Louis Lumière

Louis Lumière designed the Cinématographe and shot the first films shown to a paying audience. Born in Besançon in 1864, he moved with his family to Lyon, where his father Antoine ran a photographic business. He was the technical mind of the family: while still a teenager he devised the étiquette bleue dry plate process, which rescued the firm from bankruptcy and made it one of Europe's largest photographic plate manufacturers. Antoine saw Edison's Kinetoscope in Paris in 1894 — a peep-show cabinet for one viewer at a time, using heavy equipment — and asked his sons to do better. Louis solved the central problem, the intermittent movement needed to hold each frame still behind the lens, by adapting the claw mechanism of a sewing machine. He said the design came to him one night while ill in bed. The Cinématographe weighed about five kilograms against Edison's several hundred, was hand-cranked so it needed no electricity, and was camera, printer and projector in one device. That portability is why the Lumière catalogue is global while Edison's early films were shot in a studio. The first public paying screening was at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895, ten short films including workers leaving the Lumière factory. The story that audiences fled a train arriving at La Ciotat is almost certainly a myth. They trained operators and sent them to Egypt, Japan, India and the Americas, creating both an audience and a documentary record. Louis judged cinema an invention without a future and moved on, working on colour photography — the Autochrome process of 1907 — and stereoscopy. He died in 1948.

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