Eugène Augustin Lauste

Eugène Augustin Lauste (born January 17, 1857 in Montmartre , 18th arrondissement (Paris) , † June 27, 1935 in Montclair , New Jersey ) was a French electrical mechanic.

life and work

Lauste had emigrated to the United States in 1886 and was employed by Thomas Alva Edison . After he had left Edison in 1892, he joined forces in 1894 with Jean Aimé LeRoy in the "Cinematograph Novelty Company". In May 1895 he commissioned the Latham family to create a reversible for film recording and projection, the Panopticon and later the “ Eidoloscope ”, a film projector . With these constructions, a loose film loop has been provided for the first time, which basically allows unlimited film length. The continuously moving film mass was separated from the intermittently moving film by the loop. The term Lauste Loop became the Latham Loop and even the Lost Loop , a technical expression for the fact that the film loop has slipped.

In 1896 he joined the American Biograph Co.

In London from 1910–1911 Lauste was probably the first to build an optical sound device parallel to a picture camera, a Pathé industriel . Using the transversal method, he created suitable photographic sound recordings on motion picture film in simple serrated script . There was no public performance. On December 9, 1918, he referred Charlie Chaplin to his invention in a detailed letter. He had expressed his intense interest in a letter of reply. Why Lauste apparently no longer answered this letter remained in the dark.

literature

• Harald Jossé: The making of the sound film. Contributions to a fact-based media historiography . Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau 1984, ISBN 3-495-47551-6 .