ABSTRACT
Fox’s sound-on-film system became available because of the efforts of two recluse scientists working in a private laboratory-still very much in a nineteenth-century research and development tradition. In 1913 an independently wealthy, eccentric, Yale-trained physicist, Theodore Case, opened a private laboratory in his hometown of Auburn, New York, a small city near Syracuse. Spurred on by recent breakthroughs in the telephone and radio fields, Case and his assistant Earl Sponable, sought to improve the Audion tube, a device by which to amplify weak incoming radio waves. In 1917 Case and Sponable perfected the Thalofide Cell, a highly improved vacuum tube. The U.S. Navy Department immediately contracted with Case to adopt this invention to improve ship-to-shore communication. But America’s participation in World War I ended before the two scientists could complete their assigned task, and in 1919 the Navy ceased all funding.1
