The birth of an industry

Credit for the discovery of animated photography cannot be given to any one person. Following a long line of inventions in the fields of optics and photography, the first motion picture item, i.e. the first sequence of photographs taken on a film strip in order to give the impression of movement, was probably made in 1888, and several patents on camera and viewing apparatuses were granted in the following years. Edison applied for patents on the photographic camera called the Kineograph and on a viewing apparatus called the Kinetoscope in April 1891. The first Kinetoscope parlour opened in New York on 16 April 1894. However, the Kinetoscope could only be viewed by one person at a time, and the Kinetograph was itself a rather heavy and clumsy device. Shortly after their release, the French inventors Louis and Auguste Lumière built a handier apparatus which was a combined camera, processor and projector, patented as the Cinématographe in March 1895. The invention was shown to an audience on 22 March 1895 and the first ‘theatre’ opened on 28 December 1895 in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, on the Boulevard des Capucines. Lumière's representatives gave the first public demonstration of the Cinématographe in London a few weeks later, on 20 February 1896, at the Marlborough Hall of the Royal Polytechnic Institute on Regent Street. The invention spread rapidly throughout Europe, and met with immediate success.