Hermann O. Foersterling

Hermann Otto Foersterling (born December 19, 1857 in Aschersleben , † September 29, 1912 in Berlin ) was a German film technology pioneer.

Life

Hermann O. Foersterling started his own business in the film business around 1896. He was the technical expert, the Stollwerck brought -Kompanie in the spring of 1895 to the German rights to the Edison - phonograph to buy. In August 1895 he signed a contract in which he undertook to shoot films for Stollwerck with a Birt Acres camera . In the spring of 1896, Foersterling began producing film projection devices, which he initially called biomatographs. One device that he made in June 1896 was a copy of a projector that Pierre-Victor Continsouza had developed in Paris and that was not patented in Germany. Foersterling called this device Edison's Ideal. He started an advertising campaign for this projector in several European countries. Film projectionists such as Madame Olinka , Friedrich Georg Gröning and Jacques Marie Bellwald supported this advertising campaign.

Hermann O. Foersterling's company "Helios" resided at Leipziger Strasse 12 in Berlin. The technician O. Krimm and the instrument manufacturer EG Greiner were employed. At Foersterling, phonographs, optical instruments, electrical devices, cameras and other objects were manufactured. Foersterling was therefore predestined as an expert to inform Stollwerck and the Deutsche Automaten-Gesellschaft about the benefits of purchasing the German rights to Edison's phonograph. After Foersterling examined the phonograph and found it fit for the future, he and the Hamburg photographer Johann Hamann were obliged to record films with the Acres camera. It is not certain whether this actually happened; However, after the conclusion of this contract, Stollwerck and DAG changed their contracts with Acres, on which they were no longer solely dependent.

According to his own statement, Foersterling sold his first film projector in May 1896. This "biomatograph" is said to have been of very poor quality. It may have been a copy of Acres' device. In June or July 1896 this model was replaced by a new one, namely a copy of Continsouza's projectors. This device weighed around 50 kilograms, was operated with lime light and, according to an advertisement from September 1896, cost 1,210 marks, while the competition charged around 2000 marks for a projector. A copy that was sold to George Christiaan Slieker in the summer of 1896 and is now in the Smallingerland Museum in Drachten was probably incorrectly assigned to Oskar Messter and in fact comes from this series of Foersterling's apparatus based on Continsouza's principle. The model was no longer advertised as a biomatograph, but as Edinson's ideal. According to his own statement, Foersterling sold ten copies of this series between July 1 and August 1896. He soon expanded his range to include films he had made himself at a price of 30 marks and more. Messter obviously felt threatened by this competition and placed several advertisements in which he, without naming Foersterling, complained about the unfair methods of a second projector company. Foersterling answered this with sarcastically pointed contraindications in which he described Messter's patent claims as worthless. The dispute was carried out in the showman magazine Der Komet .

In 1899, Hermann O. Foersterling withdrew from the business, possibly due to illness; in 1900 he moved to Zehlendorf with his wife Therese von Schöneberg .

literature

• Jeanpaul Goergen, “Sensational show number of the present!” Newspaper advertisements by the film pioneer HO Foersterling from 1896 , in: KINtop 9, 2000, pp. 109–115
• Deac Rossell, Beyond Messter. Aspects of Early Cinema in Berlin , in: Film History 10/1, 1998, pp. 52–69 ( online )

Web links

• Text of an advertisement for Foersterling from 1896

Individual evidence

1. ^ Standesamt Berlin XII: death register . No. 1814/1912.
2. ↑ He possibly presented his first device to the press in the spring of 1896: Archive link ( Memento of the original from June 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
3. ^ Deac Rossell, Living Pictures. The Origins of the Movies (Suny Series in Cultural Studies in Cinema / Video) , State University of New York Press 1998, ISBN 978-0791437674 , p. 147
4. ↑ http://ivoblom.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/noggerath-film-history.pdf
5. ↑ http://www.massenmedien.de/wanderkino/ostfriesland/wandol.htm
6. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated December 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ According to this source , the city's first film screenings with an Edison's ideal were held in Tallinn on October 4, 1896.
8. ↑ by Karl Pahl also called "Hoppograph"; Foersterling himself advertised the Hoppograph in 1896 and 1897. Apparently it was a device that enabled demonstrations in bars and public spaces.
9. ↑ http://www.massenmedien.de/lichtbilderlichtspiele/wanderkino.htm
10. ↑ Deac Rossell, Beyond Messter. Aspects of Early Cinema in Berlin , in: Film History 10/1, 1998, pp. 52–69 ( online )