Eugene Augustin Lauste facts for kids
Eugène Augustin Lauste (born January 17, 1857, in Montmartre, France – died June 27, 1935, in Montclair, New Jersey) was a French inventor. He played a very important part in developing the technology that made movies possible.
Contents
The Life of an Inventor
Eugène Lauste was a very busy inventor from a young age. By the time he was 23, he had already applied for 53 patents in France. A patent is like a special license that protects an inventor's new idea.
In 1886, Lauste moved to the United States. He started working at the famous Edison Laboratories. There, he met another French-born inventor named William Kennedy Laurie Dickson.
Lauste helped develop the Kinetoscope. This was an early machine that showed moving pictures to one person at a time. It was a very important step before modern movie projectors. Lauste left Edison's company in 1892.
Creating New Machines
Lauste also worked on an idea for a combustion gasoline engine. This is the type of engine that powers cars today. He built a working model in the 1890s. However, he stopped working on it because people thought such a noisy machine would not be popular.
Later, he worked with Major Woodville Latham. Lauste helped design and build a movie projector called the Eidoloscope. He also helped create something very important for movies called the Latham loop. This loop helped film move smoothly through cameras and projectors. It stopped the film from breaking. Many years later, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson said that Lauste was the true inventor of the Latham loop.
Showing the First Movies
The Eidoloscope was shown to newspaper reporters on April 21, 1895. It opened to the public on May 20, 1895. People could pay to see films of a boxing match. These films were shot from the roof of Madison Square Garden.
Thanks to the Latham loop inside the camera, the entire boxing match could be filmed continuously. It all fit on one long roll of film. That summer, Lauste regularly showed these moving pictures in a tent at Coney Island.
Sound and Film
In 1896, Eugène Lauste joined the American Biograph Company. He worked there for four years. Then, he moved to Brixton, England. In 1904, he started working on a new idea: sound-on-film. This meant recording sound directly onto the movie film itself.
On August 11, 1906, Lauste and two other inventors applied for a British patent. Their patent was approved in 1907. It described a way to record and play back both moving pictures and sounds at the same time. This was done on a strip of 35 mm film that had both images and a sound strip.
In 1911, Lauste showed a sound film in the United States. This might have been the very first time a movie using sound-on-film technology was shown in America. However, World War I started before he could sell his system more widely.
From 1928 until he passed away, Lauste worked as a consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories. He helped them with their inventions. Eugène Lauste had a wife named Melanie. They had a son named Emile, and two stepsons, Clement and Harry E. LeRoy.
See also
- Ernst Ruhmer
- Photographophone
