History Likes a First

A Scottish film screened in Edinburgh in 1926 has challenged a familiar claim about The Jazz Singer. But perhaps the problem with the history of cinema isn't which film came first. It's our insistence that one of them must.

14 October 2026

Sir,

For almost a century, The Jazz Singer has enjoyed one of those wonderfully convenient descriptions: the world's first “talkie”. The trouble with convenient historical facts is that somebody eventually checks them.

A Scottish film titled Till the Bells Ring was shown in Edinburgh in October 1926, almost a year before The Jazz Singer. Research reported this week has drawn attention to newspaper accounts describing synchronised speech. Advertisements at the time even called it a “super talking picture”. That does not mean we should cross out one title and write in another.

Sound cinema did not arrive overnight. Films were experimenting with synchronised music, effects and speech before either film found its place in history. The Jazz Singer itself was largely silent, despite the spoken and musical sequences for which it became famous. The interesting question is whether there needs to be a winner at all.

History is much easier when somebody comes first. We get a name, a date and, if we're lucky, something that will fit beneath a photograph. A complicated development becomes a fact neat enough for a school textbook and the pub quiz afterwards.

Unfortunately, invention rarely checks the textbook before getting started.

Technologies develop in stages. People working in different places solve different parts of the same problem. Some experiments fail, some disappear, and some arrive before the world is particularly interested in them. Then one succeeds spectacularly and becomes the point from which we remember everything else.

The Jazz Singer does not become less important because evidence exists of an earlier talking film being shown in Edinburgh. Its significance lies in what followed it, not in requiring that everything before it be silent. Nor does Till the Bells Ring need to be crowned the new first to deserve recovery.

Sometimes correcting history does not mean replacing one “first” with another. It means asking whether there was ever really a first at all.

R. D. Kerr