Inventing Motion Pictures with Sound: Thomas Edison, WKL Dixon, a stick of gum and a Broken Cylinder

The remarkable story of how a stick of Wrigley's chewing gum rescued a priceless piece of cinema history unfolds in this fascinating exploration of Edison, innovation, and overlooked genius. When historian Jack Stanley joins us to discuss a historic photograph from Edison's laboratory, what emerges is an incredible tale of rediscovery and ingenuity spanning over a century. Recorded July 2025.

While Thomas Edison gets credit for inventing motion pictures, the real pioneer was his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dixon. As Stanley reveals, Edison's true genius was "being brilliant enough to realize he wasn't brilliant" – surrounding himself with specialized talent like Dixon who developed film sprockets, created the first film studio (the "Black Maria"), and ultimately produced the first synchronized sound film in 1894, showing men dancing while Dixon played violin.

The story takes an extraordinary turn when Stanley shares his firsthand account of being present in 1995 when the original sound cylinder for this historic film was discovered in the Edison archives. Broken in three pieces and sitting forgotten in a cigar box for decades, the cylinder seemed unplayable – until sound engineer Peter Dilge had a flash of inspiration while chewing gum after a dental appointment. Using ordinary Wrigley's gum to temporarily hold the cylinder fragments together, they successfully recovered the audio, reuniting sound and image for the first time since the 1890s.

This little-known historical treasure isn't just fascinating trivia – it represents a pivotal moment in media technology that predated "The Jazz Singer" by 33 years. Subscribe to hear more extraordinary stories about innovation, unsung heroes, and the surprising ways history gets preserved and rediscovered when you least expect it.

Transcript

A Mysterious Edison Lab Photo

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Welcome back today. Uh, I have Jack with me again, Jack Stanley. Those of you who've been watching and listening to us, you know, Jack is such an amazing historian and a treasure trove of information. Strangely enough, I recently purchased uh a photo at auction that was labeled Edison's Experimental Room or something like that. And it was signed for by it signed on there had UKL Dixon. Of course, when I showed it to Jack, he knew everything about that. And um, let me see if I could get the photo up here. We could talk about it. There it is. And that's the infamous photo. There is some writing at the bottom, and unfortunately the scan didn't get it, but I'll leave the description up to you, Jack.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Well, it's the music room. And hello, everyone. It's it's nice to be here again with you. Um it's the music room, which was the third floor at the the main laboratory building, and that's where they did the experiments. And Dixon, of course, uh is is so very important in motion pictures. Uh he was a photographer, and he took lots of photographs all over uh and actually put out a book of various pictures of stuff dealing with Edison. And this is one of them that was uh in that book, actually. Um it's a very, very famous picture. You can see cylinders all over the place, wax cylinders, and various horns and phonographs and pianos and various instruments, I think even an organ.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

A tinfoil machine in the back on the second on the second shelf. I'm not quite sure why um why, um, but it is there and and which one it is. I mean uh it was my understanding that he gave the original away in London or something, and then he got it back much later. But I don't know.

The Music Room And Dickson’s Role

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Yeah, they got it back in 1927. The original. All right, so that's it. That can't be it. So no, no, no, that's that's a much larger one, it's almost like a Bergman or something like that. Um but it's a it's an interesting photograph, and if you ever get the chance, there is a book that was written by Dixon all about Edison. And it's filled with photographs that he took at this period of time. And I guess to start this off, we have to explain who WKL Dixon was. And there used to be an old joke at the laboratory, don't you dare forget one of those initials. And uh but WKL Dixon, for all intents and purposes, is the fellow that develops the motion picture. I mean, we think of Edison as the inventor of a lot of this, but we have to remember something. With Edison, the brilliance of Edison is that he was brilliant enough to realize he wasn't brilliant, and that's brilliant, you think about it. And so he surrounded himself with people who had various talents who could excel in in various, you know, various fields, mathematics, science, sound, photography, etc. And there was a fella before this by the name of Moybridge, and Moybridge w went into a a bet with an individual as to does a horse, when it runs, lift all four feet off the ground? And well, he said, I'll have to try to prove it. And so he set up a series of cameras and with with various triggers that would be touched by going by. And he had like about like 16, 20 photographs, and in those it proved that the horse at one point was totally airborne, and he won the bet. I've seen that. But what that illustrated for the first time really was motion, and he created something called a zotroboscope, I believe it was called. It was a circular thing, and you'd spin it around and you could watch that horse run. And that was the first kind of form of uh of of motion. He went to Edison, actually, a number of years later, and said, We should mix my invention with your phonograph. And Edison basically said, No, nope, it would never work. No, no, no. And so Moybridge left. The world, the the smoke from Edison's cigar was still whirling around after Moybridge walked out the door and Edison said, I have enough.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Oh, sure. Spoken, spoken like a true Edison thief that he was about motion pictures, right? Well, you kind of understand.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

