ABSTRACT
During the 1920s the sound film came into being in the same orderless fashion as the silent film thirty years before, with knowledgeable men confidently asserting that the new-fangled contrivance offered no commercial advantages. Talking films would be no more than a craze of the moment. Then in a matter of months a swarm of inventors broke through, blazoning their far-from-mutually-exclusive patents. The inevitable discord, law suits and international disputations all come in their train, but eventually a general amnesty—or something approximating to it—was painfully negotiated.
