Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner

Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner (also known as Joseph T. Tykociner; October 5, 1877 – June 11, 1969) was a Polish engineer and a pioneer of sound-on-film technology.

Tykociner was born into a Jewish family in Włocławek, a town in Polish territory then under Russian control. He worked for the Marconi Company in 1901 in London at the time the first radio signal was transmitted across the Atlantic. At the age of eighteen he came to the United States. In New York City he met Nikola Tesla and became an expert in shortwave radio. He received a jeweled gold watch from Czar Nicholas II for setting up a radio communication system for the Russian fleet. He was at St. Petersburg's Helsinki Station when Lenin returned from exile in 1917. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he worked on radio for the Polish government.

He worked from 1918 to develop a system of recording and reproducing synchronized sound on motion picture film. He became the University of Illinois's first research professor of engineering in 1921. On June 9, 1922, Tykociner publicly demonstrated for the first time a motion picture with a soundtrack optically recorded directly onto the film. When Tykociner demonstrated the first sound-on-film motion picture recordings the projector had a photoelectric cell made by his Illinois colleague Jakob Kunz at its heart. In the first sounds ever publicly heard from a composite image-and-audio film, Helena Tykociner, the inventor's wife, spoke the words, "I will ring," and then rang a bell. Next, Ellery Paine, head of the university's Department of Electrical Engineering, recited the Gettysburg Address. The demonstration was written up in the New York World on July 30, 1922. A dispute between Tykociner and university president David Kinley over patent rights to the process thwarted its commercial application.

Tykonicer applied for a patent shortly before the public demonstration. The patent was awarded in 1926. Many people consider Theodore Case as the inventor of the sound film even though Tykociński made sound film 3 years before him. TYK In 1919, Lee De Forest filed patents for his sound-on-film process Phonofilm, unaware of Tykociner's work. DeForest, working with Theodore Case, produced several short films in 1921 and 1922, and introduced Phonofilm at a presentation at the Rivoli Theater in New York City on April 15, 1923. Case and DeForest had a falling out, and Case took his patents to William Fox, who used Case's patents to develop Fox Movietone.

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