Iosif Timchenko

Born Apr. 15(?), 1852; died May 20, 1924. Russian inventor.

The son of a serf, Timchenko studied in the mechanical engineering division of the University of Kharkov. In 1880 he became a mechanical engineer at Novorossiia University, where he set up a well-equipped precision-instrument shop. He built a number of automatic meteorological instruments. In 1893, together with the Russian physicist N. A. Liubimov, he invented an intermittent mechanism for intermittent viewing of still images in a stroboscope. Timchenko used the idea of such a mechanism to build a motion-picture apparatus that became the prototype of a more modern apparatus (similar to the Kinetoscope) that he developed together with M. F. Freidenberg. In January 1894, Timchenko’s apparatus was used to show images on a screen at the Ninth Congress of Russian Naturalists and Physicians in Moscow.