AI is moving fast and most people are falling behind. 

The Rundown AI keeps you ahead of the curve. 

It's a free AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on the latest AI news, and teaches you how to apply it in just 5 minutes a day.

Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses — tailored to your needs.

Sign up to start learning.

Trivia is more than a game; it’s a global tradition of knowledge and competition. Masters of Trivia’s tournaments have gone live, with 30 fast, multiple-choice questions. Most correct wins. Speed breaks ties. Compete worldwide for a $MOT token prize purse, plus valuable in-kind prizes.

Get the entry link and reminders by email — subscribe free at PlayMOT.

New York City, USA
99 years ago

On the evening of October 6, 1927, an audience at the Warners' Theatre in New York watched what was, for most of its length, an ordinary silent melodrama with title cards. Then Al Jolson, the most popular stage entertainer in America, finished a song on screen, turned to the nightclub crowd in the film, and spoke: 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!' The audience in the real theater erupted. They had just heard a movie actor talk.

The Jazz Singer contained only about two minutes of spoken words, most of them ad-libbed by Jolson, along with half a dozen songs. The sound came from large phonograph discs synchronized with the projector, a system Warner Bros. called Vitaphone. It was clumsy, and it was enough. The film was a sensation, and within two years the silent cinema, a mature art form with a worldwide audience, was commercially dead.

Warner Bros. was a second-tier studio that had gambled heavily on sound when the larger companies saw no reason to disturb a profitable business. The driving force was Sam Warner, who pushed his skeptical brothers to license the technology. He did not live to see it succeed: Sam died of a brain infection on October 5, 1927, the day before the premiere, and none of the four brothers was in the theater that night. The film's profits lifted the studio into the front rank of Hollywood.

The story concerns the son of a Jewish cantor who defies his father to become a popular singer, and it drew closely on Jolson's own life. It also features Jolson performing in blackface, a staple of the American stage in his day and a practice now recognized as a demeaning racial caricature. The film is therefore both a technical landmark and an uncomfortable document of its time, and any honest account of it has to hold both facts together.

The conversion to sound was brutal and fast. Theaters across the country had to be rewired at great expense. Cameras, which whirred noisily, were locked inside soundproof booths, and for a few years films became static and stagy. Actors with heavy accents or unsuitable voices saw their careers end; musicians who had accompanied silent pictures in thousands of theaters lost their jobs. By 1929 nearly all Hollywood production was in sound. At the first Academy Awards ceremony that year, Warner Bros. received a special award for the pioneering talking picture that had changed the industry.

On October 6, 1927, Al Jolson spoke a few unscripted lines from a movie screen and an audience went wild. The silent cinema had about two years left to live. The studio that took the risk became a giant, and the brother who made it happen died the day before the curtain went up.

How much do you know about The Jazz Singer, the Vitaphone sound system, the Warner brothers' gamble, and the rapid end of the silent film era?