November 27, 2017 • 29 mins
The Lumières are often associated with early film technology, but that wasn't the only area where they innovated. This first of two parts covers their early life, and how they went from a successful photography business into building a film camera.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Wilson. Tracy, we're finally
doing it, I know. Today we're finally going to talk
(00:22):
about a pair of brothers who have literally been on
my List Brother podcast since the day that Tracy and
I started working on it, so that's more than four years.
But I've just been hanging onto this one. I similarly
have things that have been on the list for that long.
Uh yeah, And sometimes part of it, I don't do
those because I'm like, no, that's really self serving and like, um,
(00:44):
you know, it will just be like my hobby, fun things.
But at the same time, life is short, and they
have a fun story. So the reason that I have
always wanted to cover the Lumier brothers is that they
were really prolific inventors, and we're going to talk about
the innovations in developing motion picture for which they are
most well known. I think if you ask most people,
they can tell you that they were involved in early
(01:04):
motion pictures. But we're also going to talk about other
inventions that legitimately changed human culture. In really significant ways,
and there is so much here that we're actually going
to give them a two parter. So in the first episode,
we're going to talk about the family business that their
father started and how one of them came up with
an invention when he was still a teenager that basically
set up their family for life financially and enabled them
(01:27):
to experiment and invent without worrying about money. And in
the second part will cover some of the massive success
that the Loomier family experienced in an industry that they
never really meant to get into in the first place.
We'll talk about a lot of that in the first
part too, but um we will kind of discuss then
how they diversified their interests and went in other directions.
August Lumier was born on October eighteen sixty two, and
(01:51):
his brother Louis was born two years later, both of
them October babies. His brother was born October five, eighteen
sixty four. They weren't the only two children in the family.
There was also a sister named Jin and a brother
named Eduard, and their father, Antoine Lumier, was in his
early twenties when the boys were born, and after marrying
(02:11):
Jeanne Josephine Costillo at nineteen. Antoine had first started working
painting signs and then as a painter of portraits, but
eventually he who was a very curious man about the world,
became interested in photography, and combining his painting experience with
this new medium, he opened his own photography studio where
(02:32):
he specialized in portrait photography. In eighteen seventy, when Auguste
and Louis were eight and six, Antoine moved the family
to Leon, France, as the Franco Prussian War threatened to
push into their hometown of Besson Sant and the eastern
side of France, which is near the border with Switzerland.
So Leon is south of there, farther away from the
(02:53):
Swiss border, roughly across from where Switzerland's southern border meets
Italy's northern order. Yeah, that's just kind of a triangulation.
Note it's not terribly important if you're having trouble getting
the visual there. Uh. Both of the Lumier boys went
to a technical school in Lyon known as La Martiniere,
and as teenagers they joined their father in the family business,
(03:15):
and while he was working for the company. After graduating
from lou Lis s which is the French word for
high school. Louis also attended some college classes at Conservative
de Lyon. Louis proved himself to be an innovator right
out of the gate by inventing a new type of
photographic plate when he was only seventeen. This plate, which
is sometimes called the Etiquette blue the Lumier's name for it,
(03:39):
it's a blue label plate or a dry plate. It
reduced the need for dark room development of images. Antoine,
their father, anticipating the potential success of Louise Invention, purchased
a large tract of land in Lyon's suburb of Montplaisier
to set up a much larger operation for their factory,
and his foresight was entirely correct, because demand for this product,
(04:02):
which made photography much more accessible to a great many
more people, was through the roof the Loumier company, which
was at that point named Antoine. Lumier and Sons. Company
began producing these plates, which were very high quality, in
massive numbers, literally millions every year during the busiest years.
Louise Invention turned into the primary profit driver for the company,
(04:23):
and it made the Loumiers very wealthy and also made
their name synonymous with photography at the time. Yeah. I
read in one source that they were making as many
as fifteen million plates a year, and they were barely
keeping up with demand at that point. Uh So, when
Louis was twenty eight, he got married to a woman
named genre Rose Leonie Winkler on February two of eight three,
(04:48):
and on August thirty one of that same year, Auguste
Lumier also got married to Jon's sister, Marie Euchreisive Margarite Twinkler.
So two brothers married two sisters. For their father part,
he knew that to stay successful in a field like
There's meant that the company had to be constantly researching
and developing new technology, So he used a portion of
(05:09):
the millions of francs and profit that Louise Invention had
brought in to fund ongoing research projects. Yeah this really,
I mean, I cannot stress enough how much this one
thing that Louis invented as a teenager completely enabled them
to do and achieve basically everything else they achieved in
their lives. Because they didn't have to worry about money,
(05:30):
they could just spend as much time as they needed
researching and developing things because their factory was still churning
out plates and they were still bringing in profits. So
in eighteen ninety one, Thomas Edison and William Dixon invented
the kinetoscope. There's a whole big story around that and
who deserves more credit, but that's a little outside the
scope of our podcast today. But the kinetoscope was a
(05:51):
device that had a peep hole for a viewer to
look through, and then a strip of film was run
through the machine behind the lens with a light bulb
behind it, and so the frames of the film strip
passing through the machine in this way created a moving picture.
That's a concept that's probably pretty easy to access for
most of our listeners. Yeah. Initially Edison believed this project
of Dixon's was basically a toy or a diversion. But
(06:15):
when they displayed a bunch of kinetoscopes in New York
City in eighteen ninety four, this technology was a huge hit.
Spectators happily paid twenty five cents a piece to watch
five of the short films, which you could only look
at one person at a time by looking through each
cabinets people. Yeah, so they would have basically like a
parlor full of kinetoscopes and a person would stand there
(06:37):
and just look in one by themselves. Uh. And Antoine
Lumier again their father took notice of this new technology.
Several months after Edison and Dixon kinetoscopes had made their
public debut, Antoine, who had seen one of these machines
on display in Paris, approached his son Louis and another
employee at their photography company with a small piece of
(06:58):
kinetoscope film and his and he explained that Edison was
making the film in the US and selling it for
a lot of money, and that they should start making
it too, so that they could become the French manufacturers
of it. So this meant that not only did they
have to manufacture the film itself with its spruck at
holes along the edge, they also had to make a
(07:18):
camera that could make use of it. So it was
initially August and not Louis, who took a stab at
building this camera but successfully eluded him. And then Louis
also started tinkering it, but his attempt fell short. They
just couldn't figure it out. Uh. And they knew plenty
about still photography cameras. I mean, that was their family business.
