Queer British Lovecraftian historical romantic suspense set in 1920s London London Call comprises Lost in Time, Shadows on the Border and Lost in Time, which are also available in audio at Authors Direct, Audible and many other sales platforms and libraries.
Gruesome murders taking place across 1920s London draw Lew and Alec together through the desolation of the East End and the smoky music clubs of Soho. They both have secrets that could get them arrested or killed. In the middle of a murder investigation that involves wild magic, mysterious creatures and illegal sexual desire, who is safe to trust?
The world had to wait 46 years until electricity use became widespread before the first dual-colored traffic light, using this new energy, was installed in Cleveland in the United States. Detroit and New York added yellow between red and green in 1920. The traffic lights that we now know were born and became the norm throughout the world.
The first Convention on the Unification of Road Signals was signed in Geneva on March 30, 1931. Its goal was to increase road traffic safety and facilitate international movement by road through a uniform system of road signals. The majority of signs that we recognize today were defined through this treaty. Traffic lights with three colors (red, yellow, green) became the standard.
Road traffic rose dramatically between 1950 and 1980, creating a need for an increasingly stricter regulation of traffic and the near ubiquitous use of traffic lights. In 2011, the largest French cities had an average of one traffic light-controlled intersection for every 1,000 inhabitants.
While they have long been considered the best solution for managing competing traffic flows, traffic lights are today suspected of fostering accident-prone behavior. This is the reason why many cities are reconsidering the systematic use of traffic lights and are preferring other methods for reducing the speed of vehicles. At the same time, they want to offer better circulation conditions for non-motorised mobility and public transportation. Out of this desire have emerged new light signals for giving these methods right of way. The issue today is to ensure that the most vulnerable road users remain safe and maintain their independence to travel in an environment whose points of reference are in flux.
Disability Statistics in the US: Looking Beyond Figures for an Accessible and Inclusive Society Around 61 million adults in the United States live with a disability. Diving into disability statistics in the US will help us know exactly who is concerned and what...
Our Audio Beacons Guide the Blind and Visually Impaired at the Helsinki SubwayOur audio beacons equip the new line of the Helsinki subway in Finland. They help blind and visually impaired people locate the points of interest of a station. For users with visual...
At What Intersections Should You Install Accessible Pedestrian Signals? When you install accessible pedestrian signals, you first need to ask yourself where exactly they are needed. Are there any intersections blind and visually impaired pedestrians particularly...
Hearing Impaired People: a Multitude of Profiles for Different Needs Did you know that hearing impaired people have several profiles and that the way they identify themselves is important? You may be familiar with deaf and hard of hearing people but for each of...
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures became commercially practical. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923. Before sound-on-film technology became viable, soundtracks for films was commonly played live with organs or pianos.
The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid-to-late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie (although it had only limited sound sequences) was The Jazz Singer, which premiered on October 6, 1927.[2] A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures.
By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial centers of influence (see Cinema of the United States). In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere), the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of silent cinema. In Japan, where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance (benshi), talking pictures were slow to take root. Conversely, in India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry.
The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the laboratory of Thomas Edison, the two inventors met privately. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology.[3] No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his cylinder phonograph. The two devices were brought together as the Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection.[4]
Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for a generation. The primary issue was synchronization: pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in tandem.[7] Sufficient playback volume was also hard to achieve. While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project satisfactorily to fill large spaces. Finally, there was the challenge of recording fidelity. The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound.[8]
Meanwhile, innovations continued on another significant front. In 1900, as part of the research he was conducting on the photophone, the German physicist Ernst Ruhmer recorded the fluctuations of the transmitting arc-light as varying shades of light and dark bands onto a continuous roll of photographic film. He then determined that he could reverse the process and reproduce the recorded sound from this photographic strip by shining a bright light through the running filmstrip, with the resulting varying light illuminating a selenium cell. The changes in brightness caused a corresponding change to the selenium's resistance to electrical currents, which was used to modulate the sound produced in a telephone receiver. He called this invention the photographophone,[14] which he summarized as: "It is truly a wonderful process: sound becomes electricity, becomes light, causes chemical actions, becomes light and electricity again, and finally sound."[15]
Ruhmer began a correspondence with the French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste,[16] who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892. In 1907, Lauste was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid. As described by historian Scott Eyman,
It was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and translated into light waves via a light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a strip about a tenth of an inch wide.[17]
In 1908, Lauste purchased a photographophone from Ruhmer, with the intention of perfecting the device into a commercial product.[16] Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in Berlin.[18] Hungarian engineer Denes Mihaly submitted his sound-on-film Projectofon concept to the Royal Hungarian Patent Court in 1918; the patent award was published four years later.[19] Whether sound was captured on cylinder, disc, or film, none of the available technology was adequate for big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures.[20]
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