In 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumière gave birth to the big screen thanks to their revolutionary camera and projector set, called the Cinematograph.

The Lumière’s brothers

On December 28, 1895, Antoine Lumière, an industrial photographer from Lyon, was overexcited, he invited journalists and put up posters to invite the public to come and watch a show of a new kind : the cinematograph, an extraordinary device invented by his two sons Auguste and Louis. Their cinematograph presented a crucial innovation: by projecting moving images on a big screen, they created a new shared cinematic experience.

The first “films” were born

Inspired by Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope The urge to create a cinematograph began in 1894, when Antoine Lumière traveled to Paris for the exhibition of Thomas Edison and William Dickson’s Kinetoscope, a film viewing device often described as the first cinematographic projector. But only one person at a time could watch a movie with the Kinetoscope, through a lens. Antoine Lumière then wondered if it would be possible to design a device capable of projecting a film on a screen for an audience. Edison’s representative warns him that Edison is selling them at crazy prices in America and that Lumière should embark on the adventure. Rather than simply reproducing Edison’s kinetoscope, the Lumière brothers set out to do better by fixing all the problems they analyze on the American version.

The birth of the cinematograph

Back from Paris, Antoine encouraged his sons to start working on a new invention. From this research, the cinematograph was born. Little by little and after having registered the trademark of their cinematograph in France and abroad, the Lumière brothers opened cinemas to show their films in Paris, London and New York. Ten years later, the brothers have more than two thousand films to their credit and ended in apotheosis at the Universal Exhibition of 1900 with a film on a thirty-meter screen. Viewers gasp as they watch the images move across the screen. When a train enters the station on the screen, they step back in fear, thinking the locomotive is going to run over them !