If audio technology (radio, etc) developed sooner than video technology, how come early movies were silent?

Question

If audio technology (radio, etc) developed sooner than video technology, how come early movies were silent?

In: 2

Answer 1

First of all, radio and movies began about the same time.

One medium was **transmission/reception**, the other was **record/playback**. Sound broke early on the transmission, but was about 20 years later on the recording. Visual began as the recording and took much much longer to get the transmission to anything near worthwhile.

So when sound recording could finally be done, it was nearly impossible to synchronize with the visual medium. It’d be worse than the old dubbed kung-fu movies when the characters mouth move and the words you hear don’t match.

Until the film smart people figured out how to add sound recording to the film itself. That way it was always synchronized.