Video of the Day: Subway Circa 1905

That's amazing! Everyone wore so many layers of clothing.

Dat Muuwee mentioned above is not"Dancing

in the Rain" but"Singing in the Rain".

My father had an Orchestra in the 1920's that

just played for silent movies till 1929 or so

to augment the business of playing in rich Whore

houses on Long Island he was busted but only spoke

Italian so he was released,He was cute.

Hey SGI, the cable reference was a joke. They probably got the juice off the 3rd rail, the same that power the trains themselves.

People dressed so beautifully back then.

if you actually watch the movie all the way through, you'll see in the credits that the sound was added in 2006.

This is obviously fake--they're not even shoving one another.

Jeez! Of course they didn't have PA systems in 1905! They used megaphones: cone-shaped tubes which acoustically amplified sound. Sound was recorded primarily on phonograph cylinders during the time that the film was shot. There was no way possible to record soundtracks on the cylinders since playing time was limited to four minutes.

Why do you people try to equate everything with modern technological references? Are you so vapid as to believe that everything that you are familiar with was used forty years ago, let alone 103 years? Everything didn't just pop into existence when you were born; and, not everything existed back then.

PS - Wanna have fun finding out about how sound came to movies? Rent "Dancing in the Rain," a 1950's musical comedy (very musical, very funny) about a 1920's movie company struggling with the switch to "Talkies." Among other things, it shows just how crude sound recording was, even 20 years after the subway film was made.

There certainly would have been no P.A. system. That sounded unauthentic.

Fascinating film. And like most, the scene on the platform at what I presume is Grand Central is wonderfully evocative. But regarding the sound: I am no expert, but sound recording was still pretty primitive stuff in 1905, equipment was bulky and balky, and I sincerely doubt the sounds we hear on the film were recorded at that time. More likely, they are much more recent (1920's? 1950's? - did clear public address systems such as that heard on the final platform exist in 1905 or even 1920?), dubbed in for effect. The effect is fine, but it's probably not authentic.

It seems that a good number of the bloggers here fall into the post-GenX, twentysomething hipsters category who possess no knowledge of anything older than themselves. Of course the sound isn't perfectly synced because this was a SILENT movie. There was no recorded soundtracks for silent fims. When shown in theaters, the musical score was played by a live musicians. What you heard was dubbed by film restoration specialists in the 1980s-90s time period.

For the person questioning the authenticty of the film, check out Billy Bitzer's bio here:

[url]http://www.imdb.com/name/nm000...[/url]

he was one of the early pioneers of cinematography.

And, to JimG, they didn't run cables. The power was supplied via dynamos.

Love the hats!

As a lighting technician I can't help but to try to get glimpses of the lighting car on the track to the left. Must have been a carbon arc lamp, they run on DC just like the trains. Or they ran a crap load of cable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp#Carbon_arc_lamp

G- Train sprint! Awesome.

The sound was most likely recorded at the time and then synched up in post in all it's crude glory.

Let's bring back top hats and parasols.

yeah this is the same clip they show on just about every history of the nyc subway show ever made

and yes you can even see where the tunnels used to connect if you watch the 2/3 trains go by at times square while waiting for the S train

All those long dead folks...

G-train sprint!

LOL!

Thanks for posting this, Gothamist.

Love the clothes.

Cool.. I like how they were doing the G-train sprint at 42nd street.

and look, no Scientology Stress-o-Meters. cool!

The most awesome part is that the original subway engineering has held up so well over the past century.

The sound was obviously added in later.

Just a note that Andrew Sullivan has been on vacation all week and the item on his blog you refer to was posted by one of his subs, Chris Bodenner.

The saddest part is how similar this old footage looks to subways today.

Also, I have to question the age of the film somewhat given the use of sound. Can someone with a better knowledge of sync sound recording speak to that?

Can anyone older than 103 years old verify

Is this real?

Never mind, the same question might asked in

year 2111 again, which is another 103 years.

Iloved minute 5. Thanks jen!

Awesome

I can actually hear the announcements.

Check out the outfits on passengers!

finally gothamist does something right. love this

I always loved this vid.

Topic tangent:

They should have kept the 42nd St crosstown line as a part of IRT's north/south trunk lines rather than turn it into a overcrowded Shuttle.