thumb| Lumière at the [[Institut Lumière, France]]
A cinematograph or kinematograph was an early motion picture film mechanism of various kinds. The name was used for movie cameras as well as film projectors, or for complete systems that also provided means to print films (such as the Lumière).
Before the Cinématographe Lumière
thumb|The Institut Lumière in Lyon, France
Soon after photography was introduced in 1839, people figured that the images could be combined with the principle of the phenakistiscope. Besides some experiments with short sequences of stop motion or posed phases of a movement, not much would be achieved until a sufficient amount of successive images could be captured fast enough. Although much work was done on diminishing exposures times for instantaneous photography, it took several decades before motion sequences would be recorded in real-time.
Eadweard Muybridge's well-published 1878 introduction of chronophotography inspired many attempts to further develop the technology. Muybridge's small pictures were almost immediately placed in zoetropes to view them in action, and Muybridge developed his zoopraxiscope to project animated contours of his images as a core element of the many lectures he gave from 1880 to 1895.
In 1887, Ottomar Anschütz introduced the first version of his Elektrische Schnellseher, a.k.a. Electrotachyscope, which presented the action of his chronophotographic sequences on a small glass screen for small audiences. The many exhibitions of the Electrotachyscope in large cities across Europe and the United States drew many paying visitors, with the mechanism changed to a peep-box format for individual viewers by 1890. Anschütz did not limit his subjects to the animal and human locomotion commonly seen in chronophotography, but clearly aimed at entertainment for the general public in the presented actions of acrobats, dancers, athletes, horse races, and comical scenes based on everyday life. The technology and peep-box format inspired the earliest prototypes of the Kinetoscope built by Thomas Edison's company, while much of the early films they produced for the definitive version they eventually introduced in 1893 and succesfully marketed across the United States and Europe in 1894 showed subjects resembling those seen in the machines of Anschütz.
French inventor Léon Bouly coined the term "" (from the Greek for "writing in movement"), documented in his patent for 'an instantaneous photography apparatus for the automatic and uninterrupted acquisition of a series of analytical photographs of movement or other phenomena', entered on 12 February 1892. By turning a handle, a padded pressure plate intermittently stopped the film that was transported by a rotating cylinder. On 27 December 1893, Bouly filed a patent for an improved "cinématographe Léon Bouly", a very similar device, but now "reversible", so that it could also intermittently project the images on a screen. At least three different Bouly cinematographs were actually constructed, but his patents lapsed at the end of 1894 because the annual fees were only paid once, and Bouly seems to have abandonded the project.
1894–1895
On 26 December 26 1894, the Lyon républicain reported that the Lumière brothers were working on a new kinetograph (a name for the camera that recorded the pictures for the kinetoscope viewer). The brothers filed a patent for their 'apparatus for obtaining and viewing chronophotographic prints' on 13 February 1895, which would eventually receive four additions (on 30 March and 6 May 1895, 28 March and 18 November 1896).
Louis Lumière presented his first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon) on 22 March 1895, in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry. The screening was part of his lecture on the industrial production of photographic plates in his family's factory, with the projection of photographic slides in colour (made with the Lippmann plate method) expected to be the highlight. Lumière was surprised when the audience, a few dozen invited guests, were much more enthousiastic about the film and demanded a repeated projection of the curiously detailed and lively action.
The first commercial, public screening of cinematographic films happened on 20 May 1895 at 156 Broadway, New York City, when the "Eidoloscope", invented by Woodville Latham and Eugene Lauste was presented. Nonetheless, this has often been incorrectly attributed to the first Lumière show on 28 December 1895 at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, which was organised by the Lumière brothers. This presentation featured ten short films, including a new version of Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory.
The presumably produced a sharper projected image than had been seen before, attributed to the use of claws that intermittently held frames in place behind the lens, gripping the perforations in the sides of the film strip.
To project the images in their 1895 presesentations, the Lumières used a common magic lantern, produced by Alfred Molteni.
Popularity
After the success of the Lumières's initial public screening in 1895, the became a popular attraction for people all over the world. The Lumière brothers took their machine to China and India