Thomas Armat

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Thomas J. Armat (born October 25, 1866 in Fredericksburg (Virginia) , United States , † September 30, 1948 in Washington, DC ) was an American inventor and Oscar winner.

Life

Armat studied at the Mechanics Institute in Richmond, Virginia and in 1894 at the Bliss Electrical School in Washington, DC , where he met Charles Francis Jenkins . The two students came together to develop a film projector using a new type of irregular movement mechanism (the so-called feed mechanism), not dissimilar to the chronophotography apparatus introduced by Georges Demenÿ in France in 1893 . Armats and Jenkins' invention was one of the first projectors to use the so-called Latham rotation (an additional rotation of the film in front of the transport mechanism in order to reduce the tension on the film and avoid film breakage, independently of Armat developed at the same time by Woodville Latham and his sons). The first public demonstration with their device, which they called "Phantascope", made Armat and Jenkins in September 1895 as part of the Cotton States exhibition in Atlanta .

Shortly afterwards, the two men separated in an argument because they could not agree on patent issues. Jenkins claimed to be the only inventor of the "Phantascope", but failed with this intention. He then sold his share in patent law to Armat, who joined his inventor colleague Thomas Alva Edison . Both marketed the device development under the label "Vitascope". The projection apparatus has been in use since a public presentation in New York City on April 23, 1896, and de facto established US cinematography. Armat now worked for Edison and refined the projector in 1897 by replacing the striking mechanism with a more precise Maltese cross gear, as had already been used in Germany by Oskar Messter the year before . In the following years, Thomas Armat lost its importance.

It was only in 1948, the year of his death, that the American film industry remembered him and three other pioneers of US cinematography. Armat and his colleagues William Nicholas Selig , Albert Edward Smith and George Kirke Spoor were each awarded a special Oscar for their services at the beginning of the celluloid age. In 2011, Thomas J. Armat was inducted into his country's National Inventors Hall of Fame

literature

  • "Thomas Armat, 81, A Pioneer in Films. Inventor of Vitascope Projector Attributed to Edison, Dies in Capital". Obituary in The New York Times, October 1, 1948.

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