The history of film technology traces the development of techniques for the recording, construction and presentation of motion pictures. When the film medium came about in the 19th century, there already was a centuries old tradition of screening moving images through shadow play and the magic lantern that were very popular with audiences in many parts of the world. Especially the magic lantern influenced much of the projection technology, exhibition practices and cultural implementation of film. Between 1825 and 1840, the relevant technologies of stroboscopic animation, photography and stereoscopy were introduced. For much of the rest of the century, many engineers and inventors tried to combine all these new technologies and the much older technique of projection to create a complete illusion or a complete documentation of reality. Colour photography was usually included in these ambitions and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877 seemed to promise the addition of synchronized sound recordings. Between 1887 and 1894, the first successful short cinematographic presentations were established. The biggest popular breakthrough of the technology came in 1895 with the first projected movies that lasted longer than 10 seconds. During the first years after this breakthrough, most motion pictures lasted about 50 seconds, lacked synchronized sound and natural colour, and were mainly exhibited as novelty attractions. In the first decades of the 20th century, movies grew much longer and the medium quickly developed into one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment. The breakthrough of synchronized sound occurred at the end of the 1920s and that of full color motion picture film in the 1930s (although black and white films remained very common for several decades). By the start of the 21st century, physical film stock was being replaced with digital film technologies at both ends of the production chain by digital image sensors and projectors. 3D film technologies have been around from the beginning, but only became a standard option in most movie theatres during the first decades of the 21st century. Television, video and video games are closely related technologies, but are traditionally seen as different media. Historically, they were often interpreted as threats to the movie industry that had to be countered with innovations in movie theatre screenings, such as colour, widescreen formats and 3D. The rise of new media and digitization have caused many aspects of different media to overlap with film, resulting in shifts in ideas about the definition of film. To differentiate film from television: a film is usually not transmitted live and is commonly a standalone release, or at least not part of a very regular ongoing schedule. Unlike computer games, a film is rarely interactive. The difference between video and film used to be obvious from the medium and the mechanism used to record and present the images, but both have evolved into digital techniques and few technological differences remain. Regardless of its medium, the term "film" mostly refers to relatively long and big productions that can be best enjoyed by large audiences on a large screen in a movie theatre, usually relating a story full of emotions, while the term "video" is mostly used for shorter, small-scale productions that seem to be intended for home viewing, or for instructional presentations to smaller groups.
From ancient times to 1894: motion picture technologies before film
The technology of film emerged mostly from developments and achievements in the fields of projection, lenses, photography and optics. Early techniques that involve moving pictures and/or projection include:
Shadowgraphy (probably in practice since prehistoric times) Camera obscura (a natural phenomenon that has possibly been used as an artistic aid since prehistoric times) Shadow puppetry (possibly originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, India, Indonesia or China) Magic lantern (developed in the 1650s, preceded by some incidental and/or inferior projectors) stroboscopic "persistence of vision" animation devices (phénakisticope since 1833, zoetrope since 1866, flip book since 1868) Live projection of moving images occurs in the camera obscura (also known as "pinhole image"), a natural phenomenon that may have been used artistically since prehistory. Very occasionally, the camera obscura was used to project theatrical spectacles to entertain small audiences. It is believed that the technique was more commonly used by charlatans, priests and wizards to conjure up magical, religious and necromantic appearances, for instance of spiritual beings like ghosts, gods or demons. The use of a lens in a camera obscura has been dated back to 1550. In the 17th century, the camera obscura was a popular drawing aid and commonly turned into a mobile device, first as tents and not much later as portable wooden boxes. Starting around 1790 with the experiments of Thomas Wedgwood, the box-type camera obscura would be adapted into a photographic still camera by capturing the projected images on plates or sheets that were treated with light-sensitive chemicals. Around 1659 the magic lantern was developed by Christiaan Huygens. It projected slides that were usually painted in color on glass. A sketch by Huygens believed to have been made in 1659, indicates that moving images from mechanical slides may have been part of the earliest screenings. Around 1790, the magic lantern became an important instrument in the multi-media phantasmagoria spectacles. Rear projection, animated slides, multiple projectors (superimposition), mobile projectors (on tracks or handheld), projection on smoke, sounds, odors and even electric shocks were used to frighten audiences in dedicated theatres with a convincing ghost horror experience. In the 19th century, several other popular magic lantern techniques were developed, including dissolving views and new types of mechanical slides that created dazzling abstract effects (chromatrope, et cetera) or that depicted, for instance, falling snow or the planets and their moons revolving. Many aspects of cinema are closely related to theatre. The term "photoplay", commonly used in the early days of cinema, reflects the idea of motion pictures as filmed plays. Technologies used for the theatre, such as stage lighting and all kinds of special effects were automatically adopted for use in front of cameras.
