question: Why were there silent movies when wax cylinders and 78 RPM records existed at the same time?
comment: Because the projectors and phonograph players generally did not move at a constant rate. The speed of audio playback and the framerate of the films would each vary, meaning that after just a few moments, the audio would become disjointed from the visuals. If you've ever watched a youtube video that got de-synced, you know how dissonant that can be. & #x200B; Audio levels were also a problem. Most phonographs played at relatively low volumes; too quiet for a theater. & #x200B; That being said, as early as 1888, [Eadweard Muybridge]( URL_1 ) was pitching his ideas for films with sound to Thomas Edison. So people had ideas about how to do it for as long as there was moving pictures. But we just didn't have the ability to do it well enough to make it commercially viable until the 20th century. & #x200B; EDIT: That wiki article contains a link to [this article]( URL_0 ), which directly addresses the subject.
passages: BULLET::::- "Enquire Within" (Edison cylinder 13023)
  
  BULLET::::- "Nine Gallant Highlanders" (Edison cylinder 13024)
  
  BULLET::::- "Scoot" (Edison cylinder 13025)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Volunteer Fireman" (Edison cylinder 13036)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Three Stages of Women" (Edison cylinder 13037)
  
  Made on the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound, the recordings may have disintegrated:
   Because of the universal desirability of an immediate playback capability, even studios using sound-on-film systems employed a wax disc "playback machine" in tandem with their film recorders, as it was impossible to play an optical recording until it had made the round trip to the film processing laboratory.
   BULLET::::- Early recording media formats: cylinder records versus disc records. In 1877 Thomas Edison invented sound recording and reproduction using tinfoil wrapped around a pre-grooved cylinder, and in 1888 he introduced the wax "Edison cylinder" as the standard record format. In the 1890s Emile Berliner began marketing disc records and players. By the late 1890s cylinders and discs were in competition. Cylinders were more expensive to manufacture and the wax was fragile, but most cylinder players could make recordings. Discs saved space and were cheaper and sturdier, but due to the constant angular velocity (CAV) of their rotation, the sound quality varied noticeably from the groove near the outer edge to the inner portion nearest the center; and disc record players could not make recordings.
   In March 1929, a feature film "The Clue of the New Pin", a part-talkie based on an Edgar Wallace novel, was trade-shown with "The Crimson Circle", a German-UK coproduction which was also based on a Wallace novel. "Crimson" was filmed in DeForest Phonofilm, and "Pin" was made in British Phototone, a sound-on-disc process using 12-inch phonograph records synchronized with the film. However, the UK divisions of both Phonofilm and British Phototone soon closed.
   Not all cylinder records are alike. They were made of various soft or hard waxy formulations or early plastics, sometimes in unusual sizes; did not all use the same groove pitch; and were not all recorded at the same speed. Early brown wax cylinders were usually cut at about 120 rpm, whereas later cylinders ran at 160 rpm for clearer and louder sound at the cost of reduced maximum playing time. As a medium for entertainment, the cylinder was already losing the format war with the disc by 1910, but the production of entertainment cylinders did not entirely cease until 1929 and use of the format for business dictation purposes persisted into the 1950s.
   BULLET::::133. Harry Shalson the Popular Entertainer (1927) Shalson sings "You Go Too Far"
  
  BULLET::::134. Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (1926) Fleischer cartoon originally with green and orange tinting **
  
  BULLET::::135. The Hawaiian Revellers (1928) with Kahola Marsh and His Hawaiian Orchestra
  
  BULLET::::136. Hedicashun (1929) monologue by A. W. Goodwin
  
  BULLET::::137. Helen Lewis and Her All-Girl Jazz Syncopators (1925) Lewis leads her "all-girl" band
  
