On this day 87 years ago (in 1927) an audience at a movie in New York suddenly, about half way through the 90-minute entertainment, went wild with stand-up applauding enthusiasm. What had happened?
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The film was Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer and its star, Al Jolson, had just actually said something. He'd said, his lips quite well synchronised with the sound of his voice, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!"
The Jazz Singer, a great gamble for struggling Warners, was by most definitions the first "talkie".
"The physical presentation of the film itself was remarkably complex," a film scholar writes.
"Each of Jolson's musical numbers [for The Jazz Singer was a musical and one of its numbers was the inimitable Toot Toot Tootsie, Goodbye [that all lovers should be singing to their partners at airports as they leave on journeys] was mounted on a separate reel with a separate accompanying sound disc. There were 15 reels and 15 discs to manage, and the projectionist had to be able to thread the film and cue up the Vitaphone records very quickly. The least stumble, hesitation, or human error would result in public and financial humiliation for the company."
Jolson was a white man but he was a minstrel singer and often appeared, as he does at the end of The Jazz Singer, with a blackened face.
Among those who greeted this first "talkie" with scepticism was silent-film veteran Charlie Chaplin. He was sure they were just a passing fad.
