Thomas Armat
Encyclopedia
Thomas J. Armat was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 mechanic and inventor, a pioneer of cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 best known through the co-invention of the Edison Vitascope
Vitascope
Vitascope was an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins patented "Phantoscope", which cast images via film & electric light onto a wall or screen...

.

Biography

Armat studied at the Mechanics Institute in Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...

 and then in 1894 at the Bliss School of Electricity in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, where he met Charles Francis Jenkins
Charles Francis Jenkins
Charles Francis Jenkins was an American pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television, though he used mechanical rather than electronic technologies...

. The two classmates teamed up to develop a movie projector
Movie projector
A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying moving pictures by projecting them on a projection screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras.-Physiology:...

 using a new kind of intermittent motion mechanism, a "beater mechanism" similar to the one patented 1893 by Georges Demenÿ
Georges Demenÿ
Georges Demenÿ was a French inventor, chronophotographer, filmmaker, and gymnast.-External links:* digitized by the...

 in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

. It was one of the first projectors using what is known as the Latham loop
Latham loop
The Latham Loop is used in film projection and image capture. It isolates the filmstrip from vibration and tension, allowing movies to be continuously shot and projected for extended periods....

 (an extra loop of the film before the transport mechanism to reduce the tension on the film and avoid film breakage, developed independently at the same time by Woodville Latham
Woodville Latham
Major Woodville Latham was an ordnance officer of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and professor of chemistry at West Virginia University. He was significant in the development of early film technology....

 and his sons). They made their first public projection using their invention, named Phantascope
Phantascope
The Phantoscope was a film projection machine, a creation of Charles Francis Jenkins. Created in the early 1890s, he projected the first motion picture before an audience in his hometown of Richmond, Indiana on June 6, 1894. He later met Thomas Armat who provided financial backing for necessary...

after an earlier model designed by Jenkins alone, in September 1895 at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta.

Following this success, the two co-inventors broke up over patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

 issues. Jenkins tried to claim sole inventorship, but was turned down and sold out to Armat, who subsequently joined and sold the patent to Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...

, who marketed the machine as the 'Vitascope'. The projector was used in a public screening in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 beginning April 23, 1896 and lasting more than a week.

Working for Edison, Armat refined the projector in 1897 by replacing the beater mechanism with a more precise Geneva drive
Geneva drive
The Geneva drive or Maltese cross is a gear mechanism that translates a continuous rotation into an intermittent rotary motion. The rotating drive wheel has a pin that reaches into a slot of the driven wheel advancing it by one step...

, duplicating an invention made a year earlier in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 by Oskar Messter
Oskar Messter
Oskar Messter was a German inventor and film tycoon in the early years of cinema.-Biography:He was born in Berlin, where his father had founded a company selling and manufacturing optical equipment in 1859...

 and Max Griewe and in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 by Robert William Paul.

In 1947, Armat and William Nicholas Selig, Albert Edward Smith and George Kirke Spoor were awarded a Special Academy Award
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...

 as representatives of the movie pioneers for their contributions to the film business.

He died on September 30, 1948.

External links

  • Short biography
  • Another short bio
  • Film "Spanish Dance" (on Google Video
    Google Video
    Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...

    )
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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