Everybody who enjoys movies should make a note that today is the birthday of Eugéne Augustin Lauste, who was born January 17, 1857, and had a lot to do with the early technology of moviemaking.
Lauste was born in Montmartre, France, and was a fast starter — by the age of 23 he held 53 patents. He emigrated to the US in 1886 and got a job at the Edison Laboratories, where he may have been the primary inventor of the Kinetoscope, one of the first motion picture projectors. Edison got the credit for it, as he did with all the inventions that came out of his company whether he’d been personally involved or not.
He left Edison in 1892 and designed an early internal combustion engine, but didn’t patent it or develop it further because everybody told him the thing was noise, it stank, and nobody would ever want one. So he went back to movie technology and invented the “Latham loop,” which is the mechanism that enables movie film to stop for a moment at each frame, then jump to the next without breaking. He was working for Woodville Latham at the time, and the loop was named for Latham, but Latham himself later said that it was Lauste who invented it.
While working with Latham, Lauste also invented the first wide screen movie format; the system was called the Eidoloscope. It was the first system that could show a motion picture to a large audience — all the other contemporary systems could only be seen by one person at a time. Latham’s company made several Eidoloscope movies, but unfortunately their engineering talents were far more advanced than their writing and directing abilities; by all reports the movies were pretty bad. They did come up with another innovation though; they integrated a 15-minute film about a bullfight into a stage play in 1896. It was (probably) the first time anything like that had been done.
Lauste earned more patents for various cinema systems and devices, and in 1911 showed what was probably the world’s first movie with sound recorded right on the film. It probably would have been a bigger success if World War 1 hadn’t intervened. He was also a bit too early; his movie had sound, but amplifiers hadn’t been invented yet so it was pretty hard to hear. But he was a good decade ahead of “talking pictures.”
That’s probably why you’ve never heard of Lauste; his inventions were named for other people, the bosses took the credit, he gave up on his engine just before everybody wanted one, and his timing bumped into geopolitical problems. He spent the final 15 years of his career at Bell Laboratories, where evidently he didn’t work on movie technologies, but was a consultant on any number of projects. He passed away in 1935.