1831–1848: Early stroboscopic animation
On 21 January 1831, Michael Faraday introduced an experiment with a rotating cardboard disc with concentric series of apertures that represented cogwheels of different sizes and different amounts of cogs. When looking at a mirror through the holes of one series of apertures, that "wheel" seemed to stand still while the others would appear to move around with different velocities or in opposite directions. In January 1833, Joseph Plateau, who had been working on similar experiments for years, published a letter about his recently discovered slotted disc inspired by Faraday's input. The illustrated example of a pirouetting dancer demonstrated that if drawings of successive phases of a scene or object in motion replaced the apertures in Faraday's experiment, they would give the impression of fluent motion when viewed in the mirror through the slots. Plateau's Fantascope became better known as the Phénakisticope and its principle would form the basis for many later motion picture technologies (including cinematography). The possibilities of the Fantascope were limited to the short loops of images that could be drawn or printed on a cardboard circle, but Plateau suggested in a letter to Faraday that the principle might find modified applications in, for instance, phantasmagoria. In May 1833, Simon Stampfer published his Stroboscopische Scheiben that were very similar to Plateau's Fantascope discs. He calimed stated to have discovered the technique soon after reading about Faraday's experiments in December 1832. In a booklet issued later in 1883 with a new edition of the discs, Stampfer explained the principles of stroboscopic animation, which depends on the fast irregular interruptions of light coming from the observed objects before it enters the eyes. The interruptions allow unnoticed replacement of a certain figure by a similar one that will be interpreted as the same figure, while the vision seems to continue despite these interruptions if these are sufficiently short and regular (shorter than the duration of the impressions of the pictures. Stampfer pointed out that narrower apertures gave darker images (as later established in the Talbot-Plateau law), but that the loss of light needed to be balanced with increased washing out of the contours of the fast-moving pictures with wider apertures. He realised that the pictures should ideallly remain motionless while visible, but doubted that any mechanism could stop and start the transport fast enough. Because most movements in nature could not be "fixed in their individual moments", Stampfer promoted careful analysis of motion and strict division into regular phases for accurate motion designs. Stampfer also suggested several variations of the technology, including a cylinder (similar to the later zoetrope), a long paper or canvas strip looped around two parallel rollers to enable longer theatre scenes (somewhat similar to film) and a theater-like frame (much like the later praxinoscope theatre). In the April 1833 patent application for the stroboscope discs, Stampfer and publisher Matthias Trentsensky had also suggested stroboscopic presentation of transparent pictures (which were commonly used for magic lantern projection). The earliest known public screening of projected stroboscopic animation was presented by Austrian magician Ludwig Döbler on 15 January 1847 at the Josephstadt Theatre in Vienna, with his patented Phantaskop. The spectacle was well-received with sold-out shows in several European cities during a tour that lasted until the spring of 1848, although one critic complained about the flickering quality of the stroboscopic images.
1849–1870: Photography in motion When photography was introduced in 1839, long exposure times seemed to prohibit a combination with stroboscopic animation. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published about improvements for his Fantascope, including a suggestion by Charles Wheatstone to combine it with his invention of the stereoscope and with inspiration from Wheatstone's early stereoscopic photography. Plateau proposed a stop motion technique avant la lettre with stereoscopic recordings of plaster models in different positions. He never executed the elaborate plan, probably because he had turned blind by this time. Stereoscopic photography became very popular in the early 1850s with David Brewster and Jules Duboscq's new portable viewer with lenses. Stereoscopy inspired hope that photography could also be augmented with colour and motion for a more complete illusion of reality, and several pioneers started to experiment with these goals in mind. Antoine Claudet claimed in March 1851 to have exhibited a self portrait that showed 12 sides of his face at the French Industrial Exposition of 1844. These were probably not meant as a representation of different phases of a motion, but as an overview of different camera angles. However, Claudet got interested in animating stereoscopic photography and in November 1851 he claimed to have created a stereo viewer that showed people in motion. It could show a motion of two phases repetitively and Claudet worked on a camera that would record stereoscopic pairs for four different poses (patented in 1853). Although Claudet was not satisfied with the stereoscopic effect in this device, he believed the illusion of motion was successful. On 12 November 1852, Jules Duboscq (who published Plateau's Fantascope in France and also manufactured Wheatstone stereoscopes) added a "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou Bïoscope" variation to his patent for a stereoscope. Basically a combination of Plateau's Fantascope and the stereoscope, it used two small mirrors in different angles next to each other that reflected stereoscopic image pairs (printed above each other on the stroboscopic disc). Of three planned variations only one was actually produced, without commercial success. The only known extant Bioscope disc has stereoscopic sets of a sequence of photographic images of a machine in action. No original viewing device has resurfaced, but parts of it are known from an illustration in an 1853 advertisement.