It's it's not really a thief, but it's sort of like working for ATT or Bell Labs or Microsoft. When you work for the corporation, the corporation is the inventor. They pay you for your brain. That's what Edison was doing. He was the first to really do that. And that's misunderstood by lots of people, especially the folks that are arguing about him and Tesla and and uh which I'm not going to go into. The thing is that Edison would often come up with an idea or a theory and then pass it along to his brain trust and make some developments. And so he immediately applied for an idea

Muybridge And Motion Before Movies

SPEAKER_00 5:40

in the patent office about to do to create a device that would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear. And I know what to call it yet, didn't know anything because nothing existed. And UKL Dixon was put on the task, and he was brilliant. And he created the first motion pictures, he created the camera. He felt that it should be put on a screen. Edison said, no, it should stay in one machine. They have to purchase a machine from me, and they have to look in the little scope and watch it, and then also lots of machines. That's the way Edison kind of thought. And Dixon, of course, didn't agree with that. But Dixon was working on what what ye what year are we talking about? About 1891. 1891, when Dixon's doing a lot of this. In fact, he does his first film in 1891. And the film that we're gonna talk about here was done in 1894. Now, Edison's idea, at least his initial idea, i.e. bridge, is to make motion pictures and sound. And that's a lot more difficult than you would think. And they discovered it was very difficult. And so Dixon was working on various things, and he had come up with something called sprockets in the film. That was his development, too, to keep the film steady. Because otherwise it would just slide by and you just get a big blur. And so he also worked on designing something else called the Black Mariah, which is the first film studio. And Edison had ideas with it too, of course. And it was made of canvas painted black on a wooden base that would revolve, which ran into a slight problem. They found out whenever there was a storm, the darn thing was spinning around like crazy. And it was pretty beer.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

It was it spun around for the light, correct? Yeah for the sun.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

But in this, um in this room is where they they filmed this. And we often thought for years you'd see this film of these two guys dancing and a fellow playing the violin, but there was never any sound. And according to just about everyone, the recording was lost. And this is where it starts getting interesting. In 1995, three of us, Peter Dilge, myself, and Jerry Fabris, who was the curator of sound recordings, went into the vault down below. We were just looking at stuff and taking a little tour. And we came to a cigar box. And on it it said Dixon Vile Film. And we looked inside it, and it was a cylinder broken in three pieces. And we were surmising, because we weren't sure, this might be the the sound, the sound recording for that film, which is amazing if it was true. Of course, the cylinder was smashed up and was put back in its place in its cigar box. It's inter interesting because Edison always puts things in cigar boxes. Because he was always smoking cigars.

Edison’s Plan For Moving Pictures

SPEAKER_00 8:45

He had cigar boxes filled with all kinds of this, that, and everything else. I was a um observer in this whole thing. I am not a participant in what would happen next. But I was there when we were all looking at it and talking about it, and the spark was kind of lit. And Peter was rather excited about it, and Jerry was rather excited about it.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

And eventually just explain who explain who they are.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Peter Dilge is a sound recording. Oh God, he's he's everything he's he's he's brilliant. Uh as I say, he's been a friend of mine for like 45 years.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

So what was he uh employee there?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

No, we would a volunteer who would make recordings for when we recorded Les Paul and uh we recorded Christopher Lee, and we recorded a number of other people. He always did the recordings and he did a lot of stuff on his own. He recorded Hillary Clinton, and he's done so much and so much, he's advanced our knowledge so much on the history of sound recording. Brilliant, brilliant guy, and a dear friend who I admire and have always been influenced.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

And the other person was Jerry Fabris.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Jerry Fabris was the curator of sound recordings at Edison. He was the fellow that had control over the cylinders, the discs, the stampers, everything dealing with sound recording. And both of these gentlemen were dear friends, and I always enjoyed their company. Jerry and I used to sing together sometimes. We actually made a couple of cylinders singing, and Peter said he's gonna find a recording of it, which will be kind of fun. But nonetheless, I was at that point at the Edison National Historic Site. I worked there for two years, and after I was gone from there, um in nineteen ninety-eight, I believe, they decided to record um the early original cylinders that were done in Little Meneloe in England. Colonel uh what was his name? Colonel Gerard, uh, who did all the recording in England of uh Gladstone and and Sir Arthur Sullivan, etc. stuff like that. And uh they decided they were gonna go to the the uh Lincoln Center recording department in uh New York, and uh they did all these copies of the recording. And Jerry brought the broken cylinder with him in whatever box it was in, then I'm sure it wasn't in the cigar box anymore. It was put into a a very safe. But the problem was they recorded the other stuff perfectly. What do you do to get this broken cylinder together? And you gotta remember it's very delicate, it's very old, it's from 1894. And so as as Peter put