They were not only making a lot of money at it,
(07:40):
they were very good at it. They were really astute
um and they knew how to capture images. But getting
the film to advance one frame at a time to
capture a series of still images that would convey movement
when shown in sequence was a huge leap in terms
of technology, and they just couldn't figure out for a
while how to make it happen. So in just a moment,
(08:00):
we will tell you what other invention finally gave Louis
Lumier the idea that would solve this camera dilemma. But
first we will pause for a word from one of
our sponsors. So in the end, it was one of
my favorite inventions, the sewing machine that gave Louis a
(08:20):
bolt of inspiration. The story goes that he had chronic insomnia.
That was true, but the story part is that he
had this revelation late one night when he couldn't sleep,
and as he sat there sleepless, he was thinking, and
in that way that sometimes your brain will put together
great ideas when it's not occupied doing other things. Uh,
he thought about the way a sewing machine makes a
(08:43):
stitch in a piece of fabric and then advances the
fabric to make the next stitch. It occurred to Louis
that he could build a similar mechanism to advance film
In a camera. The shutter would open to capture an image,
and then as it closed, a little claw like mechanism
would grab the perforations on the side the film, then
pull it down to the next frame. The claws would
(09:03):
release just as the shutter opened for the next image,
and then grab the perforations again when the shutter closed,
and so on. Yeah. I had really never thought about
it until um learning this little tidbit how similar they
actually are, and I was like, oh, they made little
feed dogs. Yeah. Basically, so, Louis based his camera for
(09:24):
capturing motion on the cameras that the Lumiers had been
using in their business to take still photos. He had
to attach a crank to run the film advancement system.
But even so, this apparatus was far smaller and lighter
than the kinetograph that Edison and Dixon were using to
make films. It came in at just sixteen pounds, which
is seven point three kilograms. That's still heavy if you
(09:45):
handed someone a sixteen pound camera today, but it was
suddenly way portable in a way that cameras were not
up to that point. But Louis knew that the family,
if the family business really wanted to corner the European
market for moving photog for you, they could not just
make the film and the camera to use it. They
also needed to figure out how to print film from negatives,
(10:06):
and then a way to show these films two observers.
It was a whole system, not just camera and film, right,
And while Louis had really kind of taken a much
smaller approach to building his camera in comparison to Edison
and Dixon, he really thought much bigger than they did
when it came to showing films. So instead of creating
(10:29):
another machine like the kinetoscope that could only offer viewings
to one person at a time, Louis really wanted groups
of people to be able to experience watching moving pictures together.
It was this idea that led to their development of
film projection. Louis Loumier basically devised a very similar idea
for advancing a piece of film frame by frame, sixteen frames,
(10:51):
a second opening and closing a shutter as it went
with a light source from behind the film projecting it
onto a screen or a wall, so not surprising, just
the same way they were taking it was also kind
of how they were showing it. Uh. And if you've
ever wondered how films got the nickname flicks, you can't
thank this early technology. Louise Shutter apparatus meant that the
(11:11):
light was cut off for the briefest fraction of a
second in between frames as the shutter was closing, giving
it a flickering effect, and eventually movies shown with this
system got the nickname flickers, which of course got shortened
over time to flix. So today, whenever someone calls the
film a flick, they're actually referencing the earliest parts of
film history, although I doubt many think about it that way.
(11:33):
But what's really fantastic about all this work that Louis
Lumier was doing was that all of these functions he
was inventing, the film advancement, processing of the film, the projection,
all of that together was all integrated into one machine
called the cinematograph. So it was kind of a wonder Yeah. Um,
in my head, I like to imagine him going, no,
(11:54):
just keep cramming it into that one because it is
a lot to put into one thing, and I still
kept it fairly small. So in the patent for the cinematograph,
filed jointly by Louis and August on February, it was
described as follows, and of course this is a translation quote.
The mechanism of this apparatus has the essential character of
(12:15):
acting intermittently on a ribbon regularly perforated so as to
print successive displacements, separated by the rest periods during which
occurs either the impression or the viewings of the images.
So basically, it's just saying we've invented this thing that
pulls filmed through and it opens one frame at a time,
and you will either be capturing movies on it or
(12:36):
watching movies on it through this this function. And that
patent was actually amended on March thirty to reflect some
updates that they had made to the mechanism that slightly
elongated the time that the shutter remained open for both
capturing images and for viewing. Just to be clear, as
is true of pretty much any invention we could be
talking about on show, the Lumier's cinematograph did not just
(12:59):
happen in They obviously didn't have the idea in a vacuum,
because we already mentioned their father wanting to get in
on the market of film that Edison's lab had started up.
But in addition to Edison and to the kinetoscope he
and Dixon created, there were so many other inventors all
looking into ways that motion pictures could be made. And
(13:20):
we're gonna just touch on a couple because these are
some that are often referenced as being influential in terms
of giving Louise some ideas as he was going. One
of these was Charles Emil Renaud, who had been working
on a technology to create and show animated film so
hand drawn not captured photographic films since the eighteen seventies,
when he invented a device called a prexinoscope that improved
(13:43):
on the zoa trope. So this allowed for characters in
an animated scene to be drawn on a strip and
then set into differing backgrounds. His His system is sometimes
referred to with a magic lantern involved, and in the
eighteen eighties Reno worked on an animated Moving Picture projections
STEM was based on this prexinoscope called the Tao Uptique,
(14:04):
and this device was as we said, a complicated expansion
on the Precini scope. It was much bigger and it
used the system of mirrors and lights to project the
animation onto a screen or a wall life size. In
addition to rey No, another Frenchman, Louis Laprosse, had made
strides and developing his own motion picture camera, which used
(14:25):
a single roll of film that unfurled from one spool
as it was used and then was wound onto another
school after exposure. A documentary was produced two years ago
promoting the belief that he had actually beaten Edison to
inventing a technology that could capture moving pictures. La Princes
may have emerged as a dominant name in the world
(14:45):
of motion picture technology had he not suddenly vanished in
eight Yeah, he is absolutely also on my list of
episodes to do, because his disappearance is a great history
mystery to talk about. But the point is, uh, the
Lumiers knew that other people were working in this field,
and they understood completely that they were going to race
(15:06):
to establish their name as the one that was linked
to this new technology. But what's really fortunate for them
is that they were not just unknown visionaries that were
like tinkering in a garage or their lab. They already
had a steady and impressive income to help fund their
research and development, as we said, but they also had
brand recognition as the portrait photographers in Europe. The cinematograph
(15:30):
was patented on February. They made their first film a
little more than a month later, on March nineteen. That
initial effort featured the employees of the Loomier factory leaving
their jobs for the day. It was given a rather
unimaginative title in English, it was workers Leaving the Loomier Factory.
