Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion PicturesQuigley, Martin
History
Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures
Quigley, Martin
Lantern projection; Motion pictures -- History
Louis Lumière and his brother, Auguste, operated a photographic
establishment at Lyons which their father had established. Lyons
figured once before in the magic shadow show; it was here that
Walgenstein, the Dane, first introduced Kircher’s magic lantern in
France.
Lumière, who was a successful photographer, decided that the number
of images used by Edison per second, forty-eight, was more than
necessary so he used sixteen. Lumière, however, borrowed from Edison
the idea of perforating the edge of the film, having one on each side
of every frame instead of Edison’s four. Lumière adopted a claw type
intermittent drive for the apparatus which was designed by an engineer,
Charles Moissant. Léon Gaumont, who later became associated with
Demeny, was Moissant’s secretary. The machine was constructed by the
Jules Carpentier manufacturing firm.
First experiments were made with coated paper but this was found
unsuitable. Celluloid was ordered from the American Celluloid Company
and this the Lumières coated themselves because, unlike Edison, they
were skilled in photography before they took up the motion picture
problem. The Lumières were able to use celluloid but it was not as
good as the Eastman motion picture film which Edison had found so
satisfactory.
On February 13, 1895, the Lumières obtained a French patent on their
camera-projector device, the Cinématographe. The name Cinématographe
probably was derived from a French patent issued February 12, 1892, to
Léon Bouly who had an idea for a camera which evidently was not reduced
to practice.
_Le Repas de Bébé_, “The Baby’s Meal,” was the first Lumière film.
Other scenes were made in the Lumière photographic plant, together
with views of the city, including the Bourse. A demonstration of the
apparatus was given there on March 22, 1895, but the Lumières were
already established in business and in no haste to develop the new
invention. The Cinématographe was shown at Marseilles in April, the
month an English patent was obtained, and next shown at the Congress of
the National Union of French Photographic Societies, held in June of
the same year. There the Lumières created a sensation by filming the
delegates arriving for the opening meeting on June 10, developing the
film and showing it before the conference was adjourned on June 12.
This was the first newsreel use of the motion picture.
On December 28th, the Lumières opened a commercial establishment for
the Cinématographe in the Salle au Grand-Café at 14, Boulevard des
Capucines. An admission charge of one franc was made, but only a few
dozen curious people stopped in the first day. Soon however the fame
of the Cinématographe spread throughout Paris. Within a few weeks the
Lumière films were playing to “standing room only,” averaging more than
two thousand admissions per day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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