Eugene Augustin Lauste

Who was Eugene Augustin Lauste?

Eugène Augustin Lauste was a French inventor instrumental in the technological development of the history of cinema.

By age 23 he held 53 French patents. He emigrated to the United States in 1886 where he worked as an assistant to French-born William Kennedy Laurie Dickson at the Edison Laboratories. Lauste contributed to the development of the leading predecessor to the motion picture projector, the Kinetoscope, an invention for which Edison would claim credit. Lauste left Edison in 1892.

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 and assisted with the design of the Latham loop.

He demonstrated the Eidoloscope in 1895 in a lower Broadway store with films of the Griffo-Barnett prize fight, taken from Madison Square Garden's roof on May 4. 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.