Lumière Brothers Trivia
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49 free Lumière Brothers trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Lumière brothers trivia quiz covers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the Lyon photographic manufacturers whose Cinématographe and 28 December 1895 screening in a Paris café are traditionally counted as the birth of cinema. The easy questions are ones any film fan can answer: the city they worked in, the name of their machine, the factory-gate film that started it all, the train that supposedly terrified an audience and the gardener who got sprayed in the first film comedy. The harder end is for film historians: the town where the brothers were born, the dry-plate process Louis invented at 17, the man who first coined the word cinématographe and let the patent lapse, how many films were on the Grand Café programme, why the train film is wrongly remembered as part of it, the fee Georges Méliès offered for a camera, the operator who filmed Venice from a gondola, the potato-starch colour process they patented in 1903, and the rivals from Edison to the Skladanowsky brothers who got there first in one way or another. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the brothers, their films and their machine before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Silent Films, Georges Méliès and History of Cinema quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The brothers' surname, Lumière, is also the French word for what?
Light
Light: the apt surname was no stage name, since their father Antoine Lumière already carried it when he opened his first photography studio.
Q 02In which French city was the Lumière family business and factory based?
Lyon
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.
Q 03In which eastern French town, also Victor Hugo's birthplace, were the Lumière brothers born?
Besançon
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.
Q 04What three functions did the Lumières' single machine combine?
Camera, printer and projector
Camera, printer and projector: with all three in one portable box, a Lumière operator could shoot, print and screen films wherever he travelled.
Q 05Who had originally patented a device called the Cinématographe in 1892?
Léon Bouly
Léon Bouly registered the name cinématographe for his camera in February 1892 but let the patent lapse in 1894, freeing the term.
Q 06Offered a fifth of the first paid Lumière show's takings, what did the venue's owner choose instead?
A flat daily rent
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.
Q 07Where in Paris did the first paid Lumière screening take place?
Salon Indien du Grand Café
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.
Q 08Roughly how many paying visitors attended the first commercial Lumière screening?
About 40
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.
Q 09How was the film driven through the projector at the Lumières' first paid show?
By a hand crank
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.
Q 10What did the Lumières' first film, shown privately in March 1895, depict?
Workers leaving the factory
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.
Q 11Film historians tell the three versions of the Lumières' factory-gate film apart by counting what?
Horses
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.
Q 12Which Lumière film, in which a boy steps on a gardener's hose, is often called the first screen comedy?
L'Arroseur Arrosé
L'Arroseur Arrosé: Louis cast the family's real gardener, François Clerc, as the man who gets soaked.
Q 13Whose infant daughter Andrée is fed in the film Repas de bébé?
Auguste's
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.
Q 21Most silent films are lost, yet about how many of the 1,400-odd Lumière catalogue titles are missing today?
About 20
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.
Q 22Which colour process did the Lumières patent in 1903 and market in 1907?
Autochrome
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.
Q 23What vegetable provided the dyed starch grains in the Lumières' 1907 colour plates?
Potato
Q 14Which Lumière film is popularly said to have sent its first audience fleeing, a story historians doubt?
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
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.
Q 15In what form did Louis Lumière re-shoot the train film in the 1930s?
Stereoscopic 3D
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.
Q 16Which Lumière film did the brothers famously project both forwards and in reverse?
Demolition of a Wall
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.
Q 17Which Lumière operator filmed Venice from a moving gondola in 1896?
Alexandre Promio
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.
Q 18In which country did Lumière operator Gabriel Veyre film President Porfirio Díaz in 1896?
Mexico
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.
Q 19Which future filmmaker tried to buy a Cinématographe after the first Paris show, only to be refused?
Georges Méliès
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.
Q 20Which phrase is attributed to the brothers about their own creation?
An invention without any future
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.
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.
Q 24A merger with which photographic manufacturer made the Lumière brand name disappear?
Ilford
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.
Q 25Which invention by a teenage Louis Lumière rescued his father's struggling business and made the family's fortune?
A dry photographic plate
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.
Q 26Which Edison device inspired the brothers to develop their own machine?
Kinetoscope
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.
Q 27Which technical school did both Lumière brothers attend?
La Martinière
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.
Q 28Which tsar's 1896 coronation in Moscow did a Lumière operator film?
Nicholas II
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.
Q 29Which astronomer, a co-discoverer of helium in the Sun, walks ashore in the Lumières' June 1895 congress film?
Jules Janssen
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.
Q 30Lumière films reached which country in November 1896, opening in a hall of Alexandria's stock exchange?
Egypt
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.