"By the mid-1920s, the resistance of exhibitors to spending money on anything technical or experimental was ubiquitous within the industry. 'We owned a lot of theaters,' said J. J. (Joe) Cohn, production manager at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 'and a lot of the theater [managers] said if we made [pictures with] sound, they wouldn't run 'em.'

"Even Thomas Edison was chastened by the failure, and decided that if he couldn't beat them, he would join them. 'Americans require a restful quiet in the moving picture theater,' he said in May 1926, 'and for them talking from the lips of the figures on the screen destroys the illusion ... the idea is not practical. The stage is the place for the spoken word.'"

[The following year, the first talkie (The Jazz Singer) appeared and was a huge success. (Edison also first envisioned the phonograph as a device not for music and entertainment, but for such things as dictation, documenting oral histories, preserving dying languages, teaching elocution, recording speech, and telling time for the blind.]