(15:50):
You can see it online. The title definitely gives you
the truth of what you'll see, people walking out of
a factory and then a car driving out. Is also
a large dog their runs in and out of the
frame several times. Yeah, that dog is the star of
the show as far as concerned. But it is truth
and advertising. You'll get exactly what they tell you the
title is. They were not really big on crazy titles
(16:13):
the loom years. Over the next several months, the brothers
showed their work in private screenings for professional interest organizations
and hobby organizations, including the Society for the Encouragement of
National industry and the Congress of the French Photographic Society
and in the case of the Photographic Society, and we'll
talk about this a little bit later. Uh. They actually
captured members of that group on film one day to
(16:35):
be part of the screening that they showed them as
a demonstration the following day, and this definitely made a
strong impression for those people to sit there and watch
themselves on screen. Uh. As part of this whole debut
of this new technology. At the end of the year,
on December, at the Salon Indiana Grand Cafe in Paris,
(16:56):
August and Louise screened their films for a paying audiences
for the first time. They ran ten films, each of
which ran about fifty seconds long, and it's the first
known instance of films being showed to a paying audience.
That also represented a shift and how the brothers saw
their work. And coming up, we're gonna delve into the
Lumier's transition into film exhibition as a business, but we're
(17:19):
first going to have a little sponsor break. So when
Louis was doing all of his development of the cinematograph
and August was was working on it with him, the
idea was that they were going to show what all
could be done with this new camera that they were
making so they could sell it. Uh. But as they
(17:41):
toured around showing colleagues with this camera was capable of,
leading up to that public screening, they actually started to
realize that there was money to be made in the
entertainment industry. That first audience, which consisted of thirty five people,
had paid one front each to watch the program in
the Cafes basement. That was an arrange mint which Antoine
Loumier had managed. Those thirty five were quick to describe
(18:05):
the amazing films they had seen projected onto a sheet
while they sat in the dark. And soon the Loumiers
are making more than ten thousand francs each week. They're
running multiple shows every day to try to keep up
with demand, and there were still hours long waits for
the audiences. Yeah those Uh. The first three dozen people
basically walked out, We're like, you guys gotta see this, uh,
(18:26):
And everybody agreed that they should. And the brothers also
made new films to keep audiences coming back. So they
branched out from their documentary style reels to telling some
sort of narrative fictional stories with their short films. We'll
talk about some of the specifics in a moment. One
of their films which gained a lot of attention early on,
was the Arrival of a Train at Stas Station. Uh.
(18:48):
This particular film runs about fifty seconds and features, as
the title suggests, a train pulling into the station, and
it's filmed from the station, so the audience gets the
perspective of seeing the train coming down the tracks to them.
The initial audience reaction to this film is one of
those items in history that has become the matter of discussion.
There are accounts that claim that the audience was terrified
(19:11):
by the experience of watching a train coming at them,
and that they screamed and even fled. Others say this
is squarely in the realm of urban legend, that the
reaction was a lot more subdued. So exactly how the
prisons of the day responded to this probably never going
to be known. This whole panicked reaction version that has
(19:34):
gained traction over the years. Uh, that probably is just
because it's a two sier story. Yeah, there is. I
haven't looked at the primary source, but I saw it
reported several places. There was apparently a contemporary newspaper report
that said that people were terrified, and I kind of
get the vibe that that was very much a sensationalized story,
(19:54):
like but because it is one of the few conver descriptions,
that's why this sort of hangs on forever. It seems
more likely that people maybe gasped in astonishment and then
some was like screams of terror at cinema right or
I could even see one person leaning back and then
it suddenly ballooning into everyone was petrified. So you'll somehow
(20:19):
see it reported that way. Odds are that's not how
it went down at all. The Lumier's early films also
featured another movie first, and this is really interesting to
me product placement, which we just often discuss, you know,
if you're into movies at all. People talk about how
more modern film era movies have been victimized by product placement,
but they was done from the very beginning. In a
(20:41):
film titled The Card Game, beer from Their father in
Law's brewery was actually featured as their father, their father
in law, and another man play a game of cards together.
In the film, a waiter is summoned and asked to
bring refreshments, and he brings beer this is from their brewery,
and he the uh, and then viewers get to watches
the bottle is poor into three glasses. It kind of
(21:01):
takes its time getting poured beautifully, and then all the
men drink together, and that's pretty much the whole movie. Obviously,
these films were largely documentary in nature. The brothers were
generally using their technology to capture what life was like
in Leon. They weren't really developing some kind of narrative fiction. Uh. Yeah,
we'll talk about how they did some fiction here in
(21:23):
a moment, but not really like full stories. One movie
that they made, called Feeding the Baby was simply August
Lumier and his wife feeding their infant child. Again, there's
truth in advertising, um. The also unimaginatively named The Photographical Congress,
arrives in Leon just shows dozens of people getting off
of a boat. You would never know that they were
(21:44):
interested in photography if it weren't the title. Uh. The
film Fishing for Goldfish features a very young child, I'm
not sure if it's the same child as the one
that gets fed and feeding the Baby um unsuccessfully attempting
to try to catch fish in a large bowl. It's
basically a tiny child stick in its hand in a
big fish bowl. And then another one called The Sea
shows five men jumping off of the dock into choppy water,
(22:06):
and then they make their way back up to the
shore and get on the dock and run to the
end and jump in again, and they kind of just
play out that cycle. So these are all pretty straightforward,
but that initial group of motion pictures wasn't without bits
of comedy. The film titled The Sprinkled Sprinkler shows a
garden a gardener watering plants with a hose when a
boy sneaks up behind him and steps on the hose,
(22:29):
which stops the flow of water. When they're perplexed, gardener
points the novel and himself to see what the trouble is.