Other concepts for stereoscopic viewers include a double-phenakistiscope version that one F. Wenham (possibly Francis Herbert Wenham) in 1895 claimed to have made in 1852, a similar idea and a proto-zoetrope by Johann Nepomuk Czermak published in 1855, an 1858 stroboscopic-stereoscopic projection system by Joseph-Charles d'Almeida that he wanted to combine with the principles of the phénakisticope, and Coleman Sellers II's kinematoscope patented in 1861. On 27 February 1860, Peter Hubert Desvignes received British patent no. 537 for 28 monocular and stereoscopic variations of cylindrical stroboscopic devices. This included a version that used an endless band of pictures running between two spools that was intermittently lit by an electric spark. Desvignes' Mimoscope, similar to Czermak's Stereophoroskop, received an Honourable Mention "for ingenuity of construction" at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. It could "exhibit drawings, models, single or stereoscopic photographs, so as to animate animal movements, or that of machinery, showing various other illusions." During the 1850s the first examples of instantaneous photography had appeared, which furthered hope for the possibilities of motion photography. In 1860, John Herschel figured it was or would soon be possible to take ten stereoscopic snap-shots in one second that could then be combined with the phenakisticope. He also had high hopes for the development of colour photography, since he himself had already obtained promising results. On 5 February 1870, Philadelphia engineer Henry Renno Heyl projected three moving picture scenes with his Phasmatrope to 1500 persons at a church entertainment evening at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Each scene was projected from its own intermittent spur-geared rotating disk with 16 photographic images. The only known extant disk repeated four images of a waltzing couple four times and was screened with an appropriate musical accompaniment by a 40-person orchestra. The presentation of a disk depicting a Brother Jonathan speech (considered lost) was voiced live by an actor.
1874: Janssen's photographic revolver
Jules Janssen developed a large photographic revolver that was used to document the stages of the transit of Venus in 1874 at different geographic points, in an early form of time-lapse photography. Several discs with images have been preserved, but research concluded that all of the known discs contained test recordings of a model in front of a circular light source (or brightly lit surface). The photographs were most likely never intended to be presented as motion pictures, but much later images of one disc were transferred and animated into a very short stop motion film. In 1875 and 1876, Janssen suggested that the revolver could also be used to document animal locomotion, especially that of birds, since they would be hard to photograph by other means.
1876–1878: Donisthorpe's early film concepts On 9 November 1876, Wordsworth Donisthorpe filed a patent application for "an apparatus for taking and exhibiting photographs" that would "facilitate the taking of a succession of photographic pictures at equal intervals of time, in order to record the changes taking place in or the movements of the object being photographed, and also by means of succession of pictures so taken of any moving object to give to the eye a presentation of the object in continuous movement as it appeared when being photographed". The camera would have a mechanism to move photographic plates one by one past a lens and shutter to be exposed for the necessary time and then dropped or carried into a receiver. The recorded images would be printed at equal distances apart on a strip of paper. The strip was to be wound between cylinders and carried past the eye of the observer, with a stroboscopic device to expose each picture momentarily. Such photographic strips only became commercially available several years later and Donisthorpe seems to have been unable to produce motion pictures at this stage. Thomas Edison demonstrated his phonograph on 29 November 1877. An article in Scientific American concluded: "It is already possible, by ingenious optical contrivances, to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience. Add the talking phonograph to counterfeit their voices and it would be difficult to carry the illusion of real presence much further". Donisthorpe announced in the 24 January 1878 edition of Nature that he would advance that conception: "By combining the phonograph with the Kinesigraph I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of Mr. Gladstone which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone. Not only this, but the life size photograph itself shall move and gesticulate precisely as he did when making the speech, the words and gestures corresponding as in real life." A Dr. Phipson repeated this idea in a French photography magazine, but renamed the device "Kinétiscope" to reflect the viewing purpose rather than the recording option. This was picked up in the United States and discussed in an interview with Edison later in the year.
