The Speaking Film 
By Yngye Hedy all 
One day, during the early spring of the past year, a number of 
scientists, technicists, actors, screen men, and newspaper men weie 
invited to a little exhibition in a house at Lidingon, outside of Stock¬ 
holm, where a young Swedish engineer and inventor, Sven Berglund, 
wished to demonstrate the result of ten years of work on the speak¬ 
ing film.” In general, they were rather sceptical on the journey out. 
Who did not remember the not very profitable experiments which had 
previously been made with the Edison kinetophone, a combination 
of the film and the gramophone, which never gave the illusion of simul¬ 
taneousness between speech and picture, but gave the voice an impel- 
sonal ring and produced a number of by-sounds? 
When the guests departed from the demonstration, one and all 
were enthusiasts for the new invention and prophesied a brilliant future 
for it, first, perhaps, in its scientific aspect. Two of Sweden s most 
noted actors had been heard reading various poems, and not only weie 
their personal voices and accents to be recognized, but one could even, 
by the lips and expression, completely establish the synchronism 
between speech and play on the screen. Investigators present of the 
rank of Professors Arrhenius and Montelius presented their congratu¬ 
lations to the inventor, desiring at the same time equally to congratulate 
science, which, they believed, would some day find an invaluable aid in 
the invention. 
How, then, did the discoverer succeed in reaching such a result. 
It is due, in the first place, to the fact that Mr. Berglund followed 
quite a different course from that of his predecessors in this field. 
Instead of trving to combine a gramophone and a film camera, as 
Edison and his followers had, Mr. Berglund attempted to photograph 
the sound and the picture at the same time. In the reproduction, sound 
film and picture film are mounted upon the same shaft and are fed 
out together, and by this means absolute simultaneousness between 
the language of speech and that of gesture is obtained. 
This seems perhaps like witchcraft to him who is noc technically 
initiated, and it is little less. The sound is photographed in such a 
manner that the sound waves are converted, in the same way as in the 
telephone, into vibrations, which are afterwards recorded on the film 
as sound-curves. In the reproduction of the sound, a ray of light is 
thrown upon the film, which runs back of a fissure, by which means the 
ray comes into the same vibrations as the sound originally had. These 
vibrations are thrown upon a sensitive electrical cell, which has been 
placed in the circle of a stream of loud telephone-like apparatus, and 
thereby produce in the electrical stream similar vibrations which, mag¬ 
nified one or two thousand times, reproduce the original sound. 
