Turning the pages back... November 26, 1852 (11/24/96)

Turning the pages back...

November 26, 1852

Yosyp Tymchenko was born on November 26, 1852, in Okip, a village about 50 miles northwest of Kharkiv, and worked in the machine shop of Kharkiv University, where he taught himself the fundamentals of mechanical engineering.

Eventually settling in Odesa, he worked in the factory of the Russian Society for Steamships and Trade, and in 1880 established a physical-optical machine shop at that city's university.

A tireless inventor, his creations included a signalling device for railroads, an apparatus for detecting defects in rails and cranes, and an assortment of new types of devices ranging from atmospheric pressure meters to seismographs.

Tymchenko also built a working model of the first telephone switching station in the world. However, his most important invention was a "stroboscope," which he assembled together with the physicist Nikolai Liubimov and the inventor Max Freidenberg.

This device, which projected "live pictures," was first demonstrated in Odesa in November 1893 and in Moscow the following January at the ninth All-Russian Congress of Naturalists and Physicians. Although the invention was met with acclaim in the scientific community, Tsar Nicholas II refused to give the project the necessary financial support.

A similar device was patented by the brothers Lumière in France in 1985, and a year later they toured the Russian empire with it. In the early 1920s, Tymchenko's students formed Kinap, the Soviet Union's first movie company. The inventor died in Odesa on May 20, 1924.

Source: "Tymchenko, Yosyp," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).