1878–1881: Muybridge and the horse in motion
In June 1878, Eadweard Muybridge made several sequential series of photographs of Leland Stanford's horses in motion with a line of cameras along the race track. Results were soon after published as The Horse in Motion and the achievement received worldwide praise (as well as astonishment about the relatively "ungraceful" positions of the legs of the horses). By January 1879 at the latest, people placed Muybridge's sequential pictures in zoetropes to watch them in motion. These were probably the very first viewings of photographic motion pictures that were recorded in real-time. The quality of the small pictures was limited and the figures were mostly seen as silhouettes, in some cases furthered by retouching of the pictures to get rid of photographic irregularities. From 1879 to 1893 Muybridge gave lectures in which he projected silhouettes of his pictures with a device he eventually called the Zoopraxiscope. It used slightly anamorphic pictures traced from his photographs and painted onto glass discs, in an early type of rotoscoping. One disc had anamorphic chronophotographs of the skeleton of a horse posed in the different positions of a stride, as recorded in 1881. Muybridge continued his locomotion studies of different animals and of people until 1886.
1882–1890s: Marey and chronophotography
Many others would follow Muybridge's example and started making sequential photograph series, a method dubbed "Chronophotographie" by French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey. Étienne-Jules Marey had already been researching and graphically recording animal locomotion for years. His book The animal machine, terrestrial and aerial locomotion (French edition 1873, English edition 1874) had inspired Leland Stanford to look for a way to correctly visualize the strides of horses. In 1882, Marey started using his chronophotographic gun for scientific study of animal locomotion. It was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second through a single lens. Marey had relatively little interest in moving imagery and preferred to study stills. Many of his later chronophotographic studies recorded the sequential images on a single plate, with a newly-developed chronophotographic camera system. Prompted by the much publicized successes of Muybridge's photographic sequences and other chronophotographic achievements, inventors in the late 19th century began to realize that the making and showing of photographic 'moving pictures' of a more useful or even indefinite length was a practical possibility. Many people working in the field followed the international developments closely through information in periodicals, patent filings, personal contact with colleagues or by getting their hands on new equipment.
1886–1890s: Anschütz' Electrotachyscope
Between 1886 and 1894 Ottomar Anschütz developed several versions of his "elektrische Schnellseher", or Electrotachyscope. His first machine had 24 chronophotographic 9x12 centimeter glass plate images on a rotating disk, illuminated from behind by synchronized stroboscopic flashes from a Geissler tube. In very successful presentations between 1887 and 1890, four to seven spectators at a time would watch the images on a 12.5 centimeter wide milk-glass screen in a window in a wall of a small darkened room. In 1890, Anschütz introduced a long cylindrical automated version with six small screens. In 1891, Siemens & Halske started manufacture of circa 152 copies of Anschütz' coin-operated peep-box Electrotachyscope-automat, that was successfully distributed internationally.
1884–1900: paper and gelatin films Although Simon Stampfer had already suggested rolls of paper or canvas as a means to present stroboscopic animation in 1833, the idea never caught on. Donisthorpe's 1876 patent had suggested the uses of paper film rolls, but had not resulted in any satisfying recordings or presentations. In 1884, George Eastman patented his ideas for photographic film. The first rolls of Eastman film used gelatin with a paper backing as a flexible support for a light-sensitive layer of chemicals. Several motion picture pioneers discovered the possibilities to record and present their chronophotographic work on rolls of film. Émile Reynaud seems to have been the first to present motion pictures through the projection of long strips of transparent images.
