I know who is going to win the Blue Ray verse Hi-Def DVD competition, and you would too if you knew who won the battle between “Vitaphone” and “Photophone”. The question in the mid-1920’s was how to make moving pictures talk. And the choice that was made had little to do with practicality or science or even business. It was rather a titanic struggle of personalities; the insight of a genius, the unlimited chutzpa of one man, the unlimited greed of another, and the gullibility of a movie sex goddess.
Alexander Graham Bell (above) was a Scottish eugenics enthusiast who had already invented the telephone by converting sound waves into electrical waves using magnets. In 1880, with the help of Miss Sara Orr, his assistant, Bell stumbled upon an amazing purple-gray metal usually found in soils beneath locoweed; when hit with photons this metal, selenium, gives off electrons; the more photons the more electrons. Bell realized that by varying the amount of light striking a strip of selenium he could vary the amount of electricity flowing out of the metal. Bell figured this idea, which he called the Photophone, was going to make him even richer. It didn’t. His patents sat unused in corporate vaults for fifty long years, waiting for the application of a little chutzpa.
Thirty-nine years later The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed as a subsidiary of General Electric with two major assets, the technical know-how of the Marconi Wireless Company, and the unlimited self confidence of a Marconi employee, David Sarnoff (above). Sarnoff was put in charge of the broadcast arm of RCA, the National Broadcasting Company. And in 1929 he engineered its take over of the Victor Talking Machine Company, because they were the world’s largest maker of phonographs.
Alexander Graham Bell (above) was a Scottish eugenics enthusiast who had already invented the telephone by converting sound waves into electrical waves using magnets. In 1880, with the help of Miss Sara Orr, his assistant, Bell stumbled upon an amazing purple-gray metal usually found in soils beneath locoweed; when hit with photons this metal, selenium, gives off electrons; the more photons the more electrons. Bell realized that by varying the amount of light striking a strip of selenium he could vary the amount of electricity flowing out of the metal. Bell figured this idea, which he called the Photophone, was going to make him even richer. It didn’t. His patents sat unused in corporate vaults for fifty long years, waiting for the application of a little chutzpa.Thirty-nine years later The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed as a subsidiary of General Electric with two major assets, the technical know-how of the Marconi Wireless Company, and the unlimited self confidence of a Marconi employee, David Sarnoff (above). Sarnoff was put in charge of the broadcast arm of RCA, the National Broadcasting Company. And in 1929 he engineered its take over of the Victor Talking Machine Company, because they were the world’s largest maker of phonographs.Sarnoff figured his radio network would increase sales of his RCA Victor Records, which would increase sales of his RCA Victor Phonographs which would increase the ratings of NBC. Today this is called synergy. In 1925 Sarnoff okayed the creation of a spinoff to that technology, the RCA Photophone, which was an improvement on Bell’s patent for recording sound directly onto film. 
But Western Electric had already introduced a better quality sound with its Vitaphone technology. This involved recording the motion picture soundtrack onto an 11 inch wax disc, what would one day be called an LP. The turntable that held the record was driven (at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute) by the same motor that also drove the film reel (11 minutes long at 18 frames per second). If the projectionist was careful to align the film correctly in the gate and the phonograph needle correctly on the record before starting each reel of film, the picture and sound match would be seamless.
But Western Electric had already introduced a better quality sound with its Vitaphone technology. This involved recording the motion picture soundtrack onto an 11 inch wax disc, what would one day be called an LP. The turntable that held the record was driven (at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute) by the same motor that also drove the film reel (11 minutes long at 18 frames per second). If the projectionist was careful to align the film correctly in the gate and the phonograph needle correctly on the record before starting each reel of film, the picture and sound match would be seamless.This system was used by Warner Brothers Studio to record the first huge “talkie” hit, “The Jazz Singer”, in 1927, and gave Warner and Western Electric a lead in the movie/sound business. The Western Electric system was clumsy and expensive. But the sound was of a higher quality than the RCA PhotoPhone system. To compete Sarnoff was going to have to create audience demand for his inferior alternative. And what he lacked was the audience. And that is where Joe Kennedy came in.
Time Magazine insisted that Joe made his money because “…he possessed a passion for facts, a complete lack of sentiment and a marvelous sense of timing.” Baloney; Joe was greedy, he was also lucky and he was a major horn dog. Back in 1925, when Joe was still a banker, he had been hired to put together a stock offering for a group of vaudeville producers who were making silent movie shorts to show in their theatres as part of the vaudeville programs.
