50 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.
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Q 01What were the first names of the two Lumière brothers?
Auguste and Louis
Auguste was the elder by two years; both outlived their brief film careers by decades.
Q 02In which French city was the Lumière family business and factory based?
Lyon
The factory in the Monplaisir quarter is now the Institut Lumière, on a street renamed rue du Premier-Film.
Q 03In which town were the Lumière brothers born?
Besançon
Their father Antoine ran a small photographic portrait studio there before the move to Lyon.
Q 04What three functions did the Lumières' single machine combine?
Camera, printer and projector
They patented their Cinématographe on 13 February 1895.
Q 05Who had originally patented a device called the Cinématographe in 1892?
Léon Bouly
He could not pay his patent fees in 1894 and the name became available for the Lumières to use.
Q 06Whose idea of film perforations did the Lumières patent for advancing film?
Émile Reynaud
Reynaud's Théâtre Optique had shown hand-drawn moving pictures at the Musée Grévin since 1892.
Q 07On what date did the Lumières give their first paid public screening?
28 December 1895
It is traditionally regarded as the birth of cinema, though earlier paid screenings did exist.
Q 08Where in Paris did the first paid Lumière screening take place?
Salon Indien du Grand Café
The building at 14 Boulevard des Capucines is now the Hotel Scribe, which named a restaurant Café Lumière.
Q 09Roughly how many paying visitors attended the first commercial Lumière screening?
About 40
A private showing on 22 March 1895 had drawn around 200 members of an industrial society.
Q 10How many short films made up the programme at the first paid Grand Café screening?
Ten
Each ran about 50 seconds when hand-cranked, from a strip up to 17 metres long.
Q 11What did the first real motion picture, shown privately in March 1895, depict?
Workers leaving the factory
It was the single film shown privately in Paris on 22 March 1895.
Q 12How many versions of the factory-gate film exist?
Three
They are nicknamed the one-horse, two-horses and no-horse versions after the carriage that appears.
Q 13Which Lumière film is the earliest known film comedy and first fictional film?
L'Arroseur Arrosé
Louis Lumière cast his own gardener, François Clerc, to play the gardener who gets sprayed.
Q 21Which phrase is attributed to the brothers about their own creation?
An invention without any future
Auguste separately called it a scientific curiosity with no commercial value whatsoever.
Q 22By what year had the Lumière brothers withdrawn from the film business?
1905
Their operators had by then shot more than a thousand short actuality films.
Q 23Which colour process did the Lumières patent in 1903 and market in 1907?
Autochrome
It was the first practical colour process and dominated colour photography until the 1930s.
Q 14Whose infant daughter Andrée is fed in the film Repas de bébé?
Auguste's
Early viewers, Méliès among them, were struck less by the baby than by the leaves moving in the wind behind.
Q 15Which Lumière film is popularly, but wrongly, said to have sent an audience fleeing?
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
Contrary to popular belief it was not even on the programme of the 28 December 1895 screening; it was first shown in Lyon in January 1896.
Q 16In what form did Louis Lumière re-shoot the train film for a 1934 scientific meeting?
Stereoscopic 3D
The brothers had been chasing a 3D image even before their first public exhibition.
Q 17Which Lumière film did the brothers famously project both forwards and in reverse?
Demolition of a Wall
Auguste Lumière appears in the film directing the demolition at the factory.
Q 18Which Lumière operator filmed Venice from a moving gondola in 1896?
Alexandre Promio
Promio also directed Sweden's first newsreel, of King Oscar II in 1897.
Q 19In which country did Lumière operator Gabriel Veyre direct 35 films in 1896-97?
Mexico
A pharmacy graduate from Lyon, he later worked in Indochina and Morocco.
Q 20Which filmmaker offered the Lumières 10,000 francs for a camera and was refused?
Georges Méliès
The Musée Grévin's 20,000 francs and the Folies Bergère's 50,000 francs were turned down the same night.
Q 24What vegetable provided the dyed starch grains in the Lumières' 1907 colour plates?
Potato
The grains measured 5 to 10 micrometres and looked grey to the naked eye when mixed.
Q 25Which photographic manufacturer's merger caused the Lumière brand name to disappear?
Ilford
For much of the 20th century the company was one of Europe's biggest makers of photographic goods.
Q 26At what age did Louis Lumière invent a new dry-plate process for the family firm?
17
The plates were so successful that a new factory eventually turned out 15 million a year.
Q 27Which Edison device inspired the brothers to develop their own machine?
Kinetoscope
Edison's peephole machine was viewed by one person at a time; the Lumières projected for a room.
Q 28Which technical school in Lyon did both Lumière brothers attend?
La Martinière
Louis graduated with the highest marks in his class.
Q 29Which frame rate did the Lumières advocate for their hand-cranked machine?
15 frames per second
The device weighed only about 7 kilograms, a fraction of Edison's electric equipment.
Q 30Which astronomer criticised the Lumière machine's shimmer at a June 1895 convention?
Jules Janssen
The Lumières filmed the delegates of that photographic congress arriving in Lyon.