  BULLET::::138. Helen Menken (1925) Broadway star Helen Menken
  
  BULLET::::139. Henry Cass Demonstration Film (1923)* also at the Engineers Society Auditorium in NYC on April 12, 1923
   Home recording equipment made a cameo appearance in the 1941 Marx Brothers film, "The Big Store". A custom recording was also the original surprise Christmas present in the 1931 version of "The Bobbsey Twins' Wonderful Secret" (when the book was rewritten in 1962 as "The Bobbsey Twins' Wonderful Winter Secret," it became an 8 mm movie).
   Some pre-1931 sound films made by Warner Bros. and First National have been lost because they used a sound-on-disc system with a separate soundtrack on special phonograph records. If some of a film's soundtrack discs could not be found in the 1950s when 16 mm sound-on-film reduction prints of early "talkies" were being made for inclusion in television syndication packages, that film's chances of survival plummeted: many sound-on-disc films have survived only by way of those 16 mm prints.
   From the mid-1890s until World War I, both phonograph cylinder and disc recordings and machines to play them on were widely mass-marketed and sold. The disc system superseded the cylinder in Europe by 1906 when both Columbia and Pathe withdrew from that market. By 1913, Edison was the only company still producing cylinders in the USA although in Great Britain small manufacturers pressed on until 1922.
  
  Section::::Dominance of the disc record.
   BULLET::::- "The Dickson Experimental Sound Film" (ca. 1894, 15 sec.), two men dancing and a man playing a violin in front of a huge metal cone (the microphone for the wax cylinder the sound was recorded on)
  
  BULLET::::- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (all 1894, 1 min.)
  
  BULLET::::- "Annie Oakley" (?? sec.)
  
  BULLET::::- "Buffalo Dance" (16 sec.)
  
  BULLET::::- "Bucking Broncho" (?? sec.)
  
  BULLET::::- "The Suburbanite" (1904, 9 min.), a polite comedy about the exploits of a middle-class family moving to the "burbs" of New Jersey
   Although attempts to create sync-sound motion pictures go back to the Edison lab in 1896, only from the early 1920s were the basic technologies such as vacuum tube amplifiers and high-quality loudspeakers available. The next few years saw a race to design, implement, and market several rival sound-on-disc and sound-on-film sound formats, such as Photokinema (1921), Phonofilm (1923), Vitaphone (1926), Fox Movietone (1927) and RCA Photophone (1928).
   In the 1990s, digital audio systems were introduced and began to prevail. In some of them the sound recording is again recorded on a separate disk, as in Vitaphone; others use a digital, optical sound track on the film itself. Digital processes can now achieve reliable and perfect synchronization.
  
  Section::::Digital recording.
   BULLET::::- The Movietone sound system, developed by Fox Film Corporation (later 20th Century Fox) was first demonstrated to the public, at the Sam H. Harris Theatre in New York City. Shown by a movie projector equipped to play sound-on-film, the one-reel film preceded the feature presentation, "What Price Glory?". Though not quite synchronized, the film included the sight and sound of popular singer Raquel Meller.
  
  Section::::January 22, 1927 (Saturday).
   Section::::Crucial innovations.
  
  A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback:
  
  Section::::Crucial innovations.:Advanced sound-on-film.
   One the collections notable recordings was a brown Wax Cylinder (c.1895) from Wheeling, WV. This recording by the vocalist Edward M. Favor is one of the earliest recordings in the archives. Its volume is faint and was intended to be used with a tube and earphone type machine. Historians assume that not more than 50 pieces were made of this cylinder.
   BULLET::::87. The Duke and Duchess of York Arrive at Farm Cove (1927) film first shown 12 May 1927 at the Lyceum in Sydney, Australia
  
  BULLET::::88. Dunio and Gegna (1927) instrumental comedians, play "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" on violin and cello (BFI Database)
  
  BULLET::::89. Drink to Me Only (1926) Gwen Farrar (1899-1944) sings title song
  
  BULLET::::90. East Side, West Side (1925) also known as "The Sidewalks of New York" **
  
