Before Hollywood, there was Lyon; before the giants of the movie studios, there were the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis, who were the first to create a moving picture that could be projected on a screen for public viewing.
There are a lot of hedges around statements like that; their first film, in 1895, was six years after Louis le Prince made a short film of people walking in a garden, but Le Prince had no way to project it. Edison’s Kinetoscope from 1893, actually developed by William Dickson, was a one-person-at-a-time viewer.
What the Lumière Brothers invented was a one-piece camera/projector/film printer that weighed only 7 kilos. To move the film in it accurately, they invented the sprocket system to drive the film with perforated edges. They called their device the Cinematographe, and used it both to shoot their earliest films and to project them for an audience at the Grand Café in Paris. Moving pictures are one thing; only once it’s projected is it really a ‘movie.’ The title image shows what it looked like.
The world of photography wasn’t new to the brothers; their father, Antoine, was a successful photographer and manufacturer of photographic supplies; the family’s wealth increased when Louis, at age 17, invented a highly-sensitive rapid dry photographic plate, which quickly replaced the cumbersome wet plates that preceded it. The Lumière Etiquette Bleu dominated the field for years, and helped fund the elaborate family home that now houses the museum.
Lumière film was a big factor in the market for over 80 years until it was sold to Ilford in 1968; their boastful motto (“No Photos without Lumière”) was also a pun, since the family’s name means ‘light.’
The museum retains the rich and elegant furnishings, much of it designed by Antoine, or under his direction. Locals called it Lumière Castle, The full city block and more behind it was filled with the company’s factories and warehouses, but only the house and a former warehouse that is now a screening room remain.
The first film the brothers shot, arguably the first documentary, shows a flock of workers leaving the Lumière factory, has the unimaginative title, “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.” You can see it just below; it’s also one of the selections they showed at the Grand Café.
Months before the public showing, Louis attended a scientific conference in Paris, and demonstrated the invention with this film; he was surprised and somewhat annoyed at how much interest it generated in the scientific community, because he was there mainly to talk about his progress in developing workable color film.
Despite the success of the early films, which grew to include comedy bits such as the one reflected in a still and a poster just below, the Lumères weren’t interested in becoming movie moguls; like Edison, they made movies to get the industry started; their plan was to sell cameras and film, not entertainment. By 1905, they left the production to others.
What Louis, the main scientist of the pair, was mainly interested in by that time was color film, and he soon produced some of the earliest and most widely-used color films, using the trade name Autochrome. The Autochrome plates required long exposure, but they could be used in an existing camera and opened a new era of photography, though not for amateurs with hand-held cameras.
Autochrome was presented at the French Academy of Sciences in 1904 and went on sale in 1907. The photographer Alfred Steiglitz remarked that “the possibilities of the process seem to be unlimited and soon the world will be color-mad, the Lumière will be responsible.”
In fact, the brothers were constantly busy, adding and improving products and inventing new ones. The company made specialty pharmaceuticals as a sideline. The brothers invented a panoramic camera to make 360-degree images. When another company’s projector caught fire and burned down a theater, the Lumières created a water-cooling system to prevent projector fires. In 1908 they patented the diaphragm loudspeaker that made the great curved horns of early phonographs obsolete.
Other inventions and improvements continued in the photographic field as well, including color movie film, but not all the ideas worked out in full. Photostereosynthesis, represented by the image above of Auguste’s son Henri, was a way of representing relief, or three dimensions in a two-dimensional photograph. It involved six parallel images superimposed to ‘reconstruct the spatial appearance of the object.’ The project was abandoned as too complex to have a commercial use, but it is actually a precursor to research into holography.
The brothers were both honored in their scientific fields in 1919, with Auguste becoming a member of the Academy of Medicine, and Louis of the Academy of Sciences. In part, those honors reflected their unusual roles in World War I. In 1915, Auguste invented a sterilized low-adherent wound dressing impregnated with Vaseline and Peru balsam. Used for superficial burns and wounds, it helps with drainage while not sticking to the skin.
Louis was the inventor of an articulated steel artificial hand for soldiers who had lost theirs in the war. He also invented a cabin heater for airplanes.
After the war, the business continued to grow and to acquire some other companies in related fields. From 1930 until the 1960s, they even produced a line of cameras of various sorts to go with their range of films.
Time to wander through more of the exhibits…
Before the moving picture, there were various ways of showing what appeared to be motion, such as flipping stacks of still photos taken in sequence, like a flipbook, or by viewing them through a spinning device like a zootrope.
The institute also has a more recent zootrope, created by French artist Emilie Tolot, who has worked mainly as a sculptor; to make her 3-D zootrope she created hundreds of small figures in quick-drying clay and assembled them on a large turntable.
Exhibits include more early movie cameras, featuring names cinema lovers know, including not only Lumière, but Pathé and Gaumont.
Up the ornate stairs, a glimpse of family life is preserved for visitors—the bedroom of Antoine and his wife Josephine, and a photo of the brothers and their father in 1905.
Hollywood, no—but certainly a story that would make quite a film!
Brilliant men, great article!
Thank you! I was amazed at how versatile they were, and their vision.