This is a great example of electro-mechanical technology that brought "talkies" to life!

Dale Nicol on 13th April 2018 @ 7:13am

Beautiful!! I'm wondering if the large wheel on the lower right might be a way to manually adjust the record speed so that an alert operator can maintain audio/video synchronization. This problem still occurs today with digital TV occasionally losing "lip sync". Very annoying.

tom on 13th April 2018 @ 7:48am

Neat picture. Projectionists earned their money back in the day. Now if the movie industry could just figure out how to make a movie worth watching.

Buzz on 13th April 2018 @ 8:18am

Amazing. So much to unpack in this image... like a giant Rube Goldberg machine.

Kyle on 13th April 2018 @ 8:47am

I especially appreciate how the photographer pointed his camera eye toward something far from the limelight, but nevertheless a historic photograph with vibrant vital signs.

Jim Mason on 13th April 2018 @ 10:49am

brings to mind that father John L had a part time job, probably in the late 1940s, counting people attending movies at the Railto....I think he was working for the movie distributor....maybe the theater paid the distributor based on ticket sales and his counts were a double check...not sure of this. Either Roger or I have his counters.

Arlen Sheldrake on 13th April 2018 @ 2:51pm

About 1930 my dad was a projectionist and my mother an organist for silent films.
Silents can still be seen at the Elsinor in Salem (check the web) with a great organist on the Wurlitzer ~

Kenn on 13th April 2018 @ 4:44pm

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one to enjoy this image. Synchronizing audio and video has been a difficult engineering problem for decades. I spent many years working on it. Nature still hasn't worked it out-- consider thunderstorms!

Arthur on 14th April 2018 @ 2:47pm