Early Home Entertainment Systems
Before DVD or video, there was the motion
picture phonograph. Well, at least the idea existed. I don't know
whether any of these were actually made and sold or not. This model from
1922, invented by C. Francis Jenkins, used pictures printed on a stack
of paper disks. Background music could be provided by using a special attachment
to play a record.
[from an article in the November 1922
issue of Science and Invention.]
This 1923 version played talkies! The
disk was transparent, with both grooves for sound to be played with a regular
phonograph stylus, and translucent pictures to be projected onto the back
of a screen in the cabinet by a light shining from above. One drawback
was that a show on a twelve-inch disk, playing at 53 1/3 rpm, would only
run for about three minutes. It's ironic that the sound synchronization
in this type of system would have been better than that of the early theater
"talkies."
[from an article in the January 1923 issue
of Science and Invention.]
