Lumière Brothers Show First Film to a Paying Audience
Workers shuffling out factory doors for lunch — that's what Auguste and Louis Lumière chose as humanity's first public movie screening. Not an epic battle. Not a royal coronation. Just 46 seconds of people leaving work on a spring afternoon in Lyon. On December 28, 1895, 33 Parisians paid one franc each at the Grand Café to watch ten of these mundane snippets, and most thought it was a magic trick with mirrors. Within three years, the Lumières had trained 200 operators who fanned across five continents filming everything from tsunamis to Tsar Nicholas II. The brothers thought cinema was "an invention without a future" and quit to focus on color photography. They'd accidentally created an industry worth $100 billion today by filming the most boring thing they could find.
March 22, 1895
131 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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