  BULLET::::91. Edith Sitwell (1927) reads from her work
  
  BULLET::::92. El misterio de la Puerta del Sol (1929) first sound feature film made in Spain
   Phonofilm was used mainly to record stage performances, speeches, and musical acts in and around New York City, but Hollywood movie studios expressed little interest in the system. Since the Hollywood studios controlled the major theater chains, de Forest showed his films in independent theaters in a short-form series, akin to vaudeville, which included Max and Dave Fleischer's "Song Car-Tunes". The Fleischers used the Phonofilm process for their animated shorts, which included the now-classic "Follow the Bouncing Ball" gimmick.
   Also important is the quality of the material: the earliest tinfoil recordings wore out fast. Once the tinfoil was removed from the cylinder it was nearly impossible to re-align in playable condition. 
   Early materials in the 19th century were hardened rubber, wax, and celluloid, but early in the 20th century a shellac compound became the standard. Since shellac is not hard enough to withstand the wear of steel needles on heavy tone arms, filler made of pulverized shale was added. Shellac was also fragile, and records often shattered or cracked. This was a problem for home records, but it became a bigger problem in the late 1920s with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc motion picture "talkie" system, developed in 1927.
   The Edison team had experimented with Vacuum Deposited Gold masters as early as 1888, and it has been reported that some brown wax records certainly were molded, although it seems nobody has found these, in recent years, or can identify them. The Edison Record, "Fisher Maiden", was an early record that was experimented with for the process. The 1888 experiments were not very successful due to the fact the grooves of the cylinders were square, and the sound waves were saw-tooth-shaped and deep. The records came out scratched and it was very time-consuming. Many failures and very few that come out.
   However, in the days of analog technology, no process involving a separate disk could hold synchronization precisely or reliably. Vitaphone was quickly supplanted by technologies which recorded an optical soundtrack directly onto the side of the strip of motion picture film. This was the dominant technology from the 1930s through the 1960s and is still in use although the analog soundtrack is being replaced by digital sound on film formats.
   Edison had introduced wax cylinders that played for nominally 4 minutes (instead of the usual 2) in 1909 under the "Amberol" brand. These were made from a harder (and more easily breakable) form of wax to withstand the smaller stylus used to play them. The longer playing time was achieved by shrinking the groove size and spacing them twice as close together. In 1912, the Edison company eventually acquired Lambert's patents to the celluloid technology, and almost immediately started production under a variation of their existing "Amberol" brand as "Edison Blue Amberol Records". These new celluloid recordings were given a core made from plaster of Paris. The celluloid material itself was blue in color, but purple was introduced in 1919, "... for more sophisticated selections". The use of camphor in Edison's celluloid base rendered it more stable, and the plaster core provided further resistance to possible shrinkage, but the playing surface is still liable to split if stored in less than ideal conditions; however, the groove pitch rarely changes. The plaster core itself can deteriorate in conditions that are too damp or too dry. Nevertheless, most Blue Amberol cylinders are, today, quite playable on antique phonographs or modern equipment alike (although the plaster core may need some reaming).
   BULLET::::- November 13 – World premiere of Walt Disney's "Fantasia" at the Broadway Theatre in New York City, the first film to be released in a multi-channel sound format ("see Fantasound"). The film also marks the first use of the click track while recording the soundtrack, overdubbing of orchestral parts, simultaneous multitrack recording and is cited as a key chapter in the conception and development of the multi-channel surround system.
  
  BULLET::::- December 5 – Release of "The Thief of Bagdad", pioneering the use of chroma key effects.
   Three types of optical sound-on-film technology emerged in the 1920s: Photofilm, Photophone and Movietone. A fourth major contender for the sound film market - Warner Brothers' Vitaphone sound-on-disc system which synchronized large-size (16") phonographic records with a film's projector was used on early talkies, such as their' 1927 hit "The Jazz Singer" (which was marketed as being ""all singing"" though the talking was sporadic, used in only several isolated sequences), utilised Vitaphone discs, but by 1931, optical sound-on-film would supplant the separate sound-on-disc technology.
  
  Section::::Film and radio.:1919-1926: Phonofilm.
   In 1927, Warner Bros. released the first feature-length film with sound, "The Jazz Singer", whose audio track was recorded with a proprietary technology called Vitaphone. The film's success persuaded other studios to go to the considerable expense of adding microphones to their sets, and scramble to start producing their own "talkies".
  