Pre-Eastman Film Pioneers
Before Eastman, various people tried making motion pictures. Most notable were Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman living in the US, and William Friese-Green in England, but the brilliant and innovative Thomas Alva Edison put an assistant to work with the Eastman film to produce moving pictures. By 1891 the invention became available for use by 1891. It was called the kinetoscope, designed for one person to view the pictures at a time.
The Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis
The real inventors of the modern movies were the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière because the main issue that time was the film projector. Seeing a film, what they actually saw was an enormous number of separate photographs. Each still remained for one-sixteenth (for silent films) or one-twenty-fourth (for sound films) of a second before it moved on and the next one took its place.
Because of what is known as "persistence of vision" in the eye, what seems to be seen were pictures actually moving. Stopping and starting the film so often would break the material of which it was made.
The Lumière brothers solved the problem. After watching how a sewing machine worked, and then using a somewhat similar type of claw movement to that which moves the cloth under the needle, it gave them idea and utilized the concept for the film. They managed to keep the film moving while actually stopping it many times per second in front of the lens. How did they do it? They kept the film slacked above and below the claw mechanism by means of a loop.
First Modern Movie
The first 'modern' movie was demonstrated by the Lumière brothers in 1895. This was considered as the first 'cinema' and the first film show for the public was given at the Grand Café in Paris on December 28, 1895.
Made by the Lumière brothers, the films were of a train entering a station, a rowing boat in a harbour, and workers coming out of the Lumière factory at Lyons. More improvements followed.
Early Permanent Cinemas
The following year, the first 'real' permanent cinema was the Vitascope Hall, in New Orleans, USA, which was opened by William Rock in June 1896. It took another 14 years, in 1910, when the first 'picture palace' was opened at the Gaumont Palace in Paris, which could hold an audience of 5,000 people.
Films with sound appeared at least as early as 1902.
