Anatol Josepho

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Anatol Josepho inside his photo booth, called Photomaton

Anatol Marco Josepho (born March 31, 1894 in Tomsk as Anatolij Markowitch Josefowitz , Russian Анатолий Маркович Йозефович ; † December 16, 1980 in San Diego ) was a Russian-American inventor.

Life

Anatolij Josefowitz was the son of a jeweler. As a child he was interested in cameras. At the age of 15 he traveled to Berlin and worked in a photo studio there. In 1912 he visited the USA for the first time, but found no work there and returned to Europe for the time being. He opened his own studio in Budapest . At the beginning of the First World War he was interned in Hungary. In 1918 he came to Manchuria via Russia, which had been shaken by civil war . In 1921 he opened a studio in Shanghai , which he sold two years later to try his luck again in the USA.

From Seattle he reached New York City via stops in San Francisco and Hollywood , where he was able to familiarize himself with the film technology there . There, with the support of friends and relatives, he was able to raise the sum of 11,000 US dollars to realize his idea of ​​a photo booth . On March 27, 1925, he filed a patent , which was awarded to him on June 7, 1927. In September 1925 he opened a studio on Broadway with his new Photomaton , in which one received eight photos within eight minutes after throwing in a quarter . The deal turned out to be a great success; 2,000 customers stood in line every day to have their photos taken. In July 1926 he married the actress Hannah Belle Kehlmann, with whom he later had two sons. In March 1927 he sold the rights to the Photomaton for one million US dollars to a consortium led by Henry Morgenthau senior . Josepho donated half of the money to charity, whereupon he was accused in the press of being a socialist. In an interview he described himself as apolitical. Initially he remained a technical consultant and vice president of the rapidly expanding company Photomaton Incorporated , later he moved to California and continued to work there as an inventor. In 1941 he gave the Boy Scouts of America a piece of land near Santa Monica of over 100 acres valued at 55 million US dollars, today's Camp Josepho. Shortly before his death in 1980 he received an honorary doctorate from the Technion in Haifa. Josepho died of complications from a stroke at the age of 86.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Сергей Шахиджанян: Ты сними меня, кабинка! ( ru ) May 24, 2017.
  2. ↑ U.S. Patent 1,631,593
  3. ↑ Who's who in American jewry . 2nd ed. New York 1928
personal data
SURNAME Josepho, Anatol
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Josephewitz, Anatoli; Josepho, Anatol Marco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-American inventor
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Omsk
DATE OF DEATH December 1980
Place of death San Diego