Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil.
JAMES QUIRK, Photoplay, MARCH 1924

Once a new technology enters public usage, it is susceptible to being co-opted for any number of new purposes-many of which the creators did not foresee. The sound film emerged as an exhibition phenomenon several years preceding 1927, the generally accepted date for the "birth of the talkies." When the recording and reproducing apparatuses moved out of the laboratories and into theaters, few if any inventors or promoters thought that the sound film would take over Hollywood to transform the silent feature into the all-talking, all-singing phenomenon that would become popular around 1929. Rather, the sound film was perceived as a novelty. The mainstream industry, as Quirk suggested with scatological innuendo, regarded the sound film as an irritation. The...