Film projector

Alban Lapipe ran a workshop that manufactured mechanical presses for cutting, stamping and drilling. His relationship with cinema is due to Georges Méliès, who commissioned him the first machine for perforating celluloid films. By early 1896, it was still difficult to get unused films and Méliès had just obtained some in England, but they were unperforated. In the same year, 1896, Lapipe was also the author of the patent for the Lapiposcope, a 35 mm film projector, of which two slightly different versions were made. Alban Lapipe died in 1899 and his son Henri Eugène and son-in-law Charles Wittmann took over the workshop. The Lapiposcope, in addition to being one of the first projectors marketed (nine months after the first screenings of the Lumière brothers) was also considered the smallest cinematograph of that time. However, it received a lot of criticism for its poor performance and did not sell well, which is why very few have been preserved.