The boy steps off of the hose and the gardener
gets a dowsing and then chases the boy down, uh
and not quite as funny spanks him. Yeah, there's actually
a lot of people getting spanked in these movies. It
(22:49):
doesn't look particularly violent, but I was like, really again
with the spanking as I was looking at them the
other night, Like, oh again, spanking used to be a
lot less controversial old than it is now. Yeah, and
some of it is definitely um more of what you
would It's kind of like the comedy swat on the
tail end, it's not really like a forceful thing um,
(23:12):
which happens in our next film we're going to talk about,
called Jumping the Blanket, which is also kind of a
light comedy. Uh. It features four men holding the corners
of a blanket while a fifth man attempts to jump
into it, and his initial efforts fall short, for which
he is banks, this time by a man who is
perhaps a soldier or a policeman. He's just a man
standing by and what looks like a uniform. The jumper
(23:33):
eventually manages a successful jump onto the blanket, which results
in some rather graceful acrobatics as the four men that
are holding the corners flip him out of the blanket again,
and he completes several more jump and flip combinations with
varying degrees of success. It definitely looks like he is
a trained performer. Horse trick riders a similar in tone
to the Blanket movie. A man tries several times to
(23:55):
mount a very patient horse while another man stands by
Alternatively either how helps or chastises that would be rider.
It becomes very obvious that the unsuccessful horse rider really
is a skilled gymnast because he falls him the most
graceful ways imaginable. And again this horse is extremely patient.
There is also spanking in this movie. It's like every
(24:18):
time he fails, the guy gets him and swats him
on the behind and tries to lift him back on
the horse. See now, it's just weird. It's a theme
for their films. I don't know. Um. So, these earliest
films were actually shot on the second prototype camera that
Louis had built, although the brothers soon made more of them.
Louis actually collaborated with a Parisian engineer named Jules Carpentier
(24:39):
uh to refine the camera and make it suitable for
mass production. Like at that point they had been basically
been using things that could not just be duplicated um.
Carpentier had actually attended one of the Lumier's private screenings
in March, and he immediately had reached out to them
to offer his assistance on future iterations of their work.
They did not sell all the mass produced cameras as
(25:01):
they had originally planned, though, instead they trained a large
staff of men to make films. Once the training was complete,
they sent them in to travel throughout Europe under the
Loomi Air banner, making new movies and showing them in
the same town where they were shot. From a business perspective,
this was incredibly astute. It spread the business name around
(25:21):
and it got it associated with this new technology, and
it obviously showed the amazing capabilities of the cinematograph to
make movies on the go. And it immensely increased the
company's catalog of films as this small army of filmmakers
created more and more content everywhere they went. And of course,
when you hand a new piece of technology to somebody,
they will figure out new ways to use it. This
(25:43):
new group of filmmakers tried new things. One of them
created the first moving shot when he attached to the
camera to a gondola and venice. Soon all the cameramen
were told to include similar shots in their films per
the Loomi Airs. So at this point, the Loomis Airs
successful photography business, successful manufacturers, got into motion pictures and
(26:06):
they're now wildly successful. And that is actually where we're
gonna end this episode. Um and we're actually going to
talk in the next one about how the Lumiers gained
international acclaim and then left Motion Pictures to pursue other interests.
Do you have listener mail for us also? I do.
I figured I would link this one to a listener
(26:27):
mail about another film podcast we did recently, which was
the murder of William Desmond Taylor. This is from our listener, Catherine.
She says, Hi, ladies, I was just listening to your
podcast on the William Desmond Taylor case mere moments ago,
and all of the several highly plausible suspects, I personally
think Charlotte Selby. Shelby is the most likely of the bunch.
(26:47):
I know that someone was seeing near Taylor's home that
didn't match her description at all, But a thought occurred
to me to explain this that turns this case into
more of a weird detective novel. She hired a killer
to do the deed for her. I have zero serious
evidence for this, and it's mostly a joke explanation, but
she strikes me as being shrewd enough and crazy stage
mom enough to pull something like this if she wanted
(27:09):
him out of the picture. It seems to me that
she would want to distance herself and her daughter from
the case as much as possible, therefore enter the hit man. Obviously,
if that was her goal, it didn't work that well,
since she's still got heavily investigated for the murder and
her daughter's career kind of tanked. Anyway, I personally do
not like the blackmailers did it theory, unless we also
assume that the murder was accidental. It seems to me that,
(27:32):
as menacing as they can be, any serious blackmailers would
want to keep him alive. How else are you going
to get anything out of him. Maybe I'm just not
nefarious enough to imagine a reasonable explanation for killing your
target on purpose. There's such a wide range of suspects
that Akham's razor doesn't really work super well for this case.
There are simply too many simple answers available. Since the
(27:52):
case is so cold by now, we might as well
say that ghosts did it. I'm fine with that. Cases
like this are particularly why I love your podcast. It's
always fun to hear a cool historical story or learn
about people who did amazing things for better or worse.
But it's especially fantastic when we get episodes that are
stimulating to the imagination. I can't count how many times
I thought that someone should work this or that mystery
(28:13):
or scenario, or a particular historical tidbit into a novel
or TV show while listening to your podcast and end
up spending a lot of time thinking of all the
ways that that could play out. That always makes the
work day go by a little faster. Your podcast is
truly a gift. Thank you so much, Catherine. That was
lovely You kind of point out exactly why I really
like that particular story, which is that there are too
(28:34):
many explanations, all of which would make sense. Uh, so
we'll never ever know there may have been a cover up.
Um Yeah, William Desmond Taylor remains fascinating to me. Even
after we finished that episode, I found myself thinking about
it a lot. Uh. If you would like to write
to us your series on who Killed William Desmond Taylor
or anything else, you can do so at History Podcast
at house to Works dot com. We are also available
(28:56):
across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History,
and you can also visit us on our website, which
is Missed in History dot com, where you will find
me back catalog of every episode of the show ever,
show notes and sources for any of the shows that
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missed in history dot com and we'll run through history together.
