At the turn of the twentieth century, European and American inventors were on the brink of combining sight and sound in the motion picture. In 1895 Thomas Edison joined his phonograph with his Kinetoscope, a motion-picture viewer. As watchers looked through the Kinetoscope's eyepiece, they heard sounds from ear tubes connected to a phonograph. Although there were insurmountable problems involved in synchronizing sight and sound in the Kinetophone, as the hybrid was called, it set an important precedent for sound motion-picture viewers. In 1899, after producing a commercial film projector, Edison resumed work on the Kinetophone. The film projector was linked to a special long-playing phonograph. The Kinetophone was developed around oversized cylinders of about 4.25 in. (11 cm) in diameter and 7.5 in. (19 cm) in length, which ran for approximately six minutes. In 1908 Edison hired an inventor, Daniel Higham, to work on the Kinetophone. Higham increased the Kinetophone's volume by using a...