JF Ptak Science Books Post 1755
Few people who know about Tomas Kuhn would think that the true benefactor of the idea of the structure of scientific revolutions was Ms Midge Flep, seen here in a 1920 photograph next to her famous arrow. Ms. Flep, who always maintained that she was "never a head for schooling" did however think large thoughts, culminating evidently in her procedural banquet of what happens with change and time, and written famously of course on a series of large black paper and wooden arrows. "The nice thing about writing on wood" said Ms. Flep, "is that you can get your ideas down before the wood even gets turned into paper". Her main and evidently much-copied thesis is that "big change like in big events are big", and that "time will like an arrow will fly" somewhere, usually getting where it was going, "as arrows do, Mr. Zeno notwithstanding".
This of course is not a true story, but it was the best I could do for this fantastic, high non sequitur found-photograph.
It does remind me of fast change, though--not in viewing the image exactly but in writing the nonsense about it.
Revolutions in science and in all sorts of other things does sometimes take sometime and great effort to find its way through the world. And sometimes, though not rarely, monumental changes in theory and technology and delivery systems find near-instantaneous reception, finding its universal spot very quickly. Ms. Flep-Bent's arrow would have been deflected almost not-at-all in the case of the successful application of sound-on-film technology and its application in making movies--the effects of these changes were felt immediately at the Bijou, with a near-complete turnaround from one state of affairs to another (silent film and talkies) in only three years or so.
Look: people had been messing around with sound and cinema for decades, basically from the start of the mass exhibition of movies--results of these efforts up to the early 1920's were poor. Enter the prolific and brilliant and problematic inventor and non-businessman Lee de Forest and the application of his audion in November 1922, when he established his De Forest Phonofilm Company at 314 East 48th Street in New York City. This was the true beginning and some very fierce and fast competition for sound-on-film motion pictures, which developed along the strengths of the RCA Photophone and Warner Bros Vitaphone, which basically left de Forest's Phonofilm in the developing dust.
Fast forward through the technical part, sound-on-film motion pictures iconically took center stage with Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer on 16 October 1927. The movie went box office boffo, setting records all alog the way, and the studios began producing talkies at a prodigious rate--in the first two years after the Jolson film the only thing keeping the monumental change away from silent films was the rate of changeover in the theatres themselves as they upfitted to the new sound and projection systems. the result of all of this: 1927 was the absolute zenith for silent films; by 1930 Hollywood produced 335 sound films and 175 silent films; in the next year, 1931, only two silent films were made. The change was complete.
Sound changed everything, not the least of which were the careers of actors whose voices turned out to be unacceptable for whatever reason--nasal tons, high pitch, accents and so on doomed many a silent star. Also the idea of "acting" was tremendously affected--"overacting" gave way instantly to subtlety, now that actors no longer needed to act as though they were listening to something. Now they just did so, and the audience didn;t need the explanation, as they were experiencing the sound as well, right at the same time. But the big deal is that the fates changed dramatically for writers, who became important. Now that all sound was available and didn't need to be described in pantomime or an occasional text card, the stuff of the script became extremely significant, especially the new thing: dialog.
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