Chaim Aronson (July 30, 1825 – April 22, 1893) was an inventor and academic. He was a Lithuanian Jew who lived during the time when Lithuania belonged to Tsarist Russia.
Aronson was born in the town of Serednik (now Seredžius) in Lithuania province to a poor, rural, family. He showed unusual intelligence from a very early age, reportedly learning to read Hebrew by the age of two. By his twenties he was an accomplished (if not certified) Jewish scholar. He had also taught himself several languages, including German and Russian, in both of which he achieved a high level of fluency.
It was at this time that his talent for engineering manifested itself: he first became a clockmaker, then an inventor. His early successes were such that he soon moved his business to the Russian capital at St. Petersburg, where factory owners and investors might be interested in his inventions. Despite a number of genuinely revolutionary innovations, however, he never achieved commercial success, due mostly an unfriendly business climate and the profoundly anti-semitic attitude of the government.
Aronson's inventions, which included several machines for mass producing cigarettes, a clockwork calculator, a prototype for an early movie camera, and the microdiarama, were, for their time, ground breaking. Aronson, however, is better remembered for a series of memoirs he wrote, published long after his death in the book A Jewish Life Under the Tsars[1][2][3]. This is an autobiography of Aronson's own difficult life, but it also describes insightfully, the life of ordinary society in Imperial Russia.