manvell and Fraenkel's The German Cinema lasts only one and a half paragraphs, in Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler one paragraph, and in Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now one-half paragraph.' Obviously all these accounts are incomplete. Jean Mitry in his massive, three-volume Histoire du Cinema chronicles in three pages the development of the Tri-Ergon system and its successor Tobis-Klangfilm. However he provides no documentation. Harry Geduld's treatment in his The Birth of the Talkies equals Mitry's in length. Yet Geduld adds only a smattering of new dates, corporate names, and court decisions.2 He like the others provides no theoretical understanding of why and how the Tri-Ergon system came to be, nor of how this technology entered commercial motion picture production and exhibition. None of these authors answers the most basic questions concerning the stages of invention, innovation, hnd diffusion common to all technological change. This article will devote considerable space to each of these three stages. Moreover court records and motion picture trade papers will provide the primary data to fill out this structure and thus provide the beginning of a coherent and theoretically consistent history of the Tri-Ergon sound system.