1886–1889: Le Prince's "animated pictures of natural scenery and life"
The oldest known functional motion picture cameras were developed by Louis Le Prince in the 1880s. On 2 November 1886, he applied for a US patent for a "Method of and apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life", which was granted on 10 January 1888. It described a multi-lens camera in detail and also provided some information on a projector, but construction details for the projector were planned to be patented separately. The idea for a two-fold apparatus was also included. The camera could be fitted with three, four, eight, nine, sixteen or more lenses and was illustrated with sixteen lenses in the patent documents. The images were to be recorded as negatives on a pair of sensitive films, stored on two lower drums and mechanically transported without interruption to two upper drums, past lenses and successively operated shutters. The sensitive film could be "an endless sheet of insoluble gelatine coated with bromide emulsion or any convenient ready-made quick-acting paper, such as Eastman's paper film". For longer recordings, the receiver could be suited with extra supply boxes after the first boxes were exhausted. With sixteen lenses the camera could record 960 images per minute (16 per second). The projector would have positive transparencies on flexible material, "such as gelatine, mica, horn &c" to be "adjusted on a pair of endless metallic ribbons accurately punctured with small round holes" and guided past the lenses and shutters by pins on drums. Shorter sequences could be projected from glass discs instead of the films on drums. Le Prince intended the pictures to "pass through the hands of artists" to be suitably colored. Despite similarities in terminology in Le Prince and Donisthorpe's patents and the fact that they lived and worked on similar projects in the same town, it remains uncertain whether Le Prince was directly inspired by Donisthorpe's work. Before the application was granted, it was criticized for possible infringements of the patent of Du Mont (1861 and 1865) and Muybridge (1883). In the meantime, Le Prince kept experimenting with different techniques and materials for years and applied for additional patents in many countries. A sequence of 16 frames of recordings of a man walking around a corner has been preserved and seems to have been shot on one glass plate with the 16-lens camera by Le Prince in Paris around August 1887. Only 12 frames contain complete and clear images. On 18 August 1887, while in Paris, Le Prince sent his wife 8 gelatin pictures showing his mechanic running. Le Prince claimed he was able to record 32 images per second and mentioned that he wanted to show her his progress, but was keeping the better results for his own use. He also thought about reverting to his original plan of using "a special light for each image". It is believed that the preserved images are from experiments relating to the ones mentioned in the letter, and were shot at the corner of Rue Bochard-de-Saron (where Le Prince was living) and Avenue Trudaine. In May 1887, after much trial and error, Le Prince was able to develop and patent his first single-lensed motion picture camera. He later used it to shoot the film that became known as Roundhay Garden Scene, a short test photographed on October 14, 1888 in Roundhay, Leeds. Le Prince also recorded trams and the horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic on Leeds Bridge, and a few more short films. Le Prince used paper-backed gelatin films for the negatives, from which the paper could be peeled off after filming. He also investigated the possibilities of celluloid film and obtained long lengths from the Lumiere factory in Lyon. In 1889, Le Prince developed a single-lensed projector with an arc lamp to project his films onto a white screen. Le Prince didn't publish about his inventions. His wife arranged a demonstration at the Morris–Jumel Mansion in Manhattan in 1890, but Le Prince vanished after boarding a train on 16 September 1890.
1888–1900: Reynaud's Théâtre Optique
Émile Reynaud already mentioned the possibility of projecting moving images in his 1877 patent application for the Praxinoscope. He presented a praxinoscope projection device at the Société française de photographie on 4 June 1880, but did not market his Praxinoscope à projection before 1882. He then further developed the device into the Théâtre Optique, which could project longer sequences with separate backgrounds, and patented the machine in 1888. He created several Pantomimes Illumineuses for this optical theatre by painting colourful images on hundreds of gelatin plates that were mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band. The perforated strip of images could be manually transported past a lens and mirror projection system. Many simple actions of the figures, for example one figure hitting another, were repeated several times by rewinding and forwarding certain sequences. Some sound effects were synchronized by electro-magnetic devices, triggered by metal parts on the strip, while a score with some songs was performed live. From 28 October 1892 to March 1900, Reynaud gave over 12,800 shows to a total of over 500,000 visitors at the Musée Grévin in Paris.
1889–1896: early celluloid films Celluloid photographic film was commercially introduced in 1889. William Friese-Greene reportedly used oiled paper as a medium for displaying motion pictures in 1885, but by 1887 would have started working with celluloid. In 1889, Friese-Greene took out a patent for a chronophotographic camera. This was capable of taking up to ten photographs per second using perforated celluloid film. A report on the camera was published in the British Photographic News on February 28, 1890. He showed his negative film strips and a projection device at the Photographic Convention held at the Town Hall, Chester, in late June 1890, but was unable to demonstrate the projector, supposedly because it had suffered some derangement during transport. Instead he seems to have used a phenakisticope-based device built for him by John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, which could only show a looping short sequence, possibly photographed as a series of posed shots. Le Prince investigated the possibilities of celluloid film and obtained long lengths from the Lumière factory in Lyon. Donisthorpe's interest in moving pictures was revived when he heard about the successful experiments of Louis Le Prince, who was then working in Donsithorpe's home town of Leeds. In 1889, Donisthorpe took out a patent, jointly with William Carr Crofts, for a camera using celluloid roll film and a projector system; they then made a short film of the bustling traffic in London's Trafalgar Square. The Pleograph, invented by Polish emigre Kazimierz Prószyński in 1894 was another early camera. It also doubled as a projector. The apparatus used a rectangle of celluloid with perforations between several parallel rows of images. Using an improved pleograph, Prószynski shot short films showing scenes of life in Warsaw, such as people skating in the park.
