Anatol Josepho
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March 31, 1894
Anatol Marco Josepho | |
|---|---|
_(Pacific)_-_btv1b53177896h.jpg) Josepho and his wife in a Photomaton (1927) | |
| Born | Anatolу Markovich Yozefovich March 31, 1894 Tomsk, Russia |
| Died | December 16, 1980 (aged 86) San Diego, CA |
| Occupation | Inventor |
| Known for | Inventor of the photobooth |
| Notable work | Photomaton |
| Spouse | Hannah-Belle "Ganna" Kelhmann |
Anatol Marco Josepho (born Anatolу Markovich Yozefovich, Russian: Анатолий Маркович Йозефович,[1] later germanized as Anatol Josephewitz; March 31, 1894 – December 16, 1980) was a Jewish[2][3] immigrant to the United States from Tomsk,[1] Russia, who invented and patented the first automated photo booth in 1925, which was named the "Photomaton". In 1927, he was paid one million dollars for the invention.[4][5]
Josepho's father was a wealthy jeweler and his mother died when he was three years old. He developed a close bond with his father and became interested in the Wild West cultural phenomenon of expansion in the United States in the late 1800s. He began taking photographs with a Brownie camera produced by the Eastman Kodak Company during his childhood and he attended a local technical institute to pursue his growing interest in photography in 1909 at the age of 15.[6]
On the eve of World War I, his father sent him to study in Germany. There, he studied the photo art to perfection. It was there that he conceived the idea of creating a photo machine that would work without an operator inside and would be able to produce photos automatically, but from the moment of conception to implementation it took more than 12 years. At 19, he opened his own studio in Budapest, Hungary. With the beginning of the First world war, he then moved to Shanghai. There he survived the revolution of 1917 and for a time worked as a photographer in his own photo studio.[1] In the early 1920s, he briefly returned to Tomsk, where he soon left to the United States. In the early 1920s, he worked in New York to develop the Photomaton.
On July 22, 1926, he married Hannah-Belle "Ganna" Kehlmann (January 10, 1904 – October 19, 1978), the daughter of a New York printer and a silent film actress[7][8]. The two were friends with their neighbor, performer Will Rogers and his wife Betty Blake. They had two children, both boys. He died on December 16, 1980, at the age of 86 in a rest home in La Jolla from a series of strokes.[9]
Upon selling his invention in 1927 for one million dollars, Anatol made the announcement that he would split the money in two: $500,000 would be put in a trust for charity "along economically sound lines" and he other half would be for him to administer to help struggling inventors.[10]