Black Maria And A Missing Recording

SPEAKER_00 11:40

it, I was sitting in the car and he said I had gone to the dentist the day before and had a cap put on my tooth. And he said I was chewing gum. And he said as I was sitting in traffic, the gum kept getting stuck to the cap of his tooth. And he said, at that instant, he had an idea. He said, Maybe the gum will hold wax together. And it's brilliant. And so he said he had a piece of a cylinder, nothing historic, and he and he broke it in half and took out a little piece of gum and put it over there and put the two pieces together, and he said, they stuck. And he said, I could wipe it off. And he said that's such such Edison thinking. Yes, of course. You know what I mean? That's that's the amazing thing. Like Peter is he's one of one of the crazy people that do the most amazing things. And you have to be a little bit off center sometimes to to think of these things. And so he said to Jerry, I got it. We will take the gum and put it together. Now, what this recording was is what we think is Dixon playing the violin, and it only runs for like 15, 16 seconds, and and two guys just dancing. And of course there's an announcement in the beginning, is everyone ready? Blah blah and then they record, and then you can actually hear, probably not in the filtered ones that they put out now, you can hear the the projector running out of the film going 'cause it's it's a short little thing and it moved pretty fast to get kind of good quality. But I find what Peter does is as inventive and as unique as the film itself. And you know something? This has never been talked about. There's not a mention of this. Peter just said I just didn't mention it. He said, but I think it's the greatest thing I've ever done. And I said, I agree. This is brilliant. So they put the cylinder together in in the uh in the uh in the library there, the sound recording library there. And he put it on the cylinder and he had his own electronic playback head that had play in it, because a lot of times those records they

The 1995 Cigar Box Discovery

SPEAKER_00 13:50

don't go exactly steady, they're a little like off here and there. Right. And so he hooked it up and they said, just to make sure they did it again. And it obviously hadn't been played much at all. Because how many times you're gonna play it, you know, like beforehand, it was in very good shape.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

And maybe they broke it right away. You you know how many times I buy especially the black wax cylinder is the old one, especially the old Amberolas, even more so. You break, you look at them, they they crumble.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

And so I figure the old man, Edison, probably put it in a cigar box to save it because it is the first sound recording with a film that's in time. The first. I mean, it's really incredible when you think of this.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

It is. It absolutely so is the video, which we're gonna play for you all in a little what a little in a few moments, but and you can hear people talking in the background. I uh in the beginning, let's go, it's going, or whatever it is, let's start. I forget what it's saying. Everybody ready? And I have the everybody ready, yeah. I have the video from the Library of Congress or or wherever it is. I mean, the the video, the video part of it's always existed, right? It was saved, but the audio part thought the audio part was thought it was lost, you know, throughout time. And here these guys are wandering around wandering around's a big term in the in the archives of the at the Edison Museum or the historic site or wherever, and they come across a cigar box that no one's ever before or looked at.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

It wasn't open before, it was known to exist. It was in an inventory in 1964.

unknown 15:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

And probably beforehand, but that's as far as it went. And for myself, I didn't even know it existed. Jerry did, because of course he was the curator, and he pulled it down and said, This might be. Because nobody knew. Nobody knew if that was the recording that went with that film. They found me. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

It was the ambulance. They always find me.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

But nonetheless, as I said, I I was just an observer. I had nothing to do with this. I didn't I didn't make a discovery. I didn't, it was just something I saw, I saw it in the cigar box. That was so amazingly fascinating to see. And it was just the three of us.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

I mean, that's an amazing story. How does it get to the next step? How does it get to where someone plays it with the film for the first time, to be sure?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

It was done in the library at Lincoln Center.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

So you had the f the video as well.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Well, they didn't need the they didn't need the film because they can just match it up eventually. Right. And so the whole idea was recording it. They were recording all the other brown wax cylinders that Edison had from uh the Colonel in Little Mel Menelo. And, you know, Prime Minister Gladstone and others like that. There was all those cylinders were re-recorded by uh by them. And this is important stuff because this preserves it. And it was fortunate that Jerry brought it, and it was absolutely mind-numbing how brilliant Peter was in developing this simple, very Edison-like fix, taking little pieces of gum and and holding it together. I mean, and by doing so, he rescued

Chewing Gum Repairs A Wax Cylinder

SPEAKER_00 17:10

the sound of that film.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

You know, maybe we could just play a little clip, the short one little clip for it now. It seems like the perfect time to make to uh put that on. I hopefully got it into the right spot. The second time, I guess they gotta take like that, I think. So that horn, that's the same horn that's in the picture?