Time Magazine insisted that Joe made his money because “…he possessed a passion for facts, a complete lack of sentiment and a marvelous sense of timing.” Baloney; Joe was greedy, he was also lucky and he was a major horn dog. Back in 1925, when Joe was still a banker, he had been hired to put together a stock offering for a group of vaudeville producers who were making silent movie shorts to show in their theatres as part of the vaudeville programs. 
Joe had taken a hard look at these “pants pressers”, as he called them, and decided he could do better. He bought out his erstwhile employers and formed the Film Booking Office, which was quickly turning a tidy little profit making cheap westerns and melodramas for a string of Vaudeville houses. And when David Sarnoff came sniffing around Joe was smart enough to see the potential. Kennedy and Sarnoff agreed to a partnership, and to keep it secret for the time being.
Using RCA’s money and Joe’s insider connections at FBO, they bought controlling interest in the 700 theatres of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theatres Corporation (KAO). Edward Albee agreed to the deal only if he was allowed to stay on as President. But a month later Albee issued an order to Kennedy, who then bluntly informed him, “Didn’t you know, Ed? You’re washed up. Through.” And he was. Albee died 16 months later, just about the time Joe made the acquaintance of a four foot eleven inch movie goddess with a daddy fixation, who gave him the keys to the kingdom.
Gloria Swanson once accurately observed, “All they had to do was put my name on the marquee and watch the money roll in”. By 1927, after making 57 movies, she was the highest paid star in Hollywood. She was also broke, thanks to her three husbands and her lavish life style. On the advice of her accountant she met with Joe Kennedy and he talked her into granting him power of attorney. He immediately fired her accountant and incorporated her in Delaware, as Gloria Swanson Productions, with him as president at a healthy salary. Joe was clearly now in the inside of Hollywood and a respected part of that business.
Using RCA’s money and Joe’s insider connections at FBO, they bought controlling interest in the 700 theatres of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theatres Corporation (KAO). Edward Albee agreed to the deal only if he was allowed to stay on as President. But a month later Albee issued an order to Kennedy, who then bluntly informed him, “Didn’t you know, Ed? You’re washed up. Through.” And he was. Albee died 16 months later, just about the time Joe made the acquaintance of a four foot eleven inch movie goddess with a daddy fixation, who gave him the keys to the kingdom.Gloria Swanson once accurately observed, “All they had to do was put my name on the marquee and watch the money roll in”. By 1927, after making 57 movies, she was the highest paid star in Hollywood. She was also broke, thanks to her three husbands and her lavish life style. On the advice of her accountant she met with Joe Kennedy and he talked her into granting him power of attorney. He immediately fired her accountant and incorporated her in Delaware, as Gloria Swanson Productions, with him as president at a healthy salary. Joe was clearly now in the inside of Hollywood and a respected part of that business.Gloria admitted to being relived that “Joe Kennedy had taken over my life.” Fairly shortly Joe also became her lover. She wrote, “He was like a roped horse, rough, ardous...”. Gloria had no idea.
On October 23, 1928, the deal with Sarnoff came out into the open with the formation of RKO Pictures, (sometimes labeled “RKO RADIO PICTURES”) which would make “nothing but talkies”. In exchanging his FBO and KAO stock for RKO stock Joe pocketed at least $2 million profit. He stayed on to manage the start up company, but he really wasn’t interested in making movies. Less than a year later, during a quiet dinner, Gloria mentioned she had overheard that Joe had given a writer a new car and charged it to her company. She thought it was just a mistake. Unexpectedly Joe exploded in anger and walked out. Gloria learned later, via a press release, that Kennedy was returning to New York and had resigned from Gloria Swanson Productions. Assembling what records that could be found, Gloria’s old accountant discovered that besides drawing a salary till the day he quit, Joe had run her company into debts of close to one million dollars (today’s equivalent would be $12 million). Gloria would later write “When I die, my epitaph should read: she paid the bills. That’s the story of my private life.”
Joe’s exit left Sarnoff in sole control of RKO, but again, Sarnoff was not interested in running a studio. He was thinking bigger. By keeping down the costs of the PhotoPhone system, and by not insisting that individual theatres chose one or the other, he isolated the VitaPhone system and within a couple of years starved it for product. Soon even “The Jazz Singer” had to be re-released with an inferior RCA Photophone soundtrack, which is the scratchy horrible soundtrack you hear on prints of the film today. That meant that Sarnoff had a financial share of every film shot, not just the ones exhibited at RKO theatres, like the Roxy Theatre in Manhatten (below). 
