At the beginning of cinema stood Ukrainian mechanic Yosyp Timchenko together with physicist Mykola Lyubimov, who two years before the discovery of the Lumiere brothers, developed a “snail” – a jumping mechanism.

In 1893, films shot using a kinescope were already being shown in Odessa, thus outpacing the Lumières. But Timchenko failed to patent his device. His kinescope is still stored in the storage rooms of the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. Timchenko was also the author of automatic meteorological, physical and astronomical instruments, for which he received awards at world exhibitions. He participated in the creation of the first model of the Freudenberg automatic telephone exchange.