1891–1896: The Kinetoscope
Soon after he introduced his phonograph in 1877, Thomas Edison was confronted with ideas to combine it with moving images. He never showed much interest, but eventually he registered a caveat for "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear" in October 1888. A meeting with Muybridge for a possible collaboration, in February 1888, seems to have triggered the action. Edison employee W. K. L. Dickson got the job for the development of the technology. Initially, experiments focused on an apparatus that would have 42,000 microscopic pinhole photographs on a celluloid sheet wrapped around a cylinder, similar to phonograph cylinders, to be viewed through a magnifying lens at the end of a conical tube. This concept was abandoned by the end of 1889 and a system based on Anschütz's rotating disc Electrotachyscope was investigated for a short while. After Edison had visited Étienne-Jules Marey, further experiments concentrated on 3/4 inch strips, much like Marey was using in his chronophotography cameras at the time. The Edison company added sprocket holes, possibly inspired by Reynaud's Théâtre Optique. A prototype of the Kinetoscope was demonstrated to a convention of the National Federation of Women's Clubs visiting the Edison studio on 20 May 1891, with the short demo film Dickson Greeting, leading to much press coverage. Throughout the years, Edison repeatedly claimed that he would present the kinetograph on the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 as an apparatus that combined the sound of the phonograph with projected lifesize images. But during that fair, Dickson only demonstrated a moving-image peep-box cabinet without sound for attendees of the annual meeting of the Department of Physics at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on 9 May 1893. The definitive coin-operated kinetoscope feventually became accessible to the general public in a parlor in New York City on 14 April 1894, soon followed by many others across the United States and in Europe. Edison never attempted to patent these instruments outside the US, presumably because they relied heavily on technologies that were well-known and often already patented in other countries.
1894–1896: Early screenings
After Anschütz's Electrotachyscopes and Edison's Kinetoscopes were presented publicly and the underlying technique was described in magazines, many engineers would try their hand at the projection of moving photographic pictures on a large screen. Döbler, Muybridge and Reynaud had already been quite successful with their projections of animated pictures, and stereopticons already enabled large photographic projections, but it took a while before anybody managed to publicly reproduce live-action recordings on a large screen. Newspapers and magazines often reported on such developments, but few had the knowledge necessary to properly describe true technological advancements. Many "inventors" promoted their results as groundbreaking endeavors even if they had (knowingly or unknowingly) only copied previously existing technology, claimed inventions before they were fully realized, or claimed priority with vague evidence after others had introduced similar advancements. Even if chauvinistic motives were put aside, many publications on the history of film have favored one or just a few inventors and presented those as the very first geniuses to introduce movies. From narrow teleological viewpoints, historians would often ignore pioneering technology if it didn't resemble the movie apparatus that they knew best (for instance the use of stroboscopic flashtubes instead of shutter blades). On 25 November 1894, an invited audience saw Anschütz demonstrate his patented projector with two intermittently rotating large disks and continuous light to project images on a 6 by 8 meter screen. Public screenings in the auditorium of the Postfuhramtes in Berlin followed on 29 and 30 November. The parallax caused by registration through different lenses was accentuated by the extreme size of the projected images and noted by the scientific press. A longer engagement for screenings in a 300-seat hall of the old Reichstag building started on 22 February 1895. Throughout March, about 4,000 paying visitors saw a circa 90-minute show with dozens of short loops of 'living pictures'. In Lyon, Louis and Auguste Lumière started developing a 'new kinetograph' at the end of 1894. On 13 February 1895, they patented a lightweight apparatus that took, printed, and projected film, which, unlike the kinetoscope, did not require electricity. It received the name Cinématographe a little later. Léon Bouly had already patented a hand-cranked camera by the same name in 1892, and a new version that could also project the images in 1893, but his rights lapsed by the end of 1894 because the annual fees weren't paid. The Eidoloscope, devised by Eugene Augustin Lauste for the Latham family, was demonstrated for members of the press on April 21, 1895 and opened to the paying public on May 20, in a lower Broadway store with films of the Griffo-Barnett prize boxing fight, taken from Madison Square Garden's roof on May 4. The special Latham loop allowed extended recording and reproduction of moving images. The Griffo-Barnett films lasted 