(29:22):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
hostof works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Wilson. Tracy, we're finally
doing it, I know. Today we're finally going to talk
(00:22):
about a pair of brothers who have literally been on
my List Brother podcast since the day that Tracy and
I started working on it, so that's more than four years.
But I've just been hanging onto this one. I similarly
have things that have been on the list for that long.
Uh yeah, And sometimes part of it, I don't do
those because I'm like, no, that's really self serving and like, um,
(00:44):
you know, it will just be like my hobby, fun things.
But at the same time, life is short, and they
have a fun story. So the reason that I have
always wanted to cover the Lumier brothers is that they
were really prolific inventors, and we're going to talk about
the innovations in developing motion picture for which they are
most well known. I think if you ask most people,
they can tell you that they were involved in early
(01:04):
motion pictures. But we're also going to talk about other
inventions that legitimately changed human culture. In really significant ways,
and there is so much here that we're actually going
to give them a two parter. So in the first episode,
we're going to talk about the family business that their
father started and how one of them came up with
an invention when he was still a teenager that basically
set up their family for life financially and enabled them
(01:27):
to experiment and invent without worrying about money. And in
the second part will cover some of the massive success
that the Loomier family experienced in an industry that they
never really meant to get into in the first place.
We'll talk about a lot of that in the first
part too, but um we will kind of discuss then
how they diversified their interests and went in other directions.
August Lumier was born on October eighteen sixty two, and
(01:51):
his brother Louis was born two years later, both of
them October babies. His brother was born October five, eighteen
sixty four. They weren't the only two children in the family.
There was also a sister named Jin and a brother
named Eduard, and their father, Antoine Lumier, was in his
early twenties when the boys were born, and after marrying
(02:11):
Jeanne Josephine Costillo at nineteen. Antoine had first started working
painting signs and then as a painter of portraits, but
eventually he who was a very curious man about the world,
became interested in photography, and combining his painting experience with
this new medium, he opened his own photography studio where
(02:32):
he specialized in portrait photography. In eighteen seventy, when Auguste
and Louis were eight and six, Antoine moved the family
to Leon, France, as the Franco Prussian War threatened to
push into their hometown of Besson Sant and the eastern
side of France, which is near the border with Switzerland.
So Leon is south of there, farther away from the
(02:53):
Swiss border, roughly across from where Switzerland's southern border meets
Italy's northern order. Yeah, that's just kind of a triangulation.
Note it's not terribly important if you're having trouble getting
the visual there. Uh. Both of the Lumier boys went
to a technical school in Lyon known as La Martiniere,
and as teenagers they joined their father in the family business,
(03:15):
and while he was working for the company. After graduating
from lou Lis s which is the French word for
high school. Louis also attended some college classes at Conservative
de Lyon. Louis proved himself to be an innovator right
out of the gate by inventing a new type of
photographic plate when he was only seventeen. This plate, which
is sometimes called the Etiquette blue the Lumier's name for it,
(03:39):
it's a blue label plate or a dry plate. It
reduced the need for dark room development of images. Antoine,
their father, anticipating the potential success of Louise Invention, purchased
a large tract of land in Lyon's suburb of Montplaisier
to set up a much larger operation for their factory,
and his foresight was entirely correct, because demand for this product,
(04:02):
which made photography much more accessible to a great many
more people, was through the roof the Loumier company, which
was at that point named Antoine. Lumier and Sons. Company
began producing these plates, which were very high quality, in
massive numbers, literally millions every year during the busiest years.
Louise Invention turned into the primary profit driver for the company,
(04:23):
and it made the Loumiers very wealthy and also made
their name synonymous with photography at the time. Yeah. I
read in one source that they were making as many
as fifteen million plates a year, and they were barely
keeping up with demand at that point. Uh So, when
Louis was twenty eight, he got married to a woman
named genre Rose Leonie Winkler on February two of eight three,
(04:48):
and on August thirty one of that same year, Auguste
Lumier also got married to Jon's sister, Marie Euchreisive Margarite Twinkler.
So two brothers married two sisters. For their father part,
he knew that to stay successful in a field like
There's meant that the company had to be constantly researching
and developing new technology, So he used a portion of
(05:09):
the millions of francs and profit that Louise Invention had
brought in to fund ongoing research projects. Yeah this really,
I mean, I cannot stress enough how much this one
thing that Louis invented as a teenager completely enabled them
to do and achieve basically everything else they achieved in
their lives. Because they didn't have to worry about money,
(05:30):
they could just spend as much time as they needed
researching and developing things because their factory was still churning
out plates and they were still bringing in profits. So
in eighteen ninety one, Thomas Edison and William Dixon invented
the kinetoscope. There's a whole big story around that and
who deserves more credit, but that's a little outside the
scope of our podcast today. But the kinetoscope was a
(05:51):
device that had a peep hole for a viewer to
look through, and then a strip of film was run
through the machine behind the lens with a light bulb
behind it, and so the frames of the film strip
passing through the machine in this way created a moving picture.
That's a concept that's probably pretty easy to access for
most of our listeners. Yeah. Initially Edison believed this project
of Dixon's was basically a toy or a diversion. But
(06:15):
when they displayed a bunch of kinetoscopes in New York
City in eighteen ninety four, this technology was a huge hit.
Spectators happily paid twenty five cents a piece to watch
five of the short films, which you could only look
at one person at a time by looking through each
cabinets people. Yeah, so they would have basically like a
parlor full of kinetoscopes and a person would stand there
(06:37):
and just look in one by themselves. Uh. And Antoine
Lumier again their father took notice of this new technology.
Several months after Edison and Dixon kinetoscopes had made their
public debut, Antoine, who had seen one of these machines
on display in Paris, approached his son Louis and another
employee at their photography company with a small piece of
(06:58):
kinetoscope film and his and he explained that Edison was
making the film in the US and selling it for
a lot of money, and that they should start making
it too, so that they could become the French manufacturers
of it. So this meant that not only did they
have to manufacture the film itself with its spruck at
holes along the edge, they also had to make a
(07:18):
camera that could make use of it. So it was
initially August and not Louis, who took a stab at
building this camera but successfully eluded him. And then Louis
also started tinkering it, but his attempt fell short. They
just couldn't figure it out. Uh. And they knew plenty
about still photography cameras. I mean, that was their family business.
