History of film

Before film
Film is just moving pictures. The art of moving pictures is called animation. The history of animation started long before the development of cinematography. Humans have probably attempted to depict motion as far back as the paleolithic period. Much later, shadow play and the magic lantern (since circa 1659) offered popular shows with projected images on a screen, moving as the result of manipulation by hand and/or minor mechanics.

Film's beginnings (1860s-1912)
On April 9, 1860, the first discernible voice recording of a human was recorded, a ten-second fragment of the French folk song 'Au Clair de la Lune' by inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a phonautograph. He had done human recordings before, but they were not intelligible due to errors in the phonautogram, the file created by the phonautograph. The phonautograph was the first known instrument made for reproducing sound. It transcribed sound waves as undulations or other deviations in a line traced on smoke-blackened paper or glass and was made solely for the study of acoustics. This would influence sound film for the 1920s.

Thomas Edison, famous inventor, was granted a patent for the motion picture camera or "Kinetograph" while his employee William Kennedy Dickson, a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson. In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891. The first kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early 1895. The Edison's Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the rights to sell the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors in this company were Belgian industrialists. Edison's film studio made nearly 1,200 films.

On June 23, 1895, the first film company, Gaumont, was founded by Léon Gaumont and made primitive cameras. The next year, Pathé was founded and soon became the world's largest film company.

In 1908, Edison started the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison Trust). Thomas Edison was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, which was founded in 1929.

The beginning of the studio system (1912-1934)
On April 30, 1912, Universal Pictures was founded as the Universal Film Manufacturing Company and on May 8, 1912, Paramount Pictures was founded as the Famous Players Film Company.

Milestones

 * c.1894: The first sound films
 * 1895: The first film studios
 * 1912: The first American film studios
 * 1926: The first sound film
 * 1953: The first anamorphic film system
 * 1995: The first fully computer animated film