Cinématographe

A cinematograph is a motion picture film camera, which also serves as a film projector and printer. It was invented in the 1890s.

The device was first invented and patented as the "Cinématographe Léon Bouly" by French inventor Léon Bouly on February 12, 1892. Bouly coined the term “cinematograph”, from the Greek for “writing in movement”. Due to a lack of money, Bouly was unable to develop his ideas properly and maintain his patent fees, so he sold his rights to the device and its name to the Lumière Brothers. In 1895, they applied the name to a device that was largely their own creation.

They made their first film, Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon, that same year. The film was publicly screened at L'Eden, the world's first and oldest cinéma, located in La Ciotat in southeastern France, on September 28, 1895. The first commercial, public screening of cinematographic films happened in Paris on 28 December 1895 and was organised by the Lumière brothers. The cinematograph was also exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900. At the Exposition, films made by the Lumière Brothers were projected onto a large screen measuring 16 by 21 meters (approximately 52.5 x 69 feet).

Several versions of cinématographes were developed, including ones by the inventor Robert Royou Beard (1856-1932), the electrical engineer Cecil Wray (1866-1944), the optician Alfred Wrench (?-?),Georges Demenÿ and, of course, the Lumière brothers.

Louis Lumière worked with his brother Auguste to create a motion-picture camera superior to Thomas Edison's kinetograph, which did not have a projector. The Lumières endeavored to correct the flaws they perceived in the kinetograph and the kinetoscope, to develop a machine with both sharper images and better illumination. The Cinématographe weighed only 16 lbs., which allowed for ease of transportation and placement. As well, the Cinématographe was manually operated by a hand-crank, as opposed to Edison's electrically powered camera, which was not readily portable. Furthermore, while only one person at a time could use Edison's kinetoscope for viewing - through an eyepiece, peep show style - the Cinématographe could project an image onto a screen so a large audience of people could view images simultaneously.

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