£1,650.00
The Lapiposcope 35mm film projector was invented in September 1896 by a Frenchman named Lapipe merely a year after the Lumiere Brother’s first pioneering projector was unveiled. As well as being an extremely early projector in the history of these things, the Lapiposcope also had the accolade of being the world’s smallest at the time too.
Lapipe’s fascinating design incorporated a unique friction based mechanism to smoothly feed the reel, and the whole box would have been placed on a table to be backlit by a regular carbon arc light source. Despite his innovative approach the Lapiposcope sadly never sold that well and received only lacklustre reviews when it came out. Today therefore they are extremely rare with less than 10 complete examples known to survive only.
What is offered here is sadly not a complete example, but the original near complete internal mechanism and handle for one. As I found this even with its rectangular brass side mounting plate intact, I presume the original woodwork must have suffered from damage at some point and been discarded along with the rest by a previous owner. What is interesting is that probably quite soon after its purchase, someone modified the handle and added the small flywheel, probably to allow it to run off a small motor.
All the brass mechanism, handle and handle mounting plate is completely original as found and the main body is stamped with the unique serial number ‘121’. Due to its historical value I thought it would be nice to at least have a wooden case rebuilt for it out of old walnut. This has been done as a near faithful reproduction of the original with the only variation being a slight adjustment of two of the measurements. The mechanism is missing its rotating shutter and associated cog but is otherwise in very good untouched working condition. If you wanted to you could easily recast the missing brassware and add a lens to get this functional once again.
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