The Jazz Singer and the early talkies arrived in Europe in the year 1928. This new challenge from across the Atlantic undoubtedly affected the highly developed film industries of Germany and France in markably different ways. The French film studios were totally unprepared for the advent of sound and the lucrative domestic market was consequently invaded by the better organized American and German film companies. Yet in Germany, although film audiences had been privy to the talking picture as early as 1922 - the Americans were allowed to be the forerunners in exploiting sound, merely as a result of under-investment, lack of interest and wasted opportunities on the behalf of German business.
The grueling legal battles fought over the rights to sound film systems would not be resolved until 1930 when a Parisian conference passed a worldwide patents agreement. This resolution went someway towards vindicating the work of a number of European sound-film pioneers whose claim to a place in cinema history might otherwise have been overshadowed by their American counterparts.
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| The Tri-Ergon in her prime, circa 1922 |
In 1918, three Germans, Hans Vogt, Joseph Massolle and Josef Benedickt Engl patented a sound-film system they called Tri-Ergon (the work of three people). Theirs was a sound on film system and was profoundly advanced for its time. On September 17, 1922 - Vogt, Engl and Massolle mounted the first public show of their invention at the Alambra Cinema in Berlin. The audience saw - and heard - a two-hour film program of musical numbers and recitations
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| Hans Vogt, Engineer extraordinare mit seinem Kathodophon |
By all accounts the Tri-Ergon system scored an immediate hit with an enthralled public, they were simply over the cosmos with this new wrinkle - a perfect synchronization of lip movement and sound. Under normal circumstances Tri-Ergon would have been ripe for commercial exploitation, but its investors were to receive much the same kind of negative reaction from sponsors as the American Lee De Forest had encountered earlier for his Phonofilms primarily at the time of his falling out with physicist Theodore Case, inventor of Movietone's sound-on-film system. Furthermore, Germany had scarcely recovered from the devastation of World War I, and the economy was at its most inflationary.