49 Fun Facts About Lumière Brothers

The brothers' surname, Lumière, is also the French word for what?

Light: the apt surname was no stage name, since their father Antoine Lumière already carried it when he opened his first photography studio.

In which French city was the Lumière family business and factory based?

Lyon: the family left eastern France for the city in 1870 as the war with Prussia closed in, and the old factory site in its Monplaisir quarter now houses the Institut Lumière.

In which eastern French town, also Victor Hugo's birthplace, were the Lumière brothers born?

Besançon: their father Antoine arrived in the town as a painter and switched to portrait photography there, the trade that led his sons to moving pictures.

What three functions did the Lumières' single machine combine?

Camera, printer and projector: with all three in one portable box, a Lumière operator could shoot, print and screen films wherever he travelled.

Who had originally patented a device called the Cinématographe in 1892?

Léon Bouly registered the name cinématographe for his camera in February 1892 but let the patent lapse in 1894, freeing the term.

Offered a fifth of the first paid Lumière show's takings, what did the venue's owner choose instead?

A flat daily rent: doubting that moving pictures would draw a crowd, he took a safe 30 francs a day and so missed his cut of a show that was soon packed.

Where in Paris did the first paid Lumière screening take place?

Salon Indien du Grand Café: Clément Maurice, a photographer friend of the family, arranged the show in this basement room on the Boulevard des Capucines, on a site that is now the Hôtel Scribe.

Roughly how many paying visitors attended the first commercial Lumière screening?

About 40: some accounts count just 33 one-franc tickets sold that night, a small start for a show that was taking around 2,000 francs a day within three weeks.

How was the film driven through the projector at the Lumières' first paid show?

By a hand crank: two turns a second pulled 16 frames past the lamp, so the pace of every scene depended on the steadiness of the operator's arm.

What did the Lumières' first film, shown privately in March 1895, depict?

Workers leaving the factory: the take shown that March may be lost, because the oldest surviving version has been dated by its shadows to late May 1895.

Film historians tell the three versions of the Lumières' factory-gate film apart by counting what?

Horses: the takes are nicknamed one-horse, two-horse and no-horse after the carriage that follows the staff out, and the workers' clothes show they were shot in different seasons.

Which Lumière film, in which a boy steps on a gardener's hose, is often called the first screen comedy?

L'Arroseur Arrosé: Louis cast the family's real gardener, François Clerc, as the man who gets soaked.

Whose infant daughter Andrée is fed in the film Repas de bébé?

Auguste's: his brother turned the camera on him and his wife Marguerite feeding little Andrée at the family home, which makes the clip a forerunner of the home movie.

Which Lumière film is popularly said to have sent its first audience fleeing, a story historians doubt?

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat: historian Martin Loiperdinger found no police or newspaper report of any panic, and the film was not even among the ten shown at the first paid show.

In what form did Louis Lumière re-shoot the train film in the 1930s?

Stereoscopic 3D: some forty years after the original he presented the new version to the Académie des sciences, part of a late career spent chasing depth and colour on screen.

Which Lumière film did the brothers famously project both forwards and in reverse?

Demolition of a Wall: with Auguste playing foreman to the wrecking crew, the reversed film made the rubble leap back up into a standing wall.

Which Lumière operator filmed Venice from a moving gondola in 1896?

Alexandre Promio: by setting his camera in a boat on the Grand Canal he made the picture itself glide, a shot since claimed as the first time anyone moved the camera.

In which country did Lumière operator Gabriel Veyre film President Porfirio Díaz in 1896?

Mexico: Veyre first gave Díaz a private show at Chapultepec Castle, then filmed the president on horseback in its park and had the footage on a Mexico City screen within the month.

Which future filmmaker tried to buy a Cinématographe after the first Paris show, only to be refused?

Georges Méliès: turned away by the Lumières, he went to London, bought one of Robert Paul's projectors and converted it into his first film camera.

Which phrase is attributed to the brothers about their own creation?

An invention without any future: the line is tied to the family's refusal to sell a Cinématographe to would-be buyers, and whether Antoine or one of his sons said it varies with the telling.

Most silent films are lost, yet about how many of the 1,400-odd Lumière catalogue titles are missing today?

About 20: UNESCO's Memory of the World register lists 1,405 surviving titles out of 1,423, a survival rate the Institut Lumière puts down to the firm keeping its negatives after it quit production.

Which colour process did the Lumières patent in 1903 and market in 1907?

Autochrome: its colour filters swallowed so much light that even a sunlit landscape needed a full second on a tripod, so snapshots of anything moving were out of the question.

What vegetable provided the dyed starch grains in the Lumières' 1907 colour plates?

Potato: about four million dyed starch grains covered every square inch of the glass, each one acting as a tiny colour filter in front of an ordinary black-and-white emulsion.

A merger with which photographic manufacturer made the Lumière brand name disappear?

Ilford: the Swiss chemical group Ciba bought Lumière in 1962 and the British firm soon after, then sold everything under one name, and the French company ended up as Ilford France.

Which invention by a teenage Louis Lumière rescued his father's struggling business and made the family's fortune?

A dry photographic plate: sold as Étiquette Bleue, or Blue Label, it came ready to use and could be stored, unlike the wet plates of the day, and its sales paid for the big factory at Monplaisir.

