The first-ever commercial public screening of movies occurred on this day 104 years ago, at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière inherited a photographic firm when their father retired in 1892, and over the next few years they began creating the inventions necessary to the production of moving pictures. These included film perforations and a “cinématographe”, which recorded, developed and projected motion pictures.
The world’s first public cinema experience consisted of ten short films, each lasting between 38 and 49 seconds. Each film was recorded on seventeen metres of film, which was hand-cranked through the cinématographe. The films were made in 35mm format with a 4:3 aspect ratio, at an approximate speed of 16 frames per second. Each length of film could hold 800 frames, giving each film a theoretical maximum duration of 50 seconds.
The Lumière brothers took their films on a world tour the following year, visiting Bombay, London, New York and Buenos Aires. The brothers subsequently lost interest in movies, instead pursuing a range of other inventions including colour photography. Over the course of the next decade, films became a large-scale entertainment industry.