The
shorter, funnier version of my dissertationI became
interested in this subject because I thought it was funny, because the
electrical reproducers used in cinemas in the late 1920s look like all-in-one
1970s DJ consoles. The object of this radically minimised version of the main
text is to stimulate your interest. There aren’t really any jokes, but
I still find the whole thing sort of amusing and ironic.

History, and especially the history of technology, usually
tries to construct a linear story that lead us neatly to the present day via
a succession of key events or innovations. But some technologies, no matter
how successful in the short term, do not fit the long term story arc. They
are superseded in the evolutionary chain and forgotten. The mini-disc will
probably suffer this fate.

Think about the 1920s. Silent films. Seen Singin’ In The Rain?
Sound films sweep the board overnight. Talkies, Talkies, Talkies! In the US
things moved fast. The whole industry was dominated by five companies, who
controlled production, and owned their own chains of cinemas. They could
afford to invest in the sound equipment to make the new kind of films, and
the new sound projectors for their theatres.

In Britain the film industry was pathetic. Less than 5% of
films shown were made in the UK, and Hollywood product made up most of the
rest. Of the 4,000 cinemas in the UK, 3,000 were independently owned and run.
Business was pretty bad, and getting worse each year, but the cinema owners
(exhibitors) didn’t care who made the films as long as they were
popular. They looked wistfully at their balance sheets for the First World
War period, when 20m people a week paid to see whatever was available.
Exhibitors moaned (about taxation), and worried (that the public would forget
films and go ice skating instead). They needed gimmicks, but cheap gimmicks.
The cheaper the better.

In the 1920s people went to the pictures without much regard
for what was on, or when it started. Films ran continuously – you just turned
up. Punters would base their choice on the comfort of the cinema and the
quality of the music and how much they could afford. In fact the
musicians’ wages could account for as much as a third of weekly costs.
The popular image of the single plinky plonky piano accompaniment was what
you got only in the crappest local fleapit. Most cinemas had at least three,
if not four or five permanent musicians, and music was arranged rather than
improvised, a patchwork of popular tunes and classical snippets denoting
‘sad’. ‘chase’, ‘suspense’, ‘comedy’
etc, assembled by the Musical Director. At a fancy picture palace the
accompaniment could include sections from up to 60 separate pieces. Cinema
owners and managers relied on musicians, but resented them and the
Musicians’ Union, that negotiated their rates.

Into this environment came the Electrical reproducer –
the first generation of record player with a modern electrical pickup, that
could be amplified and played through speakers. The market for such equipment
was slow to take off in the UK, as the traditional clockwork acoustic gramophone
was loud enough for the home, so Brunswick, an established record company
based in the US, developed a two-turntable machine for use in dancehalls,
theatres and cinemas. Although expensive, the success of Brunswick’s
machine, the Panatrope, soon spawned a range of cheaper imitations.

The main advertising angles for these machines were that a)
you could have the world’s finest musicians in your cinema, and b) you
wouldn’t have to pay them. Panatrope advertisements like this one
boasted openly about the number of orchestras they had replaced.

That the Panatrope should arrive at the same time as talking
pictures was not entirely coincidental, since they both grew out of the same
experimental Bell Laboratories programmes in the US, but their conjunction in
Britain led to some unexpected developments.

Although exhibitors were happy with American films as long as
audiences liked them, there remained a certain resentment and mistrust of the
US studios and their distributors, and of their ever-increasing domination of
the industry. The film trade press tended towards a patriotic distaste for
American culture and business practices, reflected in their almost unanimous
dismissal of talking pictures, which were viewed as nothing but a passing
fad. Gullible American audiences might be amused by them, but the British
public were not to be taken in. There were many reasons why the industry
closed ranks so decisively, but the main concern was, as ever, money. Small
exhibitors could never dream of paying what Warner Bros were asking for the
Vitaphone equipment, and the prices were not even for outright purchase, but
for a 10 year lease. Bigger players were initially reluctant to reveal that
they could afford it, since they were more concerned with reducing tax burden
so they could make more money.

Then something happened in Leeds, in the North of England.
The manager of the Theatre De Luxe had replaced his orchestra with one man
and a Panatrope, but rather than just playing records over the films, the
operator, a skilled musician called Reginald Johnson, recognised the full
potential of the new machine, developing a new technique of musical
presentation in the summer of 1927. By October Johnson had a library of 250
records, and was combining sections of 25-40 discs per film, marking the
segments with chalk, working from a complex cue sheet, and changing the
needle on each deck for every record played. I don’t think he did any
scratching, but I think there’s reasonable grounds to name him the
Godfather of Turntablism.

Novelty was one of founding principles of the film industry,
so news the Panatrope miracle spread fast through the trade press, and cheap
copies of the machine appeared in weeks, along with companies offering to
supply records for specific films or produce ready made cue sheets for them.
Panatrope Operators were in demand, although in truth relatively few used
their equipment to the full.

The Panatrope was not just a gimmick, though. Before The Jazz Singer opened in
London, special Panatrope effects were used to accompany Paramount’s
production of F W Murnau’s classic Sunrise,
and in New York, Paramount also used a battery of custom made Panatropes for
the original presentation of one of their first sound pictures, Wings. Brunswick also
produced whole sets of records to accompany these films so that provincial
audiences could experience a film with the same music and effects as West
End, and Paramount came close to signing a contract with British Phototone,
an offshoot of the main Brunswick company making synchronisers to link film
projectors with their Panatrope-based machines.

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