And that was how the RCA PhotoPhone system beat out a superior sound system and by 1935 had come to dominate the motion picture industry, as it did until the introduction of digital sound in 1988. And sure, high speed internet connections are quickly making the DVD as obsolete as the 35mm film with analog soundtrack, but there are still fortunes to be made in DVD's before the personalities catch up to the technology, again. But the photo ops with the internet are not nearly as dramatic as the ones left behind by the old technology.(Below, Gloria Swanson emoting in the wreckage of the Roxy, New York.)
Joe’s exit left Sarnoff in sole control of RKO, but again, Sarnoff was not interested in running a studio. He was thinking bigger. By keeping down the costs of the PhotoPhone system, and by not insisting that individual theatres chose one or the other, he isolated the VitaPhone system and within a couple of years starved it for product. Soon even “The Jazz Singer” had to be re-released with an inferior RCA Photophone soundtrack, which is the scratchy horrible soundtrack you hear on prints of the film today. That meant that Sarnoff had a financial share of every film shot, not just the ones exhibited at RKO theatres, like the Roxy Theatre in Manhatten (below). And that was how the RCA PhotoPhone system beat out a superior sound system and by 1935 had come to dominate the motion picture industry, as it did until the introduction of digital sound in 1988. And sure, high speed internet connections are quickly making the DVD as obsolete as the 35mm film with analog soundtrack, but there are still fortunes to be made in DVD's before the personalities catch up to the technology, again. But the photo ops with the internet are not nearly as dramatic as the ones left behind by the old technology.(Below, Gloria Swanson emoting in the wreckage of the Roxy, New York.)- 30 -
Sir Charles represented the tiny market town of Boroughbridge, 13 miles northwest of York. It was the very epitome of “a rotten borough”. The election districts of Parliament had not been redrawn in two hundred years, and fishing villages that had been washed out to sea, and hamlets long abandoned still had sent representatives to London. Meanwhile, newly industrialized population centers were underrepresented, like Bristol, where only 6,000 out of the 104,000 citizens could vote in 1831.
There were riots that fall in Manchester and Birmingham, and a half dozen other towns. But things came to head on Friday, October 29th 1831, when the Courts were set to open in the west coast port city of Bristol. The Official Recorder for those courts came parading into town in a carriage pulled by four magnificent matching grey horses. He was none other than Sir Charles Wetherell, and it is hard to see how he could have chosen a worse time for a display of ostentation and pomp. Shops and markets had closed so no one would be dissuaded from joining the crowds gathering to “welcome” Sir Charles.
Expecting trouble three troops of Dragoons were stationed on the outskirts of Bristol. Sir Charles’ carriage was met by 300 “marshals”, especially hired for the occasion. A crowd estimated at 2,000 people packed the route, hissing and booing as Sir Charles passed. And when the carriage crossed the bridge over the River Bath, stones were thrown.
The procession reached the Guildhall at noon. There the town clerk, Mr. Ludlow, tried to make a speech praising the reform movement. But the crowded courtroom would not be placated, and the hissing drove poor Mr. Ludlow into retreat. From atop the bench Sir Charles imperiously threatened to arrest anyone interfering with the court, and the catcalling became even louder. Eventually Sir Charles had to withdraw. Once he was gone, the crowd gave three cheers for the King.
A carriage took Sir Charles through the thick crowds to the Mansion-house on Queen Square, where he was to spend the night. But once he was safely inside several of the “Marshals”, so called “Bludgeon Men”, sallied into the crowd to arrest individuals they deemed troublemakers. This increased the anger of the crowd, who attacked the house and drove the mayor and the town council up the staircase to the second floor. This attack was stopped by the timely arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Brereton, with a single troop of dragoons. Despite Sir Charles’ demand that the troops open fire on the crowd, Brereton spoke to them instead and they dispersed willingly. At about three o’clock Col. Brereton returned with his troopers to their barracks. He might have been more cautious had he known that while transporting their prisoners to jail, the Bludgeon Men were waylaid and the “troublemakers” were freed.
The Mayor and council spent the night boarding up the broken windows and doors, but all their work was for naught. Saturday afternoon some six hundred angry men and women smashed through the front door while Sir Charles escaped out the roof, jumping into a neighboring house. He was then spirited out of town dressed as a groom. But his work in Bristol was done.
