The Lumiere Brothers - Bringing Moving Pictures to the Public

Welcome back to our blog series exploring the family tree of the IP camera. Our first entry focused on  Eadweard Muybrhttp://kintronicsvirginia.blogspot.com/2012/10/before-video-camera-first-steps.htmlidge who  based his zoopraxisope on the knowledge that individual still frames, when delivered at more than 14 frames per second, trick the mind into thinking it is seeing motion.

 Thomas Edison came along and saw inefficiencies in the zoopraxiscope and thought he could improve on it. His kinetoscope, the subject of our second series, used multiple cameras in capturing the images rather than the zoopraxiscope’s one, and it also used actual film as media.

Now we will look at a branch that  sprouted ………in France…….…. with the Lumiere Brothers, Auguste and Louis.

 Ironically, or shall we say, appropriately, Lumiere means light.

 Their father, Antoine, was a portrait artist who,sensing  a promising future for photography, started a business manufacturing photographic equipment. Both brothers had technological aptitude, especially Louis. While still a student, he developed the dry plate process, a techniqueused in photograph developing. Upon graduation from college, they both joined their father in the business; Auguste as a manager, and Louis, using the knowledge gained in pursuing his degree in physics.

The company had been devoting itself to still photography equipment, but all that changed in 1894 when Antoine was invited to a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope in Lyons. He came back impressed with the technology but intent on improving it.

First, there was the size of the device. At four feet high and over two feet wide, its bulk forced The Edison Company to confine most of its exhibitions to the Black Maria Studio at Edison Labs in New Jersey. 

 And the peephole mechanism - with one person viewing at a time - limited the size of the audience.

After listening to their father’s ideas, Louis immediately set to work on a smaller device, one that would bring simultaneous viewing to a gathered audience.He came up with the Cinematographe. Weighing only 11 lbs, it was no bigger than the handheld cameras of the era so it was easy to transport and set up. Not only that, but it was a camera, printer, and projector all in one.

Louis had also found fault with the Edison's design of  pulleys and sprockets to keep the loop of film in  continuous movement. Instead he devised  a system of intermittent movement which he described in the preamble to his patent application as:

The basic property of this appliance’s mechanism is to act intermittently on a regularly perforated strip of film to transmit successive displacements separated by stationary periods during which photographic images are either exposed or viewed.

To grasp this more easily think of the sewing machine which also relies on intermittent movement. The feed mechanism advances the material, then pauses it so that stitching can be applied, before further advancing, more stitching and so on.

Lumiere was also inspired by fellow Frenchman Emile Reynaud and his theatre Optique which projected successive frames on a screen. He incorporated it for the first Lumiere screening, held at an industrial meeting in Paris on March 22, 1895. The film, titled Les Sortie des Oevriers des L’usine Lumiere, showed workers leaving the Lumiere factory.

 Satisfied with the favorable reaction to his  premiere, Lumiere applied for an English patent on April 18, 1895. With intellectual ownership rights assured, the  Lumiere Brothers held more private screenings, and then amidst a buzz of excitement, had their first public screening in April in Paris in December of 1896

The program consisted of ten short films whose total viewing time was  not quite 20 minutes.

Seeing that people were eager to experience moving pictures for themselves, the Lumieres opened four theaters of their own, one each in Paris, London, Brussels, and New York City.

Legend has it that one of their films, showing the emergence of a train from a tunnel, sent the audience screaming out of the auditorium, convinced that the locomotive would be bursting through the screen.

 By 1896, their catalog of titles numbered 358 and would grow to 1,000 in 1898 and 2,113 in 1903. At the 1900 Paris Exhibition, they held an outdoor showing on a 99 x  79 foot screen.Yet despite their growing fame, the Lumiere Company retired from the moving picture business and returned to  manufacturing.

Why the departure from the mushrooming craze of" the movies”? It was Louis belief  that people would become bored with things they could encounter in life just by going outside for a walk. He is quoted as saying “  The cinema is an invention without a future,”

Instead the Lumiere Brothers returned their efforts  to still photography work and in 1907, designed  the Autochrome plate which was a giant step in the direction of  practical processing of color photographs.

 Louis Lumiere may have been a genius when it came to technology, but he had a long way to go as a cultural visionary.

Today he'd be amazed to see the role moving frames would play in developing video technology for the purposes of surveillance and safety. And even though  IP cameras make no use of film, they do owe  the Lumiere Brothers a word of thanks.

If you want information about IP cameras call Kintronics at 800-431-1658 or visit us at Kintronics.com. For specifics, fill out a request info form and one of our engineers will get back to you.