Early film history involved contributions from inventors, not artists. Technologies like the persistence of vision theory and zoetