Oskar Messter

Oskar Messter (21 November 1866 – 6 December 1943) was a German inventor and film tycoon in the early years of cinema. His firm Messter Film was one of the dominant German producers before the rise of UFA, into which it was ultimately merged. Oskar Messter was born on November 21, 1866, in Berlin, where his father had founded in 1859 a company called Optisches und Mechanisches Institut Ed. Messter. This company manufactured and sold eyeglasses, precision medical devices, optical devices for magicians and show businessmen, electric reflectors for theaters, and projectors for the magic lantern. Being integrated in this world since he was a child, Oskar acquired both business, optical and mechanical skills, which he later applied in cinematography.

In 1892, his father's workshops became part of Oskar and he began to carry out his own experiments. Following in the footsteps of Filoteo Alberini with the kinetograph, Robert William Paul with the theatrograph, Birt Acres with the magic lantern in 1896, among many others, Messter managed to develop his first projector to retransmit films of Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope.

Later, he was chosen to repair a theatrograph, but abandoned it to focus on a better development of the kinetoscope, first adding a "Geneva drive" on the projectors to oscillatingly cause intermittent movement to advance the frames of the film. That being the case, on June 15, 1896, Oskar sold his first device. But Messter was not the only producer of film projectors in Germany. Robert W. Paul in London built projectors independently using this same mechanism for the advancement of the film almost at the same time, or Georg Bartling, belonging to the company of GmbH, exhibited a projector at the Industrial Exhibition of Berlin in 1896.

In the middle of 1896, Messter began to produce in series cameras and film projectors that were very successful. By the end of 1896, Messters-Projection Berlin had produced 64 projectors: 42 of these were sold in Germany and 22, in the rest of Europe. In just four years, the company's profits multiplied tenfold. Also in 1896, Messter rented a small theater that had gone bankrupt and inaugurated the second cinema hall in Berlin, since the first one was opened by the envoys of the Lumière brothers that precise year. Subsequently, Messter debuted at the Apollo, a Berlin variety theater, and organized a film projection service. Also at the end of 1896, Messter entered the business of film production, creating his first films, such as A Skater at the West Railway Station (1896) and At the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin (1896).

In 1916, Oskar Messter founded with the director of cinema Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky, the Wiener Sascha-Messter Film GmbH, Viennese daughter of the Messter-Film GmbH. However, at the end of the First World War, Messter sold his companies in Berlin and Vienna to the newly founded Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA).

He donated his collection of historical film equipment to the German Museum in 1932. Messter died in 1943 in Tegernsee.