Besides the actual invention of movies itself, the next best innovation was adding sound to the picture. How they did this is probably a little hard to comprehend in this day and age let alone in 1929. Fleischer Studios, the animators of Popeye, Betty Boop, as well as Superman, made an educational cartoon to explain to the world how sound becomes joined to motion pictures.

It is certainly entertaining to see how they captured sound waves and transferred them to film. And the beauty of this piece is it is in the public domain so you can download a very high quality MPEG-2 version and do whatever you want with it. Lucky for us, the Vintage Tooncast has gone through all of the trouble of converting it to a Flash movie so you can watch it in a jiffy. But if you want to download a beefier version, then check out the Internet Archive.

P.S. If you like classic cartoons like this, the Vintage Tooncast has quite a collection.