The brothers who launched cinema called it an invention without a future
In December 1895 about 40 people paid to sit in a Paris café basement and watch ten films, each under a minute long. That night is usually called the birth of cinema. Its makers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, quit the movie business within a decade to chase colour photography instead.
Auguste, born in 1862, and Louis, born in 1864, grew up in Besançon, where their parents Charles-Antoine and Jeanne ran a small portrait studio. The family moved to Lyon in 1870, and both boys studied at La Martinière, the city's largest technical school. They became manufacturers of photographic equipment, and their patents included film perforations, borrowed from Émile Reynaud, which let a strip advance through camera and projector.
The cinématographe itself had first been patented by Léon Guillaume Bouly in February 1892. The Lumières refined it into a single machine that could film, print and project, and filed their own patent on 13 February 1895. Louis later told the historian Georges Sadoul that he had shot their first film in August 1894, but historians doubt a working Lumière camera existed before early 1895.
On 22 March 1895 they showed Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory to roughly 200 members of an industrial society in Paris, probably the first projection of film anywhere. Louis had come to talk about colour photography and was surprised that the flickering monochrome clip drew more interest than his coloured stills. The paying debut followed on 28 December at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café. Each reel held up to 17 metres of film, about 50 seconds when cranked by hand; the programme included a comic gardener soaked by his own hose.
In 1896 the machine toured Bombay, Buenos Aires, Montreal, New York and beyond, reaching Alexandria that November. Yet the brothers refused to sell cameras to rivals such as Georges Méliès, treated film as a novelty and had left the field by 1905. Their energy went into the Autochrome, the first practical colour photography process. Louis died in 1948 and Auguste in 1954; both lie in a family tomb in Lyon.
Source: Lumière brothers