Which Edison device inspired the brothers to develop their own machine?

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.

Which technical school did both Lumière brothers attend?

La Martinière: the school was founded from the will of Claude Martin, a local cooper's son who enlisted as a common soldier, made a fortune in India and died a major-general.

Which tsar's 1896 coronation in Moscow did a Lumière operator film?

Nicholas II: the Moscow ceremonies were shot by Charles Moisson, the factory's chief mechanic who had built the first working Cinématographe, with young Francis Doublier at his side.

Which astronomer, a co-discoverer of helium in the Sun, walks ashore in the Lumières' June 1895 congress film?

Jules Janssen: he had built a 'photographic revolver' to record the 1874 transit of Venus in rapid exposures, a device counted among the ancestors of the movie camera now filming him.

Lumière films reached which country in November 1896, opening in a hall of Alexandria's stock exchange?

Egypt: the show in the Toussoun Bourse came less than a year after the first paid screening in Paris, and the programme then moved on to Cairo.

Which brothers showed projected films to a paying Berlin public in November 1895?

The Skladanowskys: their Bioskop ran at the Wintergarten music hall for a month, but a Paris booking for January 1896 was cancelled, fee paid in full, once the Lumière show had opened there.

Which 1888 film by Louis Le Prince is regarded as the oldest surviving film?

Roundhay Garden Scene: Le Prince filmed his family strolling in a Leeds garden, then vanished after boarding a Dijon to Paris train in 1890, before he could show his work in public.

Which US projection system opened to the paying public on Broadway in May 1895?

Eidoloscope: the Lathams' machine showed a prize fight filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden, and the slack 'Latham loop' devised for their camera let far longer films be shot.

Which Polish inventor is said to have built his Pleograph camera-projector in 1894, before the Lumière patent?

Kazimierz Prószyński: he went on to build the Aeroscope, a camera powered by compressed air, which left the operator free to hold it in his hands.

Which future film mogul reportedly attended the private screening of 22 March 1895?

Léon Gaumont: that summer he bought the Paris photographic shop he worked in and, with Gustave Eiffel among his backers, formed the company that bears his name.

Which subject did Louis Lumière's 22 March 1895 lecture mainly concern?

The lecture was on colour photography, which the Lumières pursued from Lippmann's interference method through to their own 1907 plates; the films shown at the end stole the attention.

Why did the Bank of France scrap a banknote honouring the Lumière brothers for cinema's 1995 centenary?

Their support for Vichy: press reports recalled the brothers' wartime backing of Marshal Pétain's regime, and the bank halted the 200-franc note after printing had begun.

Which field did the elder Lumière brother turn to after cinema, founding his own research laboratory?

Biomedicine: treating war wounded in 1915, Auguste devised tulle gras, a gauze soaked in petroleum jelly and Peru balsam so that it would not stick to the wound.

Who co-founded the Institut Lumière in 1982 with Louis's grandson?

Bernard Chardère, founder of the journal Positif, set up the Institut Lumière in 1982 with Maurice Trarieux-Lumière; Bertrand Tavernier served as its president and Thierry Frémaux as director.

Which Russian writer, later famous for The Lower Depths, called an 1896 Lumière show 'the Kingdom of Shadows'?

Maxim Gorky: reviewing the show at the Nizhny Novgorod fair for a local paper, he found the silent grey pictures unsettling and wrote, 'It is not life but its shadow.'

Which Lumière film shows Antoine Lumière playing cards with friends while a waiter brings the drinks?

Partie d'écarté: filmed at the family's villa in La Ciotat, it seats Antoine next to Alphonse Winckler, the old friend whose daughters Marguerite and Rose had married Auguste and Louis.

The word Cinématographe was coined from Greek roots meaning what?

Writing in movement: the Greek kinema, 'movement', was joined to graphein, 'to write', and the name of this one machine, clipped to 'cinema', became the word for the whole art.

What width of film did the Lumières shoot on, matching the stock Edison already used?

35 mm: each Lumière frame had a single round perforation on either side where Edison's had four, and it was Edison's pattern that became the standard.

Which Scottish scientist proposed in 1855 the three-colour method of photography that the Lumière colour plates relied on?

James Clerk Maxwell: six years later he proved the idea in a lecture, projecting three slides of a tartan ribbon shot through red, green and blue filters as one colour image.

Which conjuror presented the Lumière Cinématographe at London's Empire Theatre in 1896?

Félicien Trewey: a music-hall star known for hand shadows and for twisting a piece of felt into hat after hat, he was a friend of Louis Lumière who also appeared in several of the brothers' films.

Which film festival chose Louis Lumière as honorary president of its first edition, planned for September 1939?

Cannes: the festival was due to open on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, so it was called off and the town did not hold its first full festival until 1946.

In a Lumière colour plate, what fills the gaps between the dyed starch grains?

Carbon powder: the fine black dust was spread over the sticky plate to plug every gap, so that light could reach the emulsion only by passing through a coloured grain.

The street where the Lumière factory stood has since been renamed what?

Rue du Premier-Film: the name means 'First Film Street', and part of the old factory shed survives there and now houses the Institut Lumière's cinema.

About how long did each film at the Lumières' first paid show run?

Under a minute: each 'view' was a single unedited shot on one short reel, so the ten films on that first programme ran for roughly fifty seconds apiece.