On March 22, 1895 -- 135 years ago this month -- a pair of innovative industrialist brothers from Lyon, France, brought an early version of new machine they’d invented called the Cinématographe to the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, a group in Paris that supported new inventions and the improvement of French industry. There, the brothers used the Cinématographe to project images they’d recorded of workers leaving their family’s factory at the end of the day. It was one of the first times in history a moving picture was shown.
Auguste and Louis Lumière had only patented their Cinématographe on February 13, 1895. Just a few months later, on May 20, 1895, their American rivals, the Latham brothers, used their Eidoloscope to show a film of a recent boxing match to a paying audience, which made them the first to offer a public movie screening. (The Lumières wouldn’t reach that particular milestone until December 28, 1895, when they presented a Cinématographe show in the basement of the Grand Café on Paris’ Boulevard des Capucines.) Also in the United States was Thomas Edison, who had offered the first public exhibitions of his Kinetoscope in 1894, but that system required viewers one by one to look through a peephole to watch moving images inside the device.
It’s the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale screening, and their superior technology, which made the Lumière brothers the men who created the movies.
Their father, Antoine Lumière, was a successful portrait painter-turned-photographer who also ran a business making photographic plates. In 1881, 17-year-old Louis Lumière invented a new way to develop film, which supercharged the family business. By 1894, they were manufacturing 15 million photographic plates from a factory outside Lyon. It was Antoine who first saw Edison’s Kinetoscope in Paris and encouraged his sons to devise a superior, more economical counterpart, one that could show its images to a large audience. And by the next year, they’d come up with the Cinématographe.
The Lumière system had several important attributes. First, their three-in-one device could film moving images, process the film, and then project it to audiences, which made it far more practical. Second, it was much more lightweight and portable than Edison’s system. Whereas the Lumières’ early films, actualities, were shot outdoors and showed real life -- like the famous sequence of a train arriving in a station that, according to legend, so shocked audiences -- Edison’s early films required so much recording equipment that they were mostly vaudeville acts filmed indoors, often at Edison’s famous Black Maria studio in New Jersey. Third, the brothers' film moved at 16 frames per second. When compared to Edison’s 48 frames per second, the Lumières' projector was quieter and saved money by using less film. (In the 20th century, 24 frames per second became the cinematic standard.)
In 1896, the Lumières opened theaters in London, Brussels, and New York City. They filmed scenes in France and around the world, dazzling audiences with “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon” and the famous train film. Other important films of theirs include "Bicycliste"; "Les Pompiers à Lyon," which might be considered the first documentary; and "The Gardner," which some call the first comedy.
By 1905, with cinema established as an art form and an industry, the Lumière brothers moved on. In 1907, they patented the first successful process for color photography called Autochrome Lumière. For decades, theirs was the most used color-photography format, and it led to an explosion in intrepid photographers traveling the world and capturing new kinds of images. (National Geographic has more than 15,000 color glass plates in its archive, the majority being Autochromes.)
Meantime, the filmmaking process they’d created developed into the global juggernaut, which is the movie business. It wasn’t until 2013 -- more than a century after the Cinématographe -- that more Hollywood films were recorded digitally than shot on film. And by 2019, digital production had surpassed 90 percent.
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