12 minutes and the machine reportedly could work for hours, with up to 40 frames per second. On 28 December 1895 in Paris, father Antoine Lumière began exhibitions of projected films before the paying public. The Lumière company quickly became Europe's main producers with their actualités like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and a few comic vignettes like The Sprinkler Sprinkled (both 1895). Max and Emil Skladanowsky screened short motion pictures with their "Bioscop", a flickerfree duplex construction, starting as part of a popular variety program at the Berlin Wintergarten theatre from 1 to 31 November 1895. On 21 December, their movies were screened as a single event in Hamburg. When they arrived in Paris, they caught the second screening of the Lumière Cinématographe on 29 December 1895 and consequently the booked Bioskop screenings at the Folies Bergère for January 1896 were cancelled. The brothers took their Bioscop on tour throughout Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia, but they struggled financially and quit the Bioscop screenings in 1897. Max Skladanowsky continued with related enterprises, like sales of flip books and amateur cameras. In Britain, Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres both independently developed their own systems for projecting a moving image on to a screen. Acres presented his in January 1896, and Paul unveiled his more influential Theatrograph shortly after on 20 February, on exactly the same day the Lumieres' films would first be projected in London. The Theatrograph pioneered the ‘Maltese cross’ system that drove sprocket rollers to provide intermittent motion. After some demonstrations before scientific groups, he was asked to supply a projector and staff to the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, and he presented his first theatrical programme on 25 March 1896. His device was the prototype for the modern film projector and was sold across Europe. By 1896, it had dawned on the Edison company that more money could be made by showing motion picture films with a projector to a large audience than exhibiting them in peep-show machines. The Edison company took up a projector developed by Armat and Jenkins, the "Phantoscope", which was renamed the Vitascope, and it joined various projecting machines made by other people to show the films made by the Edison company and others in France and the UK.
1896–1910s: Early movie industry Initially, a lack of standardization meant that film producers used a variety of different film widths and projection speeds, but after a few years the 35-mm wide Edison film, and the 16-frames-per-second projection speed of the Lumière Cinématographe became the standard. By 1898, Georges Méliès was the largest producer of fiction films in France, and from this point onwards his output consisted almost entirely of films featuring trick effects, which were very successful in all markets. The special popularity of his longer films, which were several minutes long from 1899 onwards (while most other films were still only a minute long), led other makers to start producing longer films.
Flicker problem and solutions The quality of the experience of films was often troubled by an obvious flicker in the projected image. Many of the systems in use featured intermittent transport of the film strip in order to avoid motion blur, while a shutter blocked projection for each advancement of the film frames. Intermittently blocking the light was also necessary for the stroboscopic effect that was widely known from the phénakisticope and zoetrope. The strain of starting and stopping also often caused damage to the film strip and could cause the system to jam (often with the result of burning the combustible film material as it was exposed to the heat of the lamp for too long). Eventually the solution was found in a three-bladed shutter that not just blocked the light intermittently during film transport, but more often and also during projection. The first three-bladed shutter was developed by Theodor Pätzold and went in production with Messter in 1902. Other systems used a continuous feed of film and projected the images intermittently by reflections from a mirror carousel, similar to the principle applied in Reynaud's Praxinoscope.
Color films
Additive process
The first person to demonstrate a natural-color motion picture system was British inventor Edward Raymond Turner, who applied for his patent in 1899, received it in 1900, and was able to show promising but very mechanically defective results in 1902. Turner's camera used a rotating disk of three color filters to photograph color separations on one roll of black-and-white film. A red, green or blue-filtered image was recorded on each successive frame of film. The finished film print was projected, three frames at a time, through the corresponding color filters. When Turner died in 1903, his financial backer at that time, pioneering film producer Charles Urban, passed on the development of the process to George Albert Smith, who by 1906 had developed a simplified version that he later named Kinemacolor. The Kinemacolor camera had red and green filters in the apertures of its rotating shutter, so that alternating red-filtered and green-filtered