Good morning.
It’s a day of showers for Whitewater, with a high of sixty-one.
The city’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6 PM.
Google has a daily puzzle that’s fit for poker players: “You’ll find me buried beside fellow gunslinger Calamity Jane. What’s the name of the poker hand that honors my death?”
On this day in 1923, Talkies Talk … On Their Own:
Radio pioneer Lee de Forest demonstrates his Phonofilm movie process to the press, bringing the world of synchronized sound to the movies.
Inventors as august as Thomas Edison had been trying to link two marvels of the age — the phonograph and the moving picture — for several decades. The fidelity was as good (or bad) as the phonographs of those days, but it was nearly impossible to synchronize the sound of the human voice with moving lips on the screen. So the first sound films the public saw were presented with recorded musical accompaniment, but they still used full-screen dialogue titles and weren’t “talkies.”
De Forest’s technical advance was to synchronize sound and motion by placing the sound recording directly on the film in an optical soundtrack. Analog blips of light represented sound frequency and volume. It was the prototype of the optical sound-on-film process used from the 1930s onward, with continued improvements like high fidelity and stereo, until digital sound began to replace it in the 1990s.
Perfect for any season, it’s Sunshine Week, 3.11-3.17, in America. Sunshine Week is a “national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include news media, civic groups, libraries, nonprofits, schools and others interested in the public’s right to know.”