Louis Lumière

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 700-710. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Although no one will ever come up with a definitive answer as to who invented the cinema (probably because no one single person was responsible), Louis Lumière has one of the strongest claims to the title - for it was he (with his brother Auguste) who invented the cinematographe : a machine that combined the functions of camera and projector and was thus able to project films onto a screen to an audience. The invention was patented on February 13 1895, and a programme of short films directed and photographed by Louis was first unveiled to the general public on 28 December 1895 - a date that many historians claim to be the birth-date of the cinema as we know it. The cinematographe was an immediate hit, and its influence was colossal -within just two years, the Lumière catalogue included well over a thousand films, all of them single-shot efforts running under a minute, and many photographed by cameramen sent to various exotic locations. Although Lumière also staged some fictive scenes, the bulk of the work bearing his name would nowadays be described as documentary reportage.

In common with many cinema pioneers, he perversely saw no future for the medium, and retired in 1900 to make still photographic equipment -the field in which he originally made his reputation. The Lumière freres' cinematographer was not their only invention. Mainly Louis is also credited with the birth of color photograph, the Autochromes, using a single exposure trichromic basis (instead of a long three-step exposure) : a glass plaque is varnished and embedded with potato starch tinted in the three basic colors (rouge-orange, green and violet-blue), vegetal coal dust to fill the interstices and a black-and-white photographic emulsion layer to capture light.

Brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière married sisters Rose and Marguerite Winckler. The day Auguste and Marguerite married the girls's older brother Jules Winckler also married Lumière's sister Juliette; and younger brother Charles Winckler would marry France Lumière in 1903.

As late as 1935 (February 27th of that year) the inventor continued to break new ground, by presenting a series of early 3 D shorts to the Parisian public.The experiment failed as the patrons didn't like having to put on glasses.