The Lumière Brothers

Auguste and Louis Lumière ran a family photographic business in Lyon and developed the Cinématographe, a device that could record, print, and project moving pictures. In December 1895 they held a public, paying film screening in Paris, often marked as the birth of cinema as a shown-to-an-audience medium. Their early films were short scenes of everyday life, such as workers leaving their factory. Louis was the main inventor of the two; both later stepped back from filmmaking toward other work.