Auguste Marie Louis Nicholas Lumière & Louis Jean Lumière

1862-1954

French Inventor

1864-1948

French Inventor

Auguste and Louis Lumière, inventors and experts in the realm of photography, were the inventors of a camera and projector apparatus called the Cinématographe, which became the basis for contemporary cinematic projection. The brothers gained additional distinction for creating the first efficient color-photography process, known as the Autochrome plate, and are commonly considered the founders of modern cinema.

Auguste Lumière was born in Besançon, France, on October 19, 1862, with Louis following on October 5, 1864. Their father, Antoine Lumière, was an accomplished portrait painter who switched media to deal in photographic manufacturing and supplies. Auguste and Louis developed an early fascination with the photographic equipment their father produced for his business in Lyon, France. After attending technical school in Lyon with great success, Auguste and Louis worked for Antoine's business. In 1894 Louis developed a new process for photographic-plate preparation; he then opened his own photographic-plate manufacturing plant. By 1895 the Lumière factory was one of the most successful of its kind in Europe, producing over 10 million plates per year.

It was an event of the previous year, however, that would lead to the Lumière brothers' greatest triumph. In 1894 their father visited Paris for a demonstration of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, a peep-show apparatus that allowed a film loop to run continuously between a shutter and an incandescent lamp. Antoine urged Auguste and Louis to invent an improved version of Edison's device. The impressive result, a single-piece apparatus, contained a projector, printer, and camera in the same machine. Patented in 1895, the Cinématographe was markedly unlike its ponderous predecessor. Movable and hand-operated with a claw foot to advance the film—and with a reduced number of frames needed per second—the new camera allowed the brothers to leave the studio and take to the Parisian streets to film all varieties of daily life.

Although initially reserved for private showings to specialists, the Cinématographe debuted in the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris on December 28, 1895, thus heralding the birth of cinema. The public reaction was spectacular, and Auguste and Louis were soon showing 20 of their short comedies and documentaries per day. Within four months of the Cinématographe's debut, the Lumières opened theaters in New York, London, Berlin, and Brussels. They also showed the first news reel, which was of the French Photographic Society Conference. By 1897 the brothers enjoyed worldwide renown; their small group of titles had expanded to over 700, and they were able to send cameramen all over the globe in search of interesting subjects to film.

After the Paris Exposition of 1900, the Lumières distanced themselves from the creative process of filming to focus on the production of the Cinématographe. Recipients of extensive acclaim and awards for their invention, the brothers continued to pursue cinematic manufacturing until Louis's death in 1948 and Auguste's in 1954.

MEGAN MCDANIEL