Oskar Messter was born on November 21, 1866, in Berlin, where his father had founded in 1859 a company called Optisches und Mechanisches Institut Ed.

Following in the footsteps of Filoteo Alberini with the kinetograph, Robert William Paul with the theatrograph, Birt Acres with the magic lantern in 1896, among many others, Messter managed to develop his first projector to retransmit films of Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope.

Later, he was chosen to repair a theatrograph, but abandoned it to focus on a better development of the kinetoscope, first adding a "Geneva drive" on the projectors to oscillatingly cause intermittent movement to advance the frames of the film.

Also in 1896, Messter rented a small theater that had gone bankrupt and inaugurated the second cinema hall in Berlin, since the first one was opened by the envoys of the Lumière brothers that precise year.

However, at the end of the First World War, Messter sold his companies in Berlin and Vienna to the newly founded Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA).

Among his most indicated contributions are: From 1896, Messter was interested in the search of a method of reproduction and synchronization of the sound effects of the cinematographic performance at the time of the "silent movies".