All of us have wondered, ‘What was the first movie ever made?’ or how films were made in the past. Early in the 19th Century, a series of developments in technology led to the birth of the movie industry as we know it today. French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often credited with inventing the first motion picture camera, although others had developed similar inventions around the same time. It included a Cinematographe projector, a film processing system, and a portable motion picture camera. Motion films became highly popular thanks to the Cinematographe.
For the first time, photographic moving pictures were shown on a screen in 1895, when Lumiere and his brother did it in front of a paid audience. Ten 50-second films were shown to the public, one of which was the Lumière brothers’ debut, Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon).
The Lumiere brothers weren’t the first to project film, though. The Kinetoscope, which allowed one person to watch moving pictures at once, was successfully exhibited by the Edison Company in 1891. The Kinetoscope was created in 1891 by inventor Thomas Edison and William Dickson, a young laboratory assistant. Later in 1896, Edison demonstrated his upgraded Vitascope projector.
The Kinetoscope was a cabinet with a window that gave each spectator the impression that a picture was moving. Edison’s innovation was copied and sold throughout Europe since he had not obtained an international patent for it. Therefore, efforts were made by many to use the technology to upgrade the device. While a single person could see a movie through a kinetoscope, Auguste and Louis were urged to develop a method of projecting films onto a screen so that several people could watch them simultaneously.
The first experiments were conducted by Auguste in the winter of 1894, and by the beginning of the year that followed, the brothers had developed their own device, which they termed the Cinématographe. The Cinématographe, a three-in-one camera that could capture, develop, and project moving images, would become known as the first film camera. The Lumière brothers used it to record films of their manufacturing employees returning at the end of the day. At an industry gathering in Paris in March 1895, they screened the motion picture, “La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière” (“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”); it is regarded as the very first motion picture.
They opened Cinématographe theatres in New York, London, and Brussels, Belgium, in 1896. After producing more than 40 films in one year, mostly documenting daily life in France but also including the first newsreel and the first documentary (concerning the Lyon Fire Department), they started sending other cameramen-projectionists to capture everyday life outside France and show their invention.
The Lumière brothers stopped making films by 1905 in favour of creating the Lumière Autochrome, the first usable photographic colour process.
The Cinématographe, a groundbreaking motion picture camera, had already given its name to a fascinating new form of art known as cinema as we know today.