The Silent Films Era The term silent film is a retronym—a term created to retroactively distinguish something from later developments. Early sound films, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927, were variously referred to as the "talkies", "sound films", or "talking pictures". The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is older than film (it was suggested almost immediately after Edison introduced the phonograph in 1877), and some early experiments had the projectionist manually adj

In the 1890s, movies were created with groundbreaking yet rudimentary technology. The first films were made using devices like the Kinetoscope, invented by Thomas Edison, and the Cinématographe by the Lumière brothers. The Kinetoscope, an early motion picture viewer, allowed only one person to watch a short, looped film. In contrast, the Cinématographe could both record and project moving images, letting audiences experience films together. These early cameras were hand-cranked, capturing around