Eugene Augustin Lauste

Eugène Augustin Lauste (17 January 1857 in

Life

By age 23 he had filed 53 French patents. He emigrated to the United States in 1886 and started working at the

Lauste also worked on an idea for a combustible gasoline engine; he did develop a working model in the 1890s but gave up when told that such a noisy device would never be widely used. He then worked with Major Woodville Latham, for whom he engineered the Eidoloscope^[2] and assisted with the design of the Latham loop.^[3] (Later, Dickson would credit Lauste with the loop's invention.)

The Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on 21 April 1895 and opened to the paying public on 20 May, in a lower Broadway store^[4] with films of the Griffo-Barnett prize fight, taken from Madison Square Garden's roof on 4 May.^[5] Thanks to the Latham loop inside the camera, the entire fight could be continuously shot on a single reel of film. He held regular displays of the pictures that summer in a Coney Island tent.

He joined the

• Ernst Ruhmer
• Photographophone

References