Lumière brothers

Auguste and Louis Lumière were French inventors and filmmakers whose public film screenings helped establish cinema in the 1890s.

Cinematograph: A motion-picture camera, film printer, and projector designed by the Lumière brothers. This portable device both recorded films and projected them for paying audiences.
Film stock: A flexible, light-sensitive material used to record photographic images. Celluloid film let the Cinematograph capture and transport successive images.
Antoine Lumière: A French industrialist and photographer who founded the Lumière family’s photographic business. His factory and commercial success gave his sons a setting for invention.
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory: An 1895 short film showing workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon. It was among the first films the brothers made with their Cinematograph.
Cinema of attractions: An early mode of cinema that emphasizes spectacle, display, and direct audience attention. The Lumières’ short films often presented striking scenes for audiences to watch as attractions.
Kinetoscope: A peephole motion-picture viewer developed by Thomas Edison’s company. Its individual viewing format contrasted with the Lumières’ projected screenings for groups.
Intermittent mechanism: A mechanism that advances film in discrete steps while holding each frame briefly before a light source. The Cinematograph needed this motion to project sharp, separate frames.
Lumière factory: The photographic-plate factory established by the Lumière family in Lyon, France. Its products and manufacturing expertise formed the brothers’ industrial base.
The Sprinkler Sprinkled: A 1895 Lumière comedy in which a gardener is tricked by a boy interrupting his watering. Its staged gag shows the brothers’ films were not limited to recording everyday scenes.
Nickelodeon: An early, small theater devoted to showing motion pictures, especially in the United States. Later dedicated venues extended the public film exhibition their screenings helped popularize.

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