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49 free Lumière Brothers trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Lumière brothers trivia quiz covers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the Lyon photographic manufacturers whose Cinématographe and 28 December 1895 screening in a Paris café are traditionally counted as the birth of cinema. The easy questions are ones any film fan can answer: the city they worked in, the name of their machine, the factory-gate film that started it all, the train that supposedly terrified an audience and the gardener who got sprayed in the first film comedy. The harder end is for film historians: the town where the brothers were born, the dry-plate process Louis invented at 17, the man who first coined the word cinématographe and let the patent lapse, how many films were on the Grand Café programme, why the train film is wrongly remembered as part of it, the fee Georges Méliès offered for a camera, the operator who filmed Venice from a gondola, the potato-starch colour process they patented in 1903, and the rivals from Edison to the Skladanowsky brothers who got there first in one way or another. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the brothers, their films and their machine before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Silent Films, Georges Méliès and History of Cinema quizzes next.
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Q 01What were the first names of the two Lumière brothers?
Auguste and Louis
Auguste and Louis Lumière were born in 1862 and 1864; Auguste, the elder by two years, died in 1954 and Louis in 1948.
Q 02In which French city was the Lumière family business and factory based?
Lyon
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.
Q 03In which town were the Lumière brothers born?
Besançon
Both brothers were born in Besançon, in the Doubs department, where their father Antoine kept a photographic portrait studio.
Q 04What three functions did the Lumières' single machine combine?
Camera, printer and projector
The Cinématographe, patented on 13 February 1895, worked as camera, printer and projector in a single hand-cranked wooden box.
Q 05Who had originally patented a device called the Cinématographe in 1892?
Léon Bouly
Léon Bouly registered the name cinématographe for his camera in February 1892 but let the patent lapse in 1894, freeing the term.
Q 06On what date did the Lumières give their first paid public screening?
28 December 1895
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.
Q 07Where in Paris did the first paid Lumière screening take place?
Salon Indien du Grand Café
The Salon Indien du Grand Café, a basement room at 14 Boulevard des Capucines, hosted the show; the building is today the Hôtel Scribe.
Q 08Roughly how many paying visitors attended the first commercial Lumière screening?
About 40
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.
Q 09How many short films made up the programme at the first paid Grand Café screening?
Ten
The programme held ten films of roughly 50 seconds each, every one hand-cranked through the projector from a short strip of film.
Q 10What did the Lumières' first film, shown privately in March 1895, depict?
Workers leaving the factory
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.
Q 11How many versions of the factory-gate film exist?
Three
Three versions survive, nicknamed the one-horse, two-horses and no-horse versions after the carriage seen leaving the gate.
Q 12Which Lumière film is the earliest known film comedy and first fictional film?
L'Arroseur Arrosé
Louis Lumière cast his own gardener, François Clerc, to play the gardener who gets sprayed.
Q 13Whose infant daughter Andrée is fed in the film Repas de bébé?
Auguste's
Auguste Lumière and his wife Marguerite feed their daughter Andrée in Repas de bébé; early viewers were struck by the leaves stirring behind them.
Q 21By what year had the Lumière brothers withdrawn from the film business?
1905
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.
Q 22Which colour process did the Lumières patent in 1903 and market in 1907?
Autochrome
Autochrome, patented in 1903 and sold from 1907, was the first practical colour process and led the market until the 1930s.
Q 23What vegetable provided the dyed starch grains in the Lumières' 1907 colour plates?
Potato
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.
Q 14Which Lumière film is popularly, but wrongly, said to have sent an audience fleeing?
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
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.
Q 15In what form did Louis Lumière re-shoot the train film in the 1930s?
Stereoscopic 3D
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.
Q 16Which Lumière film did the brothers famously project both forwards and in reverse?
Demolition of a Wall
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.
Q 17Which Lumière operator filmed Venice from a moving gondola in 1896?
Alexandre Promio
Promio also directed Sweden's first newsreel, of King Oscar II in 1897.
Q 18In which country did Lumière operator Gabriel Veyre direct 35 films in 1896-97?
Mexico
Veyre shot about 35 films in Mexico for the Lumières in 1896-97, filming President Porfirio Díaz, before later postings in Indochina and Morocco.
Q 19Which filmmaker offered the Lumières 10,000 francs for a camera and was refused?
Georges Méliès
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.
Q 20Which phrase is attributed to the brothers about their own creation?
An invention without any future
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.
Q 24Which photographic manufacturer's merger caused the Lumière brand name to disappear?
Ilford
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.
Q 25At what age did Louis Lumière invent a new dry-plate process for the family firm?
17
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.
Q 26Which Edison device inspired the brothers to develop their own machine?
Kinetoscope
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.
Q 27Which technical school did both Lumière brothers attend?
La Martinière
Both brothers studied at La Martinière, a technical school in their adopted city; Louis left with the highest marks in his class.
Q 28Which tsar's 1896 coronation in Moscow did a Lumière operator film?
Nicholas II
Lumière operator Camille Cerf filmed the coronation of Nicholas II in Moscow in May 1896, among the earliest news events ever recorded on film.
Q 29Which astronomer presided over the June 1895 photographic congress where the Lumières screened films?
Jules Janssen
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.
Q 30Which country saw Lumière films screened in November 1896, first in Alexandria then Cairo?
Egypt
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.