History of Film Timeline (http://www.filmsite.org/milestones.html - accessed 09.06.10)
Pre-1900s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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300s B.C.
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The Greek Aristotle was the first to observe and describe how he saw a light after-effect: a persistent image (that slowly faded away) after he gazed into the sun.
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65 B.C.
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The Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus described the principle of persistence of vision - the optical effect of continuous motion produced when a series of sequential images were displayed, with each image lasting only momentarily.
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130 A.D.
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The Greek astronomer and geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria discovered (and proved) Lucretius' principle of persistence of vision.
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late 1790s
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Belgian optician and showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson's Phantasmagoria - a kind of amusement 'horror show' designed to frighten audiences that became popular in Europe. He produced the show with a 'magic lantern' on wheels (which he called a Phantascope or Fantascope), usually out of view of the audience, to project ghostly-looking, illusory images that changed shape and size, onto smoke or onto a translucent screen.
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1820s
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The Frenchman Peter Mark Roget (famed as the author of Roget's Thesaurus) rediscovered the persistence of vision principle.
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1832-34
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The Belgian scientist Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau, who had studied the phenomenon of persistence of vision, developed a spindle viewer or spinning wheel called a phenakistoscope (aka Fantascope or Magic Wheel), the first device that allowed pictures to appear to move - and considered the precursor of an animated film (or movie). [The device was simultaneously invented by Austrian Simon von Stampfer.]
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1834
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William George Horner invented the first zoetrope (which he called a daedalum or daedatelum), based upon Plateau's phenakistoscope. It was a very crude, mechanical form of a motion picture 'projector' that consisted of a drum that contained a set of still images. When it was turned in a circular fashion, it created the illusion of motion.
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1860
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The zoetrope, another animation toy, was invented by French inventor Pierre Desvignes.
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1872-1878
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British photographer Eadweard Muybridge took the first successful photographs of motion, producing his multiple image sequences analyzing human and animal locomotion. California senator Leland Stanford commissioned Muybridge to determine whether the 4 legs of a galloping horse left the ground at the same time, so he set up 24 still cameras along a racetrack. As a horse ran by the cameras, the horse broke strings which were hooked up to each camera's shutter, thereby activating the shutter of each camera, capturing the image and exposing the film. Soon after, the photographs were projected in succession with a viewing device called a Zoogyroscope (aka Zoopraxiscope). Viewing the photos in sequence comprised a primitive movie.
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1877
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The praxinoscope (which refined the long-established zoetrope with mirrors rather than slots) was invented and patented by the Frenchman Emile Reynaud. In 1892, Reynaud opened his Theatre Optique in Paris with a theatrical form of his 'movie or animation' device designed for public performances. The device reflected out, in long segments, the sequential, hand-painted drawings that were on long broad strips inside the drum.
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1882
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Etienne Jules Marey in France developed a chronophotographic camera, shaped like a gun and referred to as a "shotgun" camera, that could take twelve successive pictures or images per second.
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1886
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Pioneering British inventor William Friese-Greene collaborated with John Rudge to make an enhanced magic lantern, one of the earliest motion picture cameras and projectors, termed a Biophantascope, to project photographic plates in rapid succession. He claimed to have sent Thomas Edison (who denied receiving anything) details of his camera designs, but received no replies. In 1890, Friese-Greene received a patent for his 'chronophotographic' camera, capable of taking up to ten photographs per second using perforated celluloid film, but his experiments met with limited success, unlike Edison. However, he became the first man to ever witness moving pictures on a screen.
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1886
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Daeida, the wife of real-estate developer Harvey Henderson Wilcox, named her ranch in Cahuenga Valley "Hollywood". [Another origin, though probably inaccurate, of the "Hollywood" name may be from the toyon, popularly known as California holly.]
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1887
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Nitrate celluloid film (a chemical combination of gun cotton and gum camphor) was invented by American clergyman Hannibal W. Goodwin.
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1888
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Edison filed his first caveat (a Patent Office document) in which he declared his work on future inventions, anticipating filling out a complete patent application for his Kinetoscope and Kinetograph (a motion picture camera).
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1888
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George Eastman introduced the lightweight, inexpensive "Kodak" camera, using paper photographic film wound on rollers, and registered the trademarked name Kodak.
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1888
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French inventor Louis Augustin Le Prince developed a single-lens camera which he used to make the very first moving picture sequences (of traffic on a Leeds, England bridge), by moving the film through a camera's sprocket wheels by grabbing the film's perforations. Presumably, it was the first movie ever shot and then shown to the public.
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Pre-1900s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1889
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Henry Reichenbach developed (and patented) durable and flexible celluloid film strips (or roll film) to be manufactured by the pioneer of photographic equipment, George Eastman, and his Eastman Company.
