A JOURNEY THROUGH CINEMATOGRAPHY CAMERAS – PART II

Lumiere brothers were also known as French brothers were sons of Claude-Antoine Lumiere. They ran a photographic firm.

Antoine, a well known portrait painter turned photographer along with his sons Lumiere brothers known for being biggest manufacturers of photographic plates in Europe.

Inspired by an exhibition of the Kinetoscope, a primitive motion-picture projector invented in 1892 by Thomas Edison and William Dickson.

Lumiere brothers began trying to figure out how to combine film recording and projection into a single device. Main reason was Kinetoscope could only show a motion picture to one individual viewer. Antoine urged his sons Louis and Auguste Lumiere to work on a way to project film onto a screen where many people could view it at the same time.

In the meantime, Lumiere brothers began filming with Leon Bouly’s cinematographe device. Due to financial problems, Leon Bouly sold his equipment patent properties to Lumiere brothers.

In February 1895, Louis Lumiere came up with the solution, a three-in-one device that could record, develop and project motion pictures; they patented a combined camera, projector and printer which used an intermittent claw derived from the mechanism used in sewing machines to move the cloth.

The apparatus was called the Cinematographe. [The small box on top contained the unexposed film.]

The Cinematographe would go down in history as the first viable film camera. Using it, the Lumiere brothers shot footage of workers at their factory leaving at the end of the day. They showed the resulting film, (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory) at an industrial meeting in Paris in March 1895. It is considered to be the very first motion picture.

Auguste began the first experiments in the winter of 1894 and by early the following year the brothers had come up with their own device, which they called the Cinematographe. Much smaller and lighter than the Kinetograph, it weighed around five kilograms (11 pounds) and operated with the use of a hand-powered crank. The Cinematographe photographed and projected film at a speed of 16 frames per second, much slower than Edison’s device (48 frames per second) which meant that it was less noisy to operate and used less film.

Lumiere Cinematographe could record moving images at a rate of sixteen frames per second (two crank turns) on a 35 mm wide celluloid film (perforated on both sides of each frame) measuring seventeen feet long.

The key innovation at the heart of the Cinematographe was the mechanism through which film was transported through the camera. Two pins or claws were inserted into the sprocket holes punched into the celluloid film strip; the pins moved the film along and then retracted, leaving the film stationary during exposure. Louis Lumiere designed this process of intermittent movement based on the way in which a sewing machine worked.

Lumiere brothers travelled across the world to showcase and popularize their cinematographe camera which also projected images (incorporating a magic lantern as a light source).