In the beginning: cinemaâs murky origin story
Everyone knows that the Lumière brothers invented cinema, right? Well, up to a point: the story is more complicated than thatâ¦
27 February 2021
Birt Acres filming the Derby at Epsom on 29 May 1895
The familiar story is that cinema was born when the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière staged their first ticketed film show in Paris on 28 December 1895. But while that is the version of the facts embedded in movie history, it is not true.
A woman looking into a kinetoscope
The movie business did not begin with films projected on a screen but viewed in a box: the Edison âKinetoscopeâ. For their money, the customer of 1894 would bend over, peer through a hole and view a tiny but vivid staged sequence lasting around 17 seconds. This was the culmination of a six-year project at the Edison works, overseen by William Dickson.