Auguste Lumière

Auguste Lumière was the elder of the two brothers who launched commercial cinema, and spent the larger part of his life in medical research. Born in Besançon in 1862, he grew up in Lyon in the photographic business their father Antoine built, and studied at the Lycée La Martinière and then took a scientific training. He worked with his brother Louis in the family plate factory, which by the 1890s was producing millions of photographic plates a year and employed several hundred people. The two collaborated closely enough that they agreed to put both names on every patent regardless of who did the work, which is why the Cinématographe is credited jointly even though Louis always said the mechanism was his. Auguste's role was in the development and the business: refining the apparatus, organising the manufacture, and managing the extraordinary logistics of the operator network they dispatched around the world from 1896. He appears in several of the earliest films, including one in which he feeds his infant daughter. The brothers presented the Cinématographe publicly in December 1895 and withdrew from film production within a few years, having concluded that the novelty would not last and that the plate business was more valuable. Auguste then turned to biology and medicine, setting up a laboratory and publishing extensively on tuberculosis, cancer, wound healing and the physiology of colloids. He developed tulle gras, a paraffin-impregnated gauze dressing that stops bandages adhering to burns, which was widely used and saved a great deal of suffering. Some of his medical theorising was unorthodox and did not survive scrutiny. He died in Lyon in 1954, six years after Louis.

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