Auguste Lumiere
Auguste Lumiere, (1862-1954) and his brother Louis (1864-1948). French cinema pioneers. The brothers’ father, Antoine Lumiere, was a manufacturer of photo-graphic paper and film. In 1894 Louis saw an exhibition of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a peepshow machine that showed moving pictures to one viewer at a time. He at once had the idea of projecting images from an intermittently moving film roll onto a large screen for paying audiences. The brothers patented their Gine-matographe, a combined camera-projector, in February 1895 and on 28 December gave what is considered the first public cinema show at the Grand Cafe in Paris. Their short documentary films were soon being shown to amazed audiences all around the world. Despite this important achievement, however, the brothers failed to realize the commercial and artistic potential of their invention. Both soon abandoned film-making for other areas of research.
“This invention is not for sale, but if it were it would ruin you. It can be exploited for a while as a scientific curiosity; beyond that it has no commercial future. Antoine Lumiere, rejecting the attempts of a rival film-maker to buy a Cinematographe”