Sir Charles (above) was at first confused by what had happened. The night of his escape he confessed to an inn keeper, “I am not aware that I ever injured any individual in the city.” But by the time Parliament convened in December he was sure again.
In January of 1832 eighty-two people went on trial for crimes committed during the riot. Despite a petition for clemency signed by 10,000 citizens of Bristol, four men were hung over the gates of the new jail. The punishment drove the hangman to sob uncontrollably so that he almost fell off the scaffold. But the four were hung, nevertheless. A fifth man, James Ives, was judged insane and his death sentence was commuted to transportation to Australia for life. Seventy-four others were also exiled to Australia, while forty-three were sentenced to hard labor in England. Of those forty-three, one old woman, convicted of receiving silver plate looted from the Mansion-house, hung herself in prison. Col Brereton was court-martialed for refusing to fire on the crowds, and after a week of testimony at his court-martial, he shot him self in the heart. He left behind two small motherless children. His second in command was allowed to resign and sell his commission. Meanwhile, seven of those sentenced to transportation to Australia died of cholera before their ship even set sail. Another, Matthew Warry, jumped ship. While swimming to shore he was shot and killed by a sentry, as was James Ives, the man judged too insane to hang for his crimes against property. And that was the fate of the victims of Sir Charles Wetherell’s “…coarse and vulgar mind…”, all save one.
No one tried to defend any of these victims. Instead the champions of reform concentrated their efforts on passing the Reform bill in 1832. One of the last to speak against the bill, again, was Sir Charles, who knew he had done much to ensure the elimination of his “rotten borough.” He concluded his remarks by saying, “This is the last dying speech and confession of the member for Boroughbridge.” And it was. When Sir Charles stood for election that fall for one of the “new” seats from Oxford University he received so few votes he withdrew his name as a candidate after the first day. He died of a “concussion of the brain” caused by a carriage accident, on Monday, August 17, 1846. He left behind no heirs. And in 1983 his statue was removed from Queens Square in Bristol, because, in the words of the City Council Engineer, “We are redesigning the garden for the 17th century period and Sir Charles will not blend in”.
I would have thought the old fool matched the seventeenth century a lot better than he did his own nineteenth.
But then we come across the criticism of Lincoln offered by Mr. Peter Muggins, a private citizen from Ohio. He wrote the President the following letter: “G-damn you, and your G-damned old, hell fired, G-damned soul to hell. G-damn your G-damned families’ G-damned souls to hell. And G-damn your G-damned friends to hell.” After reading an outburst such as that what else is there to say except…everything? It is easy to insult someone if you are willing to be reduced to vulgarity. The first recorded insult was carved on the walls of an Egyptian tomb 4,300 year ago, when one fisherman ordered a second, “Come over here, you copulater.” And it probably wasn’t original, even then.
Lincoln occasionally gave as good as he got, of course. He described one opponent as a man who could “…compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” But mostly, his wit was addressed to self depreciating humor. When accused of pandering to voters, Lincoln quickly replied, “If I were two faced, would I be wearing this one?” Compared to the horrible things others said about him, Lincoln’s venom couldn’t hold a candle. 
In my subjective search for the wittiest political insult I have been disappointed by most modern commentators on George W. Bush for various reasons. Most fall victim, as Ron Reagan Jr. did when he asked of our former President before he was our President, “What is his accomplishment? That he’s no longer an obnoxious drunk?” Mr. Reagan gets points for bitterness and perhaps accuracy (he did know the younger Bush personally) but I must correspond with the adage that “He who has never been an obnoxious drunk at least once in his life, has not lived”. And the missing element in Mr. Reagan’s observation is that elusive quality of “wit”.
I have eliminated most professional commentators from my search because they have staffs who daily submit attempts at wit, which are then weeded through for prize examples, to wit: Jay Leno on Bush being caught by a microphone using an obscenity at an international conference, “It’s not a big deal, President Bush using a four-letter word. Now if Bush used a four-syllable word…that would be unbelievable”; or David Letterman on the results of a poll; “One percent of Americans participating in this poll believe Dick Cheney is the best Vice President ever. Everybody else in the poll believes that one percent should be wearing funny hats”. 
So I have broadened my search to the world stage but limited it to actual politicians, and for a time I had hopes I had found a choice subject in that indomitable woman, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, known by her fellow politicians as “Attila the Hen” (Clement Freud), “Petain in petticoats” and “La Pasionaria of middle-class privilege” (Denis Healey), “The Immaculate Misconception (Norman St. John-Stevas) or simply “Virago Intacta” (various sources.)
