Kazimierz Prószyński

Biography

Kazimierz Prószyński was born in Warsaw and educated in Poland and Belgium, later working in France, England, and the United States. He was the grandson of photographer Stanisław Antoni Prószyński, who had been sentenced by Congress Poland's Imperial Russian authorities for placing Polish patriotic symbols in photograph backgrounds. His father, Konrad Prószyński, was an educator, writer, and publisher. In 1894, Prószyński built the Pleograph, an apparatus for taking photographs and projecting pictures, before the Lumière brothers lodged their patent. He produced several films in Poland at the beginning of the 20th century, created an improved film projector shutter, devised a method of synchronizing sound and film tracks, and invented the first hand-held film camera. Much of his active life was spent abroad; in France and England he invented and produced the Aeroscope camera in 1909, which used compressed air so the cameraman did not have to turn a crank. This allowed filming with both hands on the camera in difficult circumstances and from airplanes. Compressed air was pumped into the camera before filming with a pump similar to those used for bicycle tires. Hundreds of Aeroscope cameras were used by British Army combat cameramen in World War I and later by newsreel cameramen until the late 1920s, with archival photographs showing them still in use in 1940. Finding business partners proved difficult. In 1922 he established the company Oko to promote a simple amateur camera of his design, intended for mass production for schools and the public, but the economic crisis of the 1920s interrupted his plans. He worked on other inventions such as simple home film projectors and reading machines for the blind, but none were mass-produced.