They were not only making a lot of money at it,
(07:40):
they were very good at it. They were really astute
um and they knew how to capture images. But getting
the film to advance one frame at a time to
capture a series of still images that would convey movement
when shown in sequence was a huge leap in terms
of technology, and they just couldn't figure out for a
while how to make it happen. So in just a moment,
(08:00):
we will tell you what other invention finally gave Louis
Lumier the idea that would solve this camera dilemma. But
first we will pause for a word from one of
our sponsors. So in the end, it was one of
my favorite inventions, the sewing machine that gave Louis a
(08:20):
bolt of inspiration. The story goes that he had chronic insomnia.
That was true, but the story part is that he
had this revelation late one night when he couldn't sleep,
and as he sat there sleepless, he was thinking, and
in that way that sometimes your brain will put together
great ideas when it's not occupied doing other things. Uh,
he thought about the way a sewing machine makes a
(08:43):
stitch in a piece of fabric and then advances the
fabric to make the next stitch. It occurred to Louis
that he could build a similar mechanism to advance film
In a camera. The shutter would open to capture an image,
and then as it closed, a little claw like mechanism
would grab the perforations on the side the film, then
pull it down to the next frame. The claws would
(09:03):
release just as the shutter opened for the next image,
and then grab the perforations again when the shutter closed,
and so on. Yeah. I had really never thought about
it until um learning this little tidbit how similar they
actually are, and I was like, oh, they made little
feed dogs. Yeah. Basically, so, Louis based his camera for
(09:24):
capturing motion on the cameras that the Lumiers had been
using in their business to take still photos. He had
to attach a crank to run the film advancement system.
But even so, this apparatus was far smaller and lighter
than the kinetograph that Edison and Dixon were using to
make films. It came in at just sixteen pounds, which
is seven point three kilograms. That's still heavy if you
(09:45):
handed someone a sixteen pound camera today, but it was
suddenly way portable in a way that cameras were not
up to that point. But Louis knew that the family,
if the family business really wanted to corner the European
market for moving photog for you, they could not just
make the film and the camera to use it. They
also needed to figure out how to print film from negatives,
(10:06):
and then a way to show these films two observers.
It was a whole system, not just camera and film, right,
And while Louis had really kind of taken a much
smaller approach to building his camera in comparison to Edison
and Dixon, he really thought much bigger than they did
when it came to showing films. So instead of creating
(10:29):
another machine like the kinetoscope that could only offer viewings
to one person at a time, Louis really wanted groups
of people to be able to experience watching moving pictures together.
It was this idea that led to their development of
film projection. Louis Loumier basically devised a very similar idea
for advancing a piece of film frame by frame, sixteen frames,
(10:51):
a second opening and closing a shutter as it went
with a light source from behind the film projecting it
onto a screen or a wall, so not surprising, just
the same way they were taking it was also kind
of how they were showing it. Uh. And if you've
ever wondered how films got the nickname flicks, you can't
thank this early technology. Louise Shutter apparatus meant that the
(11:11):
light was cut off for the briefest fraction of a
second in between frames as the shutter was closing, giving
it a flickering effect, and eventually movies shown with this
system got the nickname flickers, which of course got shortened
over time to flix. So today, whenever someone calls the
film a flick, they're actually referencing the earliest parts of
film history, although I doubt many think about it that way.
(11:33):
But what's really fantastic about all this work that Louis
Lumier was doing was that all of these functions he
was inventing, the film advancement, processing of the film, the projection,
all of that together was all integrated into one machine
called the cinematograph. So it was kind of a wonder Yeah. Um,
in my head, I like to imagine him going, no,
(11:54):
just keep cramming it into that one because it is
a lot to put into one thing, and I still
kept it fairly small. So in the patent for the cinematograph,
filed jointly by Louis and August on February, it was
described as follows, and of course this is a translation quote.
The mechanism of this apparatus has the essential character of
(12:15):
acting intermittently on a ribbon regularly perforated so as to
print successive displacements, separated by the rest periods during which
occurs either the impression or the viewings of the images.
So basically, it's just saying we've invented this thing that
pulls filmed through and it opens one frame at a time,
and you will either be capturing movies on it or
(12:36):
watching movies on it through this this function. And that
patent was actually amended on March thirty to reflect some
updates that they had made to the mechanism that slightly
elongated the time that the shutter remained open for both
capturing images and for viewing. Just to be clear, as
is true of pretty much any invention we could be
talking about on show, the Lumier's cinematograph did not just
(12:59):
happen in They obviously didn't have the idea in a vacuum,
because we already mentioned their father wanting to get in
on the market of film that Edison's lab had started up.
But in addition to Edison and to the kinetoscope he
and Dixon created, there were so many other inventors all
looking into ways that motion pictures could be made. And
(13:20):
we're gonna just touch on a couple because these are
some that are often referenced as being influential in terms
of giving Louise some ideas as he was going. One
of these was Charles Emil Renaud, who had been working
on a technology to create and show animated film so
hand drawn not captured photographic films since the eighteen seventies,
when he invented a device called a prexinoscope that improved
(13:43):
on the zoa trope. So this allowed for characters in
an animated scene to be drawn on a strip and
then set into differing backgrounds. His His system is sometimes
referred to with a magic lantern involved, and in the
eighteen eighties Reno worked on an animated Moving Picture projections
STEM was based on this prexinoscope called the Tao Uptique,
(14:04):
and this device was as we said, a complicated expansion
on the Precini scope. It was much bigger and it
used the system of mirrors and lights to project the
animation onto a screen or a wall life size. In
addition to rey No, another Frenchman, Louis Laprosse, had made
strides and developing his own motion picture camera, which used
(14:25):
a single roll of film that unfurled from one spool
as it was used and then was wound onto another
school after exposure. A documentary was produced two years ago
promoting the belief that he had actually beaten Edison to
inventing a technology that could capture moving pictures. La Princes
may have emerged as a dominant name in the world
(14:45):
of motion picture technology had he not suddenly vanished in
eight Yeah, he is absolutely also on my list of
episodes to do, because his disappearance is a great history
mystery to talk about. But the point is, uh, the
Lumiers knew that other people were working in this field,
and they understood completely that they were going to race
(15:06):
to establish their name as the one that was linked
to this new technology. But what's really fortunate for them
is that they were not just unknown visionaries that were
like tinkering in a garage or their lab. They already
had a steady and impressive income to help fund their
research and development, as we said, but they also had
brand recognition as the portrait photographers in Europe. The cinematograph
(15:30):
was patented on February. They made their first film a
little more than a month later, on March nineteen. That
initial effort featured the employees of the Loomier factory leaving
their jobs for the day. It was given a rather
unimaginative title in English, it was workers Leaving the Loomier Factory.