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1890
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William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, commissioned by Thomas Alva Edison, built the first modern motion-picture camera and named it the Kinetograph.
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1889 or 1890
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William K.L. Dickson filmed his first experimental Kinetoscope trial film, Monkeyshines No. 1, the only surviving film from the cylinder kinetoscope, and apparently the first motion picture ever produced on photographic film in the United States. It featured the movement of laboratory assistant Sacco Albanese, filmed with a system using tiny images that rotated around the cylinder.
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1891
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Thomas Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson also developed or invented the Kinetoscope, a single-viewer peep-show device in which film was moved past a light. The first public demonstration of motion pictures in the US using the Kinetoscope occurred at the Edison Laboratories to the Federation of Women’s Clubs on May 20, 1891. The very short film’s subject in the test footage, titled Dickson Greeting, was William K.L. Dickson himself, bowing, smiling and ceremoniously taking off his hat. Edison filed for a patent for the Kinetoscope in 1891, granted in 1893. On Saturday, April 14, 1894, a refined version of Edison's Kinetoscope began commercial operation.
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June, 1892
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The Limelight Department, one of the world's first film studios, was officially established in Melbourne, Australia. In the next nine years, it produced arguably the first feature-length film (a series of 13 films titled Soldiers of the Cross (1900) delivered as a 'multi-media' presentation of songs, slides, films and scripture) and documentary film (the Federation of Australia ceremony (January 1, 1901)) in the world.
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1893
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Thomas Edison displayed 'his' Kinetoscope projector at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and received patents for his movie camera, the Kinetograph, and his peepshow device. Edison also held the first public exhibition of films shot using his Kinetograph at the Brooklyn Institute in early May.
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1893
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Edison constructed the world's first motion picture studio in New Jersey, a Kinetograph production center nicknamed the Black Maria (slang for a police van), on February 1, 1893, at a cost of $637.67.
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1894
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Fred Ott's Sneeze (aka Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze), the first film made in Edison's Kinetograph (the Black Maria) in 1893 and noted for the first medium-closeup, became the first film officially copyrighted on January 7.
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1894-1895
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The earliest color hand-tinted films ever publically-released were Annabelle Butterfly Dance (1894), Annabelle Sun Dance (1894), and Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) featuring the dancing of vaudeville-music hall performer Annabelle Whitford (known as Peerless Annabelle) Moore, whose routines were filmed at Edison's studio in New Jersey. Male audiences were enthralled watching these early depictions of a clothed female dancer (sometimes color-tinted) on a Kinetoscope - an early peep-show device for projecting short films.
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April 14, 1894
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The first Kinetoscope parlor, consisting of a row of coin-operated kinetoscopes (single-viewer, peep show device) opened at 1155 Broadway (in a converted shoe store) in New York City for business on April 14, 1894 -- it was called the Holland Brothers' Kinetoscope Parlor. The first commercial presentation of a motion picture took place here. The mostly male audience was entertained by a single loop reel depicting clothed female dancers, sparring boxers and body builders, animal acts and everyday scenes. Soon, peep show parlors were set up in penny arcades, hotel lobbies, and phonograph parlors in major cities across the US.
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March 22, 1895
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The first public testing and demonstration of the Lumieres' camera-projector system (the Cinematographe) in their basement. During the private screening - a trial run for their public screening later in the year (see below), the Lumieres caused a sensation with their first film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumiere a Lyon), although it only consisted of an everyday outdoor image - factory workers leaving the Lumiere factory gate for home or for a lunch break.
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April 21, 1895
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In New York on Frankfort Street, a device called the Eidoloscope Projector (aka the Pantoptikon) was demonstrated for the NY press by Woodville Latham - one of the first public exhibitions of motion pictures in the world. Latham was credited with the "Latham Loop" - a feature of movie projectors involving a loop to feed the film smoothly. (This showing preceded the landmark exhibition of the Lumieres in Paris by about eight months. See below.)
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May 20, 1895
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A filmed boxing match between Australian fighter Albert Griffiths (Young Griffo) and Barnett, titled Young Griffo v. Battling Charles Barnett (filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden on May 4, 1895 by Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Grey) was the first motion picture in the world to be screened before a paying audience, at a storefront at 153 Broadway in New York City. The four minute B&W silent film premiered on May 20, 1895, more than seven months before the Lumière brothers showed their film in Paris (see below).
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Sept-Oct, 1895
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C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat projected Kinetoscope films at the Cotton States Exposition, Georgia USA, using their Phantascope projector.
