When people think of movies, they usually think of Hollywood. However, many of the earliest tools relating motion pictures were not American inventions. It was thanks to the efforts of inventors from several countries that we can enjoy movies today.
In the early 1800s an Englishman named William George Horner invented the zoetrope. In it a series of pictures were mounted inside a drum. When the rotating pictures were viewed through slot, they merged into one and appeared to move. In California in 1877, another Englishman named Eadweard Myubridge, used a series of cameras to record the movements of a galloping horse. Later, he also recorded human movements. He used his still pictures to illustrate books; thus it was left to the German, Ottomar Anschutz, to invent a way to rapidly show the picture series to give the impression of movement. Finally, it took a Frenchman, Etienne Jules Marey, to develop a single camera to record movement. Marey shots his pictures on fixed plates, at the rate of 12 per second. As early as 1888 he was experimenting with celluloid film, an American invention.
While Thomas Edison was busy inventing something called the kinetograph camera, Louis Le Prince of france was patenting a 16-lens camera to make moving pictures and a projector to show them. By the following year he was working with a single-lens camera. Unfortunately, in 1890 Le Prince suddenly disappeared from the train in which he was travelling and vanished forever, Taking up what Le Prince left were Louis and Auguste Lumiere, who gave the world’s first projected film performance, before a paying audience in Paris on December 28th, 1895. Motion pictures have become a long way since those early days and have had a great influence on society. It was thanks to the contributions of filmmakers and inventors from all over the world that movies have developed in the form we know today.