A litte bit of film history

We take movies for granted today. We can pick up a newspaper and find advertisements for movies in practically any genre on any day of the week. The only problem we have is choosing which of the many offerings to buy tickets for. What a dilemma!

There isn't anybody alive today who remembers the world before movies. The first commercial movie even was on December 28, 1895. That was 112 years ago.

Two French brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, made the film. The brothers developed a camera-projector called the cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers showed their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory but charged no admission.

Then on December 28, the "boys" showed a film that was a series of short scenes from everyday French life (workers leaving a factory, a train arriving, a baby being fed, girls playing, etc.) and sold the first movie tickets in history. After the showing of the film, Auguste and Lumiere decided not to pursue their invention. They called it "an invention without a future."

In the early 1830s Joseph Plateau of Belgium and Simon Stampfer of Austria separately but simultaneously developed a device called the phenakistoscope. The phenokistoscope used a spinning disc with slots. A series of drawings could be viewed that created the effect of a single moving image (think animation). The phenakistoscope is considered the root of modern motion pictures. It was followed by advances over the next six decades, and in 1890 Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson developed the first motion-picture camera, called the kinetograph.

The next year Edison invented the kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was a machine with a peephole viewer that let one person watch a strip of film as it moved past a light.

Movies were what the public wanted. I guess the Lumiere brothers were...WRONG!

Want more? Check out - A Short History of Film