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Dec. 28, 1895
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In France, two brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the Cinématographe which was patented in early 1895. It was a combination hand-held movie camera and projector, capable of showing an image that could be viewed by a large audience. They held their first public screening or commercial exhibition - often considered "the birth of film" or "the First Cinema" - when they projected a motion picture onto a screen for the first time at Salon Indien at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The 20-minute afternoon program shown to an invited audience of 35 people included ten short films with twenty showings a day. The ten shorts included the famous first comedy of a gardener with a watering hose (aka The Sprinkler Sprinkled, Waterer and Watered, or L'Arrouseur Arrose), the factory worker short (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory), a sequence of a horse-drawn carriage approaching toward the camera, and a scene of the feeding of a baby. The Lumieres also became known for their 50-second short Arrivee d'un train en gare a La Ciotat (1895) (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), which some sources reported was shocking to its first unsophisticated viewing audience. With a few exceptions, the early films were mostly documentaries (or films of every-day life) - or so-called actualités.
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1895
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In the early 1890s, Edison and Dickson also devised a prototype sound-film system called the Kinetophonograph or Kinetophone - a precursor of the 1891 Kinetoscope with a cylinder-playing phonograph (and connected earphone tubes) to provide the unsynchronized sound. The projector was connected to the phonograph with a pulley system, but it didn't work very well and was difficult to synchronize. It was formally introduced in 1895, but soon proved to be unsuccessful since competitive, better synchronized devices were also beginning to appear at the time. The first known (and only surviving) film with live-recorded sound made to test the Kinetophone was the 17-second Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894-1895).
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1895
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The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895) contained the first special effect (in-camera), reportedly, of the controversial execution (decapitation) of Mary, Queen of Scots (Robert Thomae) on the execution block, using a dummy and a trick camera shot (substitution shot or "stop trick"). In the short sequence, Mary knelt down, and put her head on the block as the executioner raised a large axe. When the axe was brought down, her head rolled off the chopping block to the left - where the executioner picked it up in the final frame and held it up.
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April 23, 1896
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Edison's Company (because it was unable to produce a workable projector on its own) purchased an improved version of Thomas Armat's 1895 movie projection machine (the Phantascope, originally invented by C. Francis Jenkins in 1893), and renamed it the Vitascope. It was the first commercially-successful celluloid motion picture projector in the US. Thomas Edison presented the first publically-projected Vitascope motion picture (with hand-tinting) in the US to a paying American audience on a screen, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, with his latest invention - the projecting kinetoscope. Customers watched the Edison Company's Vitascope project a ballet sequence in an amusement arcade during a vaudeville act.
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1896
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The Kiss (1896) (aka The May Irwin Kiss) was the first film ever made of a couple kissing in cinematic history. May Irwin and John Rice re-enacted a lingering kiss for Thomas Edison's film camera in this 20-second long short, from their 1895 Broadway stage play The Widow Jones. It became the most popular film produced that year by Edison's film company (it was filmed at Edison's Black Maria studio, in West Orange, NJ), but was also notorious as the first film to be criticized as scandalous and bringing demands for censorship.
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1896
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Alice Guy-Blaché, generally acknowledged as the world's first female film director (with France's Gaumont Film Company), was the first film-maker to contribute to the development of narrative film-making, with her first film made in April of 1896, the one-minute in length fictional film La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy). Some historians consider it the first ever narrative fiction film.
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1896
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The roots of horror films (and vampire films in particular) may be traced back to French film-maker Georges Méliès' two-minute short film Le Manoir du Diable (1896) (aka Manor/House of the Devil, or The Devil's Castle), although it was meant to be an amusing, entertaining film.
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1898
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The Spanish-American War drew camera operators to Cuba, but they were shut out by the U.S. Army. Since they could not capture the battles on film, many went into studios and created them using models and painted backdrops -- the start of scale-model effects.
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1898
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The oldest major talent agency in Hollywood was the William Morris Agency, founded in 1898. However, its first offices were in New York City, and it didn't move out to the LA area until around 1930.
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1898
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Using the Chronophone process, Alice Guy-Blaché continued to make primitive sound films in France.
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1899
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Two of the earliest westerns (or cowboy-related) films were both Edison films made at Black Maria: the one-shot (less than one minute short) Thomas Edison's Cripple Creek Bar Room Scene - with the 'first' western saloon setting, and Poker at Dawson City.
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1899
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The French magician Georges Melies became the film industry's first film-maker to use artificially-arranged scenes to construct and tell a narrative story, with Cendrillon (aka Cinderella). Melies wrote, designed, directed, and acted in hundreds of his own fairy tales and science fiction films, and developed techniques such as stop-motion photography, double and multiple-exposures, time-lapse photography, "special effects" such as disappearing objects (using stop-trick or substitution photography), and dissolves/fades.
