We generally think of the rise of “talkies” in the 1920s. The first movie with sound actually dates from 1895, when a short film called "Dickson Experimental Sound Film" was made. The image is that of Edison engineer W. K. L. Dickson playing a violin. The sound was recorded on a wax cylinder at the same time the film was shot. The Edison company was working on ways to present both images and sound, but there is no evidence that this film was ever shown to the public with sound, due to problems developing the technology to synchronize separately-recorded media. Eventually, the two were physically separated, and the film went to the Library of Congress, while the Edison National Historic Site had the wax cylinder, which broke at some point. The wax cylinder was rediscovered in the 1960s, and the audio was recovered and synched with the film in 2000. -via Futility Closet
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