(15:50):
You can see it online. The title definitely gives you
the truth of what you'll see, people walking out of
a factory and then a car driving out. Is also
a large dog their runs in and out of the
frame several times. Yeah, that dog is the star of
the show as far as concerned. But it is truth
and advertising. You'll get exactly what they tell you the
title is. They were not really big on crazy titles
(16:13):
the loom years. Over the next several months, the brothers
showed their work in private screenings for professional interest organizations
and hobby organizations, including the Society for the Encouragement of
National industry and the Congress of the French Photographic Society
and in the case of the Photographic Society, and we'll
talk about this a little bit later. Uh. They actually
captured members of that group on film one day to
(16:35):
be part of the screening that they showed them as
a demonstration the following day, and this definitely made a
strong impression for those people to sit there and watch
themselves on screen. Uh. As part of this whole debut
of this new technology. At the end of the year,
on December, at the Salon Indiana Grand Cafe in Paris,
(16:56):
August and Louise screened their films for a paying audiences
for the first time. They ran ten films, each of
which ran about fifty seconds long, and it's the first
known instance of films being showed to a paying audience.
That also represented a shift and how the brothers saw
their work. And coming up, we're gonna delve into the
Lumier's transition into film exhibition as a business, but we're
(17:19):
first going to have a little sponsor break. So when
Louis was doing all of his development of the cinematograph
and August was was working on it with him, the
idea was that they were going to show what all
could be done with this new camera that they were
making so they could sell it. Uh. But as they
(17:41):
toured around showing colleagues with this camera was capable of,
leading up to that public screening, they actually started to
realize that there was money to be made in the
entertainment industry. That first audience, which consisted of thirty five people,
had paid one front each to watch the program in
the Cafes basement. That was an arrange mint which Antoine
Loumier had managed. Those thirty five were quick to describe
(18:05):
the amazing films they had seen projected onto a sheet
while they sat in the dark. And soon the Loumiers
are making more than ten thousand francs each week. They're
running multiple shows every day to try to keep up
with demand, and there were still hours long waits for
the audiences. Yeah those Uh. The first three dozen people
basically walked out, We're like, you guys gotta see this, uh,
(18:26):
And everybody agreed that they should. And the brothers also
made new films to keep audiences coming back. So they
branched out from their documentary style reels to telling some
sort of narrative fictional stories with their short films. We'll
talk about some of the specifics in a moment. One
of their films which gained a lot of attention early on,
was the Arrival of a Train at Stas Station. Uh.
(18:48):
This particular film runs about fifty seconds and features, as
the title suggests, a train pulling into the station, and
it's filmed from the station, so the audience gets the
perspective of seeing the train coming down the tracks to them.
The initial audience reaction to this film is one of
those items in history that has become the matter of discussion.
There are accounts that claim that the audience was terrified
(19:11):
by the experience of watching a train coming at them,
and that they screamed and even fled. Others say this
is squarely in the realm of urban legend, that the
reaction was a lot more subdued. So exactly how the
prisons of the day responded to this probably never going
to be known. This whole panicked reaction version that has
(19:34):
gained traction over the years. Uh, that probably is just
because it's a two sier story. Yeah, there is. I
haven't looked at the primary source, but I saw it
reported several places. There was apparently a contemporary newspaper report
that said that people were terrified, and I kind of
get the vibe that that was very much a sensationalized story,
(19:54):
like but because it is one of the few conver descriptions,
that's why this sort of hangs on forever. It seems
more likely that people maybe gasped in astonishment and then
some was like screams of terror at cinema right or
I could even see one person leaning back and then
it suddenly ballooning into everyone was petrified. So you'll somehow
(20:19):
see it reported that way. Odds are that's not how
it went down at all. The Lumier's early films also
featured another movie first, and this is really interesting to
me product placement, which we just often discuss, you know,
if you're into movies at all. People talk about how
more modern film era movies have been victimized by product placement,
but they was done from the very beginning. In a
(20:41):
film titled The Card Game, beer from Their father in
Law's brewery was actually featured as their father, their father
in law, and another man play a game of cards together.
In the film, a waiter is summoned and asked to
bring refreshments, and he brings beer this is from their brewery,
and he the uh, and then viewers get to watches
the bottle is poor into three glasses. It kind of
(21:01):
takes its time getting poured beautifully, and then all the
men drink together, and that's pretty much the whole movie. Obviously,
these films were largely documentary in nature. The brothers were
generally using their technology to capture what life was like
in Leon. They weren't really developing some kind of narrative fiction. Uh. Yeah,
we'll talk about how they did some fiction here in
(21:23):
a moment, but not really like full stories. One movie
that they made, called Feeding the Baby was simply August
Lumier and his wife feeding their infant child. Again, there's
truth in advertising, um. The also unimaginatively named The Photographical Congress,
arrives in Leon just shows dozens of people getting off
of a boat. You would never know that they were
(21:44):
interested in photography if it weren't the title. Uh. The
film Fishing for Goldfish features a very young child, I'm
not sure if it's the same child as the one
that gets fed and feeding the Baby um unsuccessfully attempting
to try to catch fish in a large bowl. It's
basically a tiny child stick in its hand in a
big fish bowl. And then another one called The Sea
shows five men jumping off of the dock into choppy water,
(22:06):
and then they make their way back up to the
shore and get on the dock and run to the
end and jump in again, and they kind of just
play out that cycle. So these are all pretty straightforward,
but that initial group of motion pictures wasn't without bits
of comedy. The film titled The Sprinkled Sprinkler shows a
garden a gardener watering plants with a hose when a
boy sneaks up behind him and steps on the hose,
(22:29):
which stops the flow of water. When they're perplexed, gardener
points the novel and himself to see what the trouble is.
