Education
Armat studied at the Mechanics Institute in Richmond, Virginia and then in 1894 at the Bliss Electrical School in Washington, District of Columbia, where he met Charles Francis Jenkins.
Armat studied at the Mechanics Institute in Richmond, Virginia and then in 1894 at the Bliss Electrical School in Washington, District of Columbia, where he met Charles Francis Jenkins.
They made their first public projection using their invention, named Phantascope after an earlier model designed by Jenkins alone, in September 1895 at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Following this success, the two co-inventors broke up over patent issues. Jenkins tried to claim sole inventorship, but was turned down and sold out to Armat, who subsequently joined and sold the patent to Thomas Edison, who marketed the machine as the "Vitascope".
The projector was used in a public screening in New York City beginning April 23, 1896 and lasting more than a week.
Working for Edison, Armat refined the projector in 1897 by replacing the beater mechanism with a more precise Geneva drive, duplicating an invention made a year earlier in Germany by Oskar Messter and Max Griewe and in England by Robert William Paul. He died on September 30, 1948.
In 2011, he was inducted, posthumously, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.