On this day in 1895, the Grand Cafe in Paris hosts the world’s inaugural commercial movie screening.
The film was created by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French siblings who invented a camera-projector known as the Cinematographe. In March 1895, the Lumiere brothers introduced their invention to the public with a short film depicting workers departing from the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial brothers displayed a collection of brief scenes depicting everyday life in France and, for the first time, charged admission.
The origins of movie technology trace back to the early 1830s, when Belgium’s Joseph Plateau and Austria’s Simon Stampfer independently created a device called the phenakistoscope. This device featured a rotating disc with openings that allowed a sequence of drawings to be seen, thereby creating the illusion of a single moving image. Regarded as a precursor to contemporary motion pictures, the phenakistoscope led to decades of innovations, culminating in 1890 with Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson unveiling the first motion-picture camera, named the Kinetograph.
In 1891, Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, which was a machine equipped with a peephole viewer for individual film viewing as the strip advanced past a light.
In 1894, Antoine Lumiere, father to Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), attended a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope. Though impressed, he reportedly advised his sons, who operated a successful photographic plate factory in Lyon, France, that they could create something superior. Louis Lumiere’s Cinematographe, patented in 1895, combined a movie camera and projector capable of showcasing moving images on a screen for an audience. Compared to Edison’s technology, the Cinematographe was smaller, lighter, and required less film.
The Lumieres established theaters, referred to as cinemas, in 1896 to exhibit their films and dispatched teams of cameramen globally to present films and capture new content. In America, the film industry rapidly gained momentum. Vitascope Hall, believed to be the first theater in the U.S. dedicated to films, opened in New Orleans in 1896. By 1909, The New York Times released its first film review (of D.W. Griffith’s “Pippa Passes”), the first Hollywood film studio was established in 1911, and Charlie Chaplin made his big-screen debut in 1914.
Apart from the Cinematographe, the Lumieres also pioneered the first practical color photography process, the Autochrome plate, which was introduced in 1907.