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1899
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The first known Shakespearean film, an adaptation of one of the Bard's plays, was the UK film King John, with the title character played by stage actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Directed by William K.L. Dickson and Walter Pfeffer Dando, and composed of only four short scenes, only one survived - the last scene of the King's death.
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1900s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1900s
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Movies became a popular attraction in amusement arcades, music halls, traveling fairs, wax museums, and vaudeville houses in many countries.
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1900
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The Eastman Kodak company first introduced the Brownie camera, a very simple cardboard box camera that used roll film. Its original list price was $1.00.
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1901
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With the arrival of electricity, Broadway set out white lights stretching from 13th to 46th Street in New York City, inspiring the nickname "the Great White Way."
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1901
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Thomas Edison's "Black Maria" film studio, often called America's first movie studio, was closed, and it was demolished two years later.
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1902
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The first permanent movie house exclusively designed for showing motion pictures was Thomas Tally's Electric Theater, built in Los Angeles (on South Spring Street) in 1902 - the first for the city, and one of the first modern movie palaces. It was also a precursor to the more ubiquitous nickelodeons that opened in 1905. Tally was the first to show a color film there, in 1912.
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1902
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Georges Méliès, a magician-turned-filmmaker, introduced innovative special effects in the first real science fiction film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune, aka A Trip to the Moon. This was his 400th film - a narrative fantasy of long shots strung together, punctuated with disappearances, double exposures, and other trick photography and elaborate sets.
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1903
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American director Edwin S. Porter, chief of production at the Edison studio, helped to shift film production toward narrative story telling with such films as the first realistic (or documentary) film The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery, one of the first westerns (filmed on the East Coast in New Jersey - not in Hollywood). The latter, a 12-minute dramatic film, was the first to use modern film techniques, such as multiple camera positions, filming out of sequence and later editing the scenes into their proper order. There were 14 scenes with parallel cross-cutting between simultaneous events. It was also memorable for its audience-shocking scene (placed at the beginning or end) of a cowboy shooting his pistol directly at the camera.
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1903
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The first male movie star, and first Western star, was Max Aronson, aka Bronco Billy, Max Anderson, and Gilbert M. Anderson, who made his first film appearance in The Great Train Robbery (1903), as a bandit, a passenger who was shot in the back, and a tenderfoot dancer.
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1903
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Hollywood was officially incorporated as a municipality.
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1904
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Narrative film began to become the dominant form.
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1904
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Georges Méliès released the first two-reel film, The Impossible Voyage (aka Le Voyage a Travers L'Impossible) - at about 20 minutes in length, it was about five times longer than the average film at the time.
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1904
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Marcus Loew founded Loew's Theatres - it would eventually become the longest-lived theater chain in America.
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1904
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The first film exchange (or distribution company) in the US, the Duquesne Amusement Supply Company, was founded in Pittsburgh, PA by Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner for the distribution of films -- it was the precursor to Warner Bros. Pictures. (Some sources claimed it was formed in 1907).
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1905
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Harry Davis and John Davis opened their first movie theater, dubbing it a nickelodeon, in Pittsburgh. The opening feature was The Great Train Robbery. The name for the converted dance hall or theater was derived from the cost of admission -- a nickel -- and the Greek word for theater -- "odeon."
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1905
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Cooper Hewitt mercury lamps made it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight.
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1905
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The American entertainment trade journal Variety began publication. It published its first film review on January 19, 1907 - often cited as the first film review in history, in an expanded section of the magazine that covered new vaudeville acts and reviews of films.
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1905
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The British melodrama Rescued by Rover was produced (by Cecil Hepworth). It was a very early example of suspenseful cutting and traveling shots.
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1906
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J. Stuart Blackton made the earliest surviving example of an animated film - a 3-minute short or cartoon called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. It was the first cartoon to use the single frame method, and was projected at 20 frames per second. In the film, a cartoonist's line drawings of two faces were 'animated' (or came to life) on a blackboard. The two faces smiled and winked, and the cigar-smoking man blew smoke in the lady's face; also, a circus clown led a small dog to jump through a hoop.
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1906
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The world’s first feature-length film at 70 minutes in length, The Story of the Kelly Gang (aka Ned Kelly and His Gang), premiered in Melbourne, Australia. Cinema briefly flourished there.
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1906
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The Biograph film studio opened in New York City.
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1906
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Edwin S. Porter directed the amusing fantasy film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, using trick photography. [The name was based on a Winsor McCay newspaper comic strip - McCay served as the film's writer.] It was the Edison Company's most popular film of the year.
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