49 Fun Facts About Lumière Brothers

What were the first names of the two Lumière brothers?

Auguste and Louis Lumière were born in 1862 and 1864; Auguste, the elder by two years, died in 1954 and Louis in 1948.

In which French city was the Lumière family business and factory based?

The Lumière works stood in the Monplaisir quarter of Lyon, where Antoine Lumière moved the family in 1870; the factory site is now the Institut Lumière.

In which town were the Lumière brothers born?

Both brothers were born in Besançon, in the Doubs department, where their father Antoine kept a photographic portrait studio.

What three functions did the Lumières' single machine combine?

The Cinématographe, patented on 13 February 1895, worked as camera, printer and projector in a single hand-cranked wooden box.

Who had originally patented a device called the Cinématographe in 1892?

Léon Bouly registered the name cinématographe for his camera in February 1892 but let the patent lapse in 1894, freeing the term.

On what date did the Lumières give their first paid public screening?

On 28 December 1895 the brothers charged one franc a head in Paris; it is traditionally counted as cinema's birth though earlier paid film shows existed elsewhere.

Where in Paris did the first paid Lumière screening take place?

The Salon Indien du Grand Café, a basement room at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, hosted the show; the building is today the Hôtel Scribe.

Roughly how many paying visitors attended the first commercial Lumière screening?

Only about 40 people, some accounts say 33, paid one franc on opening night; within weeks the show was taking some 2,000 francs a day.

How many short films made up the programme at the first paid Grand Café screening?

The programme held ten films of roughly 50 seconds each, every one hand-cranked through the projector from a short strip of film.

What did the Lumières' first film, shown privately in March 1895, depict?

Workers leaving the factory was the single film Louis showed to an industrial society in Paris on 22 March 1895, shot at the family plant that month.

How many versions of the factory-gate film exist?

Three versions survive, nicknamed the one-horse, two-horses and no-horse versions after the carriage seen leaving the gate.

Which Lumière film is the earliest known film comedy and first fictional film?

Louis Lumière cast his own gardener, François Clerc, to play the gardener who gets sprayed.

Whose infant daughter Andrée is fed in the film Repas de bébé?

Auguste Lumière and his wife Marguerite feed their daughter Andrée in Repas de bébé; early viewers were struck by the leaves stirring behind them.

Which Lumière film is popularly, but wrongly, said to have sent an audience fleeing?

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was not on the programme of the first paid show; it premiered in January 1896, and no contemporary report records a panic.

In what form did Louis Lumière re-shoot the train film in the 1930s?

Louis Lumière re-shot the train film in stereoscopic 3D and presented it to the Académie des sciences in Paris; the brothers had worked on stereo images since the 1890s.

Which Lumière film did the brothers famously project both forwards and in reverse?

In Demolition of a Wall (1896) a Lumière brother directs workmen toppling a wall; run backwards through the projector the wall rose again, delighting audiences.

Which Lumière operator filmed Venice from a moving gondola in 1896?

Promio also directed Sweden's first newsreel, of King Oscar II in 1897.

In which country did Lumière operator Gabriel Veyre direct 35 films in 1896-97?

Veyre shot about 35 films in Mexico for the Lumières in 1896-97, filming President Porfirio Díaz, before later postings in Indochina and Morocco.

Which filmmaker offered the Lumières 10,000 francs for a camera and was refused?

Georges Méliès was refused by Antoine Lumière, who the same night also turned down 20,000 francs from the Musée Grévin and 50,000 from the Folies Bergère.

Which phrase is attributed to the brothers about their own creation?

The brothers called cinema 'an invention without any future'; one of them separately said it could be exploited as a scientific curiosity but had no commercial value.

By what year had the Lumière brothers withdrawn from the film business?

By 1905 the Lumières had given up film production, leaving a catalogue of more than 1,400 short actuality films shot by their operators worldwide.

Which colour process did the Lumières patent in 1903 and market in 1907?

Autochrome, patented in 1903 and sold from 1907, was the first practical colour process and led the market until the 1930s.

What vegetable provided the dyed starch grains in the Lumières' 1907 colour plates?

The 1907 plates used potato starch grains 5 to 10 micrometres across, dyed orange, green and violet; mixed together they looked grey to the eye.

Which photographic manufacturer's merger caused the Lumière brand name to disappear?

The Lumière brand disappeared after the company merged with the British maker Ilford; for much of the 20th century it had been one of Europe's biggest photographic suppliers.

At what age did Louis Lumière invent a new dry-plate process for the family firm?

Louis was 17 when, in 1881, he devised the 'Etiquette Bleue' dry plate that turned the family's struggling studio into a thriving photographic manufacturer.

Which Edison device inspired the brothers to develop their own machine?

Antoine Lumière saw Edison's Kinetoscope, a peephole viewer for one person at a time, demonstrated in Paris in 1894 and urged his sons to improve on it.

