- 1880 – American George Eastman begins to commercially manufacture dry plates for photography.
- 1880 – Eadweard Muybridge holds a public demonstration of his Zoopraxiscope, a magic lantern provided with a rotating disc with artist’s renderings of Muybridge’s chronophotographic sequences. It was used as a demonstration device by Muybridge in his illustrated lecture (the original preserved in the Museum of Kingston upon Thames in England).
- January 1, 1881 – American inventor George Eastman founds the Eastman Dry Plate Company.
- 1882 – American inventor George Eastman begins experimenting with new types of photographic film, with his employee, William Walker
- 1882 – French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey invents the chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that photographs twelve successive images each second.
- 1885 – American inventors George Eastman and Hannibal Goodwin each invent a sensitized celluloid base roll photographic film to replace the glass plates then in use.
- 1887 – Hannibal Goodwin files for a patent for his photographic film.
- 1888 – George Eastman files for a patent for his photographic film.
- 1888 – Thomas Edison meets with Eadweard Muybridge to discuss adding sound to moving pictures. Edison begins his own experiments.
- 1888 – Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince creates the first motion picture films created on paper rolls of film.
- 1889 – American inventor George Eastman’s celluloid base roll photographic film becomes commercially available.
- 1890 – Wordsworth Donisthorpe and W. C. Crofts, filmed London’s Trafalgar Square using a camera patented in 1889.
- 1891 – Designed around the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman, Thomas Edison’s employee, William K. L. Dickson finishes work on a motion-picture camera, and a viewing machine, called the Kinetoscope.
- May 20, 1891 – Thomas Edison holds the first public presentation of his Kinetoscope for the National Federation of Women’s Clubs.
- August 24, 1891 – Thomas Edison files for a patent of the Kinetoscope.
- 1892 In France, Charles-Émile Reynaud began to have public screenings in Paris at the Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his Zeotrope projector to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.
- 1892 – The Eastman Company becomes the Eastman Kodak Company.
- March 14, 1893 – Thomas Edison is granted Patent #493,426 for “An Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects” (The Kinetoscope).
- 1893 Thomas Edison builds a motion-picture studio near his laboratory, dubbed the “Black Maria” by his staff.
- May 9, 1893 – In America, Thomas Edison holds the first public exhibition of films shot using his Kinetograph at the Brooklyn Institute. Unfortunately, only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope.
- January 7, 1894 – Thomas Edison films his assistant, Fred Ott sneezing with the Kinetoscope at the “Black Maria.”
- April 14, 1894 – The first commercial presentation of the Kinetoscope took place in the Holland Brothers’ Kinetoscope Parlor at 1155 Broadway, New York City.
- 1894 – Kinetoscope viewing parlors begin to open in major cities. Each parlor contains several machines.
- 1895 – In France, brothers named Auguste and Louis Lumière, designed and built a lightweight, hand-held motion picture camera called the Cinématographe. The Lumière brothers discovered that their machine could also be used to project images onto a large screen. The Lumière brothers created several short films at this time that are considered to be pivotal in the history of motion pictures.
- November 1895 – In Germany, Emil and Max Skladanowsky develop their own film projector.
- December 1895 – In France, Auguste and Louis Lumière hold their first public screening of films shot with their Cinématographe.
- January 1896 – In Britain, Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul developed their own film projector, the Theatrograph (later known as the Animatograph).
- January 1896 – In the United States, a projector called the Vitascope was designed by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Armat began working with Thomas Edison to manufacture the Vitascope, which projected motion pictures.
- April 1896 – Thomas Edison and Thomas Armat’s Vitascope is used to project motion pictures in public screenings in New York City
- 1896 – French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès begins experimenting with the new motion picture technology, developing a lot of early special effects techniques, including stop-motion photography.
- 1897 – A total of 125 people die during a film screening at the Charity Bazaar in Paris after a curtain catches on fire from the ether used to fuel the projector lamp.
- 1899 – Pathé-Frères is founded.
Merry (belated) Christmas 🙂 !
Film-u-Cation 