Lumière brothers

First film screenings

On 22 March 1895, in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry, in front of a small audience, one of whom was said to be Léon Gaumont, then director of the company Comptoir Géneral de la Photographie, the Lumières privately screened a single film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The main focus of the conference by Louis concerned the recent developments in the photographic industry, mainly the research on polychromy (colour photography). It was much to Lumière's surprise that the moving black-and-white images retained more attention than the coloured stills.

The Lumières gave their first paid public screening on 28 December 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This presentation consisted of the following 10 short films:

1. La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon (literally, "the exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon", or, under its more common English title, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), 46 seconds
2. La Voltige (Horse Trick Riders), 46 seconds
3. La Pêche aux poissons rouges ("fishing for goldfish"), 42 seconds
4. Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon (The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon), 48 seconds
5. Les Forgerons (The Blacksmiths), 49 seconds
6. Le Jardinier (L'Arroseur Arrosé) (The Gardener, or The Sprinkler Sprinkled), 49 seconds
7. Repas de bébé (Baby's Breakfast (lit. "baby's meal")), 41 seconds
8. Le Saut à la couverture ("Jumping Onto the Blanket"), 41 seconds
9. Place des Cordeliers à Lyon (Cordeliers' Square in Lyon), 44 seconds
10. La Mer (The Sea), 38 seconds

Each film was up to 17 m (56 ft) long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.

The Lumières went on tour with the cinématographe in 1896, visiting places like Mexico City, Brussels, Bombay, London, Montreal, New York City, Palestine, and Buenos Aires.

In 1896, only a few months after the initial screenings in Europe, films by the Lumiere Brothers were shown in Egypt, first in the Tousson stock exchange in Alexandria on 5 November 1896, and then in the Hamam Schneider (Schneider Bath) in Cairo.

Early colour photography

The brothers stated that "the cinema is an invention without any future" and declined to sell their camera to other filmmakers such as Georges Méliès. This made many film makers upset. Consequently, their role in the history of film was exceedingly brief. In parallel with their cinema work they experimented with colour photography. They worked on colour photographic processes in the 1890s including the Lippmann process (interference heliochromy) and their own 'bichromated glue' process, a subtractive colour process, examples of which were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. This last process was commercialised by the Lumieres but commercial success had to wait for their next colour process. In 1903 they patented a colour photographic process, the Autochrome Lumière, which was launched on the market in 1907. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Lumière company was a major producer of photographic products in Europe, but the brand name, Lumière, disappeared from the marketplace following merger with Ilford.

Film systems that preceded the Cinématographe Lumière

Earlier moving images, for instance those of the phantasmagoria shows, the phénakisticope, the zoetrope and Émile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique consisted of hand-drawn images. A system that could record photographic reality in motion, in a fashion much like it is seen by the eyes, had a greater impact on people.

Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope projected moving painted silhouettes based on his chronophotographic work. The only Zoopraxiscope disc with actual photographs was made as an early form of stop motion.

Less-known predecessors, such as Jules Duboscq's Bioscope, patented in 1852, were not developed to project moving images.

A Polish inventor, Kazimierz Prószyński, built his camera and projecting device, called Pleograph, in 1894, before those made by the Lumière brothers.

Le Prince went missing in 1890, before he could give public demonstrations of the patented cameras and projectors he had been developing during the previous years. His short film known as Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) is regarded as the oldest surviving film.

William Friese-Greene patented a "machine camera" in 1889, which embodied many aspects of later film cameras. He displayed the results at photographic societies in 1890 and developed further cameras, but did not publicly project the results.

Ottomar Anschütz's Electrotachyscope projected very short loops of high photographic quality.

Thomas Edison believed projection of films was not as viable a business model as offering the films in the "peepshow" kinetoscope device. Watching the images on the screen turned out to be much preferred by audiences. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, developed by William Kennedy Dickson, premiered publicly in 1894.

Lauste and Latham's Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on 21 April 1895, and it opened to the paying public on Broadway on 20 May. They shot films up to twenty minutes long at speeds of over thirty frames per second and showed them in many US cities. The Eidoloscope Company was dissolved in 1896 after various internal disputes.

Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioscop, offered projected moving images to a paying public in Berlin from 1 November 1895 until the end of that month. Their machinery was relatively cumbersome and their films much shorter than those of the Lumière brothers. The Skladanowskys' screenings booked in Paris were cancelled after the news of the Lumière show. Nonetheless, they toured their films to other countries.