Which technical school did both Lumière brothers attend?

Both brothers studied at La Martinière, a technical school in their adopted city; Louis left with the highest marks in his class.

Which tsar's 1896 coronation in Moscow did a Lumière operator film?

Lumière operator Camille Cerf filmed the coronation of Nicholas II in Moscow in May 1896, among the earliest news events ever recorded on film.

Which astronomer presided over the June 1895 photographic congress where the Lumières screened films?

Jules Janssen, the Meudon astronomer, presided over the congress; the Lumières filmed the delegates landing from a boat at Neuville-sur-Saône and screened it the next day.

Which country saw Lumière films screened in November 1896, first in Alexandria then Cairo?

Egypt's first Lumière screenings came in November 1896, in Alexandria and then Cairo; the same year the operators also reached Bombay, London, New York and Buenos Aires.

Which brothers showed projected films to a paying Berlin public in November 1895?

Their Paris bookings were cancelled once news of the Lumière show broke.

Which 1888 film by Louis Le Prince is regarded as the oldest surviving film?

Roundhay Garden Scene, shot in Leeds in October 1888, survives as the oldest known film; Le Prince vanished from a Dijon-Paris train in 1890 before demonstrating his work publicly.

Which US projection system opened to the paying public on Broadway in May 1895?

The Lathams' Eidoloscope, built around the slack-giving Latham loop, showed a Griffo-Barnett boxing film at 153 Broadway on 20 May 1895; the venture collapsed within about a year.

Which Polish inventor built his Pleograph camera-projector in 1894?

Kazimierz Prószyński built his Pleograph camera-projector in Warsaw in 1894; he later invented the hand-held, compressed-air Aeroscope camera in 1909.

Which future film mogul reportedly attended the private screening of 22 March 1895?

Léon Gaumont, then running the Comptoir général de photographie, is said to have watched the demonstration to the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale on 22 March 1895.

Which subject did Louis Lumière's 22 March 1895 lecture mainly concern?

The lecture was on colour photography, which the Lumières pursued from Lippmann's interference method through to their own 1907 plates; the films shown at the end stole the attention.

Where are the Lumière brothers buried?

Louis died in 1948 and Auguste in 1954.

Which field did the elder Lumière brother turn to after cinema, pioneering X-rays?

Auguste turned to biomedicine, researching tuberculosis, cancer and pharmacology in his own laboratory and devising the Tulle gras wound dressing used in the First World War.

Who co-founded the Institut Lumière in 1982 with Louis's grandson?

Bernard Chardère, founder of the journal Positif, set up the Institut Lumière in 1982 with Maurice Trarieux-Lumière; Bertrand Tavernier served as its president and Thierry Frémaux as director.

Which Russian writer described a Lumière train appearing on screen in an 1896 article?

Maxim Gorky, reviewing the Lumière programme at the Nizhny Novgorod fair in July 1896, wrote in 'The Kingdom of Shadows' that the train seemed to rush straight at the viewer.

Which Lumière film shows Antoine Lumière playing cards with friends while a waiter pours drinks?

Partie d'écarté (1895), also catalogued as Partie de cartes, shows Antoine Lumière at cards with friends, one of them the brewer Alphonse Winckler, while a waiter pours the drinks.

The word Cinématographe was coined from Greek roots meaning what?

Cinématographe joins the Greek kinema, 'movement', to graphein, 'to write', hence 'writing in movement'; the word gave English both 'cinematography' and 'cinema'.

On film of what gauge were the early Lumière films, including the factory-gate film, shot?

The Lumières used 35 mm film, the same width as Edison's stock, but with a single round perforation on each side of every frame instead of four.

Which Scottish physicist first proposed the trichromatic colour principle behind the Lumières' plates in 1855?

James Clerk Maxwell set out the trichromatic principle in 1855 and demonstrated it in 1861 with a tartan ribbon photographed through red, green and blue filters; Joly and Ducos du Hauron later built on it.

Which conjuror presented the Lumière Cinématographe at London's Empire Theatre in 1896?

Félicien Trewey, a conjuror and friend of the Lumière family, ran the Cinématographe season at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square from March 1896 after a debut at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Louis's dry-plate process let the family open a factory eventually making how many plates a year?

The Monplaisir works grew to turn out some 15 million dry plates a year by the mid-1890s, bankrolling the brothers' later work on moving pictures and colour.

In a Lumière colour plate, what fills the gaps between the dyed starch grains?

Lampblack was dusted over the plate to fill the spaces between the dyed grains, so only light passing through the orange, green and violet starch filters reached the emulsion.

The street where the factory-gate scene was shot has since been renamed what?

The old rue Saint-Victor became rue du Premier-Film; the surviving hangar where the workers were filmed stands beside the Institut Lumière in the Monplaisir district.

How many frames make up the 46-second Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory?

The 46-second film runs to about 800 frames, each advanced by a single round perforation on either side of the strip.