SPEAKER_00 18:48

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

I don't uh uh so I wonder where that horn went, disappeared too.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

You know, I mean that's you gotta remember it's 1890s. They had an opportunity for many years to throw stuff out.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Yeah, I guess that's true. You kind of wonder you kind of write it.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

It's an amazing thing, though, that recording and that film are back together and will be for perpetuity, and it was all due to a stick of Wrigley's chewing gum. The next time you bite into a little stick of Wrigley's gum, just think of what you can do with a stick of gum. I mean, that's that's the brilliance. It's it's it's you know, it's it's just thinking outside of the box, which is everything about Edison and everything that we should do today. Do things different, try things different. You don't want to be two anal on things, you want to just look in different ways. And of course, Edison and Dixon had a parting of the ways because they didn't agree. But two WKL Dixon, who was born in 1860 and died in 1835, he uh did uh a uh uh a yeoman's uh share of uh the motion picture. The other thing that's interesting about of course Dixon went to biograph. He also invented uh another system of of basic cards that would flop and you would just turn a crank and you could just watch motion. It was something else he developed. He was very inventive when it came to motion pictures and stuff. And of course,

Hearing The Film Come Alive

SPEAKER_00 20:30

he was pretty devastated that Edison didn't see his vision. But Dixon talked about the amazing things that film is going to do. And he said in the future, someday, they will be taking pictures in Mars and showing it to people. And by golly, we do that. Think about that. I mean, truly a great visionary. Went to Biograph, he developed a studio with glass tops so they could film. Uh he filmed the first motion pictures of a of a newcoming president, William McKinley. Uh that was done by Dixon. He he did all kinds of stuff in England, all over he was involved in it. One last thing to mention, it was kind of fascinating. In 1929, uh Edison was honored for his work in motion pictures, and he was presented with two books. And as I was looking at the books in his personal life, I noticed he put a picture of Dixon in the book because he knew as well as Dixon did. That the invention, the development of the elephant was Dixon. But of course, Edison, he was the head guy, he took he took the credit, basically. And eventually he would hire someone to replace Dixon, in a sense, and as a director, and that was Edwin Porter. And Edwin Porter would do the Great Train Robbery and that infamous recording of Autopsy the Elephant. They're still saying Edison killed the elephant, which he didn't. But Porter would be. Become very, very important in the development of motion pictures. And if you think about it, a biograph which was Dixon was in from the beginning, took in a fella to work with them. His name was D.W. Griffith. And of course, before long, he changes the world with motion pictures as well. So WKL Dixon, a name not well known. Very few people know it. So very important in the history of motion pictures. And his creation, his development is once again reunited, thanks to the brilliance of Peter Dilge and Jerry Vabres.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Well, you were lucky to be there. That's all I could say.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

It's I I consider myself blessed to have been there when we were sitting there talking about it, looking at a cigar box.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

It's just so fun. Well, I'm really glad we can memorialize that

Dickson’s Vision And Later Influence

SPEAKER_01 22:50

story and save it for all of us who are Edison fanatics.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Yeah. And uh Peter, Peter really needs to get an award for this. I really think that he did something truly incredible.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

I think we're gonna have to coax him to get him on, even if we do it by just he can talk just audio if he doesn't want to do video, because I'm sure he has many, many, many stories of things he found and recorded.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

And he said, You know, you know, you and I would have been working in the laboratory if we were around. I said, Maybe we did in a previous life. Who knows? And he said, Do you think when we croak we're gonna meet the old man? I said, I don't know. We'll find out. Wouldn't that be something, huh? So he's a fascinating, brilliant guy. And Jerry, as well, he's with the uh Library of Congress now, working in the sound recording stuff. I mean, he's really brilliant and smart and very musical. As I said, we we made some recordings together on Cylinder that Peter recorded, and uh we had we had a little group we put together called Peter, Paul, and Murray. So we did one performance, that was it. But uh these these are really great, fascinating people who look at the world slightly different, like I do. And I was always very happy in their company. Is that all I need to say?

SPEAKER_01 24:23

It's an amazing story. Um I'm glad we could fill in the holes of what we see. We know that we see the film available on YouTube or anywhere you want to see it. You can always come back and play our video and get to it as well. This is just as uh a note, our podcast is always available on YouTube, and it's also available on audio, on Apple Podcasts, as well as Spotify and all the major regular audio

Where To Watch And How To Reach Us

SPEAKER_01 24:50

podcasts, but video on YouTube. Thank you again, Jack, for uh more great moments in recovering Edison and bringing him to the next generation. And I'm glad we could deposit that story in the way it is. So I'm very happy. I'm glad that photo came to me. I knew that you were the person to ask about it, and I was right. So I'm glad to have had it and uh thank you for sharing the file. My pleasure, and thank you for being on as always. I thank everybody for listening. I look forward to any questions or anything you know how to reach out to us. You can put comments on YouTube, on the audio podcast. There's a little button you can click, and those messages get forwarded to us as well. Thank you all for listening. Thank you, Jack, and thank you, everyone, and have a good day.