In the third of her series looking at Harrogate inventors who've made a difference, Ophelia takes a closer look at Claude Verity – arguably the first person to put sound to motion pictures. 

Sam Warner is widely celebrated as the "father of the talkies" for bringing sound to The Jazz Singer in 1927. Yet few people know that Claude Hamilton Verity had already cracked the problem six years earlier – in his back garden in Harrogate. What he lacked wasn't the idea, it was the monster funding needed to make it work – which he didn't have, but Hollywood did.

Born and raised in Leeds, Claude inherited the family hardware firm with his brother in 1909 after his father's sudden death.  But within a year, he'd left it behind, turned to engineering and moving to Liverpool. 

The next few years saw him drift around England, seemingly unable to settle. By his early forties he was back in Leeds, running the same hardware business at 168 Briggate, and living quietly in Harrogate with his wife and young family.  

After nearly five years of perfecting his invention in complete secrecy, he finally unveiled his creation to the world in 1921 – the "Veritiphone." 

He demonstrated two complete films with fully synchronised speech at Harrogate's Royal Hall. The system worked by linking a film projector to a customised gramophone, with an operator able to fine-tune the sync by sliding a single control knob, correcting any drift to within 1/24th of a second – all without needing to watch the screen. 

His four showings alone drew more than five and a half thousand people, and word soon spread nationwide. By 1922, he was actively seeking financial backers but insisted he had no interest in monopolising his invention – he wanted it spread as widely as possible. 

In 1924, his ambition took him to New York, where he was sought out and interviewed by the New York Times. By then, the project had cost him a staggering £7,000 of his own money – more than half a million pounds in today's terms. 

Why did it go wrong for him? 

Verity seemed on track to become a cinematic legend, but funding and scalability undid him. The race to make movies talk was both a technological and corporate battle – and while Verity tinkered in his garden shed, Warner Bros had teamed up with Bell Telephone Laboratories, AT&T's research arm, on a rival system: Vitaphone. 

Vitaphone used electronic amplification built on Lee De Forest's Audion tube (often called the father of radio broadcasting), plus a condenser microphone sensitive enough to pick up a whisper from feet away – technology that Verity, working alone with a mechanical sliding knob, had no way of matching. Behind it sat decades of telephone engineering expertise and deep corporate pockets; behind Verity sat roughly £7,000 of a hardware merchant's savings. Arguably not an equal fight. 

In many ways, Verity's innovation and creativity has been largely overlooked. He'd solved the creative problem years before Hollywood did – he just never had the infrastructure to back it.

For over a century, Verity's recognition for his contribution to cinema history was virtually non-existent. But his family never forgot, even if history did. 

In 2025, Harrogate Civic Society and Harrogate Film Society mounted a tribute to him, with backing from his descendant, Richard Verity, of Harrogate estate agents Verity Frearson. A mini-exhibition on his life was set up at the West Park Centre – fittingly, just a short walk from the Royal Hall where he'd unveiled the Veritiphone over a century earlier. 

The organisers themselves called him "the forgotten man of cinema".

A century on, the man who taught pictures to talk was finally being talked about.