She was described by Lord St. John of Fawsley this way: “When she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks”, and Clive James described her speeches as sounding, “…like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.” Johnathan Aiken questioned her grasp of international events. “She probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus”. And Denis Healey compared her rages to “…charging about like a bargain basement Boadicea.” The depths were surely plumbed however when Tony Banks accused her of behaving “…with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa-constrictor.” In fact the only drawback to Ms. Thatcher as a contender in my search is that she was not as good a wit as the wits she inspired.
The reverse was true of the prince of the British political witticism, legendary Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not for the way he was described but for the way he described others. He spoke of the man elected to replace him in 1946 this way; “An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened, (Clement) Atlee got out. He is a modest man who has much to be modest about”. Of another opponent Churchill said, “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been better if he had never been born. He once stumbled over the truth, but hasty picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” Winston described his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, as looking at foreign affairs “…through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” And he observed that “Harold Wilson is going around the country, stirring up apathy.” And at the award ceremony where Lord Mountbatten was promoted and presented with a medal for bravery after his destroyer was sunk in the Mediterranean, “What could you hope to achieve except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship next time?”
A dutiful socialite, Churchill once bumped into his hostess, Bessie Braddock, at a party. He excused himself, but Ms. Braddock scolded, “Winston, you’re drunk!” To which Winston replied, “Bessie, you’re ugly. And tomorrow I shall be sober.” At another party Lady Astor told him, “Winston, if you were my husband I would flavor your coffee with poison” Churchill told her, “Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it.” 
The Brits have an advantage in political wit-ery because of the weekly “Question Time” which forces their Prime Ministers to submit to cross examination directly from his opponents in full public view, requiring both sides of the aisle to live by their wits. This has given rise to such lifelong political duels as the one-sided war between Benjamin Disraeli, who called his great adversary, William Gladstone (above) , “…essentially a prig…All the prigs spoke of him as the coming man”, and noted that “If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune. And if anybody pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity”. But the best that Gladstone could respond with was to complain that he lost an election because, “We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”. I guess Gladstone was a prig, after all. It’s no wonder then that Queen Victoria complained that Gladstone, in private conversation with her, always spoke to her as if she were a public meeting.
The only nation that comes close to the erudite viciousness of the English is the Australians, and their one-man Olympic insult team – one time Labor Party Prime Minister, the right honorable Paul Keating, who once said that most politicians have brains like a sparrow’s nest - “all s—t and sticks”. Clearly he was exempting himself. It was Keating who described an opposition member as “..a shiver waiting for a spine”, and labeled another as “a desiccated coconut”, “…a lizard on a rock, alive but looking dead.”, and “…the brain damaged Leader of the opposition.” Keating described listening to a speech by John Hewson as similar to “…being flogged with a warm lettuce” and Andrew Peacock as “…an intellectual rust bucket.” And when Peacock repeated an old charge against Keating, the P.M. described the attack as “A dog returning to his vomit.”
Yes, the world is filled with political insults that display wit, verve and élan, as when one British M.P. called another “..a semi-house trained polecat.”, or when Loyld George described Neville Chamberlin as “A retail mind in a wholesale business.”. An Italian politician described Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi as clinging to data “…the way a drunkard clings to a lampposts, not for illumination but to keep him standing up”. Sam Huston said that Thomas Jefferson processed “…all the characteristics of a dog, except loyalty.” And when told that Dan Quayle had announced his intention to become George H.. Bush’s “Pit Bull”, Bill Clinton observed that Quail must have “…every fire hydrant in America worried.”
The supreme American professional political wit (although he never ran for office) was and always will be H. L. Mencken, the man who described democracy as "...the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” It was Mencken who said that if Franklyn Roosevelt became convinced that supporting cannibalism would help him win an election “he would be fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday.” When describing President Warren G. Harding, Mencken wrote, “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
It was Mencken who said that “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar”. But Mencken hit his stride when he stooped to describe Calvin Coolidge. “He slept more than any other president, whether by day or night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.”
No, I believe the best, most accurate, most vicious witticism ever uttered by any politician sprang from the lips of Bob Dole, Republican workhorse and American Presidential candidate. Well before his failed Presidential campaign, Dole was present in 1980 at the White House to attend a reception for former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, before they flew off to attend Anwar Sadat's funeral. Looking over the Blue Room crowded with Presidents, Dole was heard to comment, “There they are. See no evil, hear no evil and…evil.” Accurate, biting, funny and inventive; the very definition of wit.
