Lumière Brothers Invent Cinema: The Birth of Motion Pictures

Workers shuffling out factory doors for lunch was what Auguste and Louis Lumière chose as humanity's first public movie screening. Not an epic battle. Not a royal coronation. Just 46 seconds of people leaving work on a spring afternoon in Lyon, France. Born in Besançon and raised in Lyon, the brothers grew up in their father's photographic firm, where Louis made improvements to the dry-plate photographic process while Auguste handled business operations. Their father retired in 1892, and the brothers turned their attention to moving pictures. They patented the cinématographe on February 13, 1895, a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures. The first footage was recorded on March 19, 1895, showing workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon. On December 28, 1895, 33 Parisians paid one franc each at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris to watch ten short films, each approximately 50 seconds long. Most thought it was a magic trick involving mirrors. The screening included scenes of workers, a baby being fed, a garden being watered, and a train arriving at a station. Contemporary accounts suggest that some audience members recoiled when the train appeared to approach the camera, though this claim has been disputed by film historians. The commercial potential was immediately apparent to others, if not to the Lumières themselves. Within three years, they had trained over 200 camera operators who fanned across five continents, filming everything from the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II to street scenes in Japan, creating the first international library of documentary footage. The brothers themselves viewed cinema as a scientific curiosity with limited commercial potential. Auguste reportedly declared it "an invention without a future." They withdrew from filmmaking to focus on color photography. They had accidentally created an industry worth over $100 billion today by filming the most ordinary thing they could find.