The boy steps off of the hose and the gardener
gets a dowsing and then chases the boy down, uh
and not quite as funny spanks him. Yeah, there's actually
a lot of people getting spanked in these movies. It
(22:49):
doesn't look particularly violent, but I was like, really again
with the spanking as I was looking at them the
other night, Like, oh again, spanking used to be a
lot less controversial old than it is now. Yeah, and
some of it is definitely um more of what you
would It's kind of like the comedy swat on the
tail end, it's not really like a forceful thing um,
(23:12):
which happens in our next film we're going to talk about,
called Jumping the Blanket, which is also kind of a
light comedy. Uh. It features four men holding the corners
of a blanket while a fifth man attempts to jump
into it, and his initial efforts fall short, for which
he is banks, this time by a man who is
perhaps a soldier or a policeman. He's just a man
standing by and what looks like a uniform. The jumper
(23:33):
eventually manages a successful jump onto the blanket, which results
in some rather graceful acrobatics as the four men that
are holding the corners flip him out of the blanket again,
and he completes several more jump and flip combinations with
varying degrees of success. It definitely looks like he is
a trained performer. Horse trick riders a similar in tone
to the Blanket movie. A man tries several times to
(23:55):
mount a very patient horse while another man stands by
Alternatively either how helps or chastises that would be rider.
It becomes very obvious that the unsuccessful horse rider really
is a skilled gymnast because he falls him the most
graceful ways imaginable. And again this horse is extremely patient.
There is also spanking in this movie. It's like every
(24:18):
time he fails, the guy gets him and swats him
on the behind and tries to lift him back on
the horse. See now, it's just weird. It's a theme
for their films. I don't know. Um. So, these earliest
films were actually shot on the second prototype camera that
Louis had built, although the brothers soon made more of them.
Louis actually collaborated with a Parisian engineer named Jules Carpentier
(24:39):
uh to refine the camera and make it suitable for
mass production. Like at that point they had been basically
been using things that could not just be duplicated um.
Carpentier had actually attended one of the Lumier's private screenings
in March, and he immediately had reached out to them
to offer his assistance on future iterations of their work.
They did not sell all the mass produced cameras as
(25:01):
they had originally planned, though, instead they trained a large
staff of men to make films. Once the training was complete,
they sent them in to travel throughout Europe under the
Loomi Air banner, making new movies and showing them in
the same town where they were shot. From a business perspective,
this was incredibly astute. It spread the business name around
(25:21):
and it got it associated with this new technology, and
it obviously showed the amazing capabilities of the cinematograph to
make movies on the go. And it immensely increased the
company's catalog of films as this small army of filmmakers
created more and more content everywhere they went. And of course,
when you hand a new piece of technology to somebody,
they will figure out new ways to use it. This
(25:43):
new group of filmmakers tried new things. One of them
created the first moving shot when he attached to the
camera to a gondola and venice. Soon all the cameramen
were told to include similar shots in their films per
the Loomi Airs. So at this point, the Loomis Airs
successful photography business, successful manufacturers, got into motion pictures and
(26:06):
they're now wildly successful. And that is actually where we're
gonna end this episode. Um and we're actually going to
talk in the next one about how the Lumiers gained
international acclaim and then left Motion Pictures to pursue other interests.
Do you have listener mail for us also? I do.
I figured I would link this one to a listener
(26:27):
mail about another film podcast we did recently, which was
the murder of William Desmond Taylor. This is from our listener, Catherine.
She says, Hi, ladies, I was just listening to your
podcast on the William Desmond Taylor case mere moments ago,
and all of the several highly plausible suspects, I personally
think Charlotte Selby. Shelby is the most likely of the bunch.
(26:47):
I know that someone was seeing near Taylor's home that
didn't match her description at all, But a thought occurred
to me to explain this that turns this case into
more of a weird detective novel. She hired a killer
to do the deed for her. I have zero serious
evidence for this, and it's mostly a joke explanation, but
she strikes me as being shrewd enough and crazy stage
mom enough to pull something like this if she wanted
(27:09):
him out of the picture. It seems to me that
she would want to distance herself and her daughter from
the case as much as possible, therefore enter the hit man. Obviously,
if that was her goal, it didn't work that well,
since she's still got heavily investigated for the murder and
her daughter's career kind of tanked. Anyway, I personally do
not like the blackmailers did it theory, unless we also
assume that the murder was accidental. It seems to me that,
(27:32):
as menacing as they can be, any serious blackmailers would
want to keep him alive. How else are you going
to get anything out of him. Maybe I'm just not
nefarious enough to imagine a reasonable explanation for killing your
target on purpose. There's such a wide range of suspects
that Akham's razor doesn't really work super well for this case.
There are simply too many simple answers available. Since the
(27:52):
case is so cold by now, we might as well
say that ghosts did it. I'm fine with that. Cases
like this are particularly why I love your podcast. It's
always fun to hear a cool historical story or learn
about people who did amazing things for better or worse.
But it's especially fantastic when we get episodes that are
stimulating to the imagination. I can't count how many times
I thought that someone should work this or that mystery
(28:13):
or scenario, or a particular historical tidbit into a novel
or TV show while listening to your podcast and end
up spending a lot of time thinking of all the
ways that that could play out. That always makes the
work day go by a little faster. Your podcast is
truly a gift. Thank you so much, Catherine. That was
lovely You kind of point out exactly why I really
like that particular story, which is that there are too
(28:34):
many explanations, all of which would make sense. Uh, so
we'll never ever know there may have been a cover up.
Um Yeah, William Desmond Taylor remains fascinating to me. Even
after we finished that episode, I found myself thinking about
it a lot. Uh. If you would like to write
to us your series on who Killed William Desmond Taylor
or anything else, you can do so at History Podcast
at house to Works dot com. We are also available
(28:56):
across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History,
and you can also visit us on our website, which
is Missed in History dot com, where you will find
me back catalog of every episode of the show ever,
show notes and sources for any of the shows that
Tracy and I have worked on together, as well as
occasional other fun tidbits. So come and visit us and
missed in history dot com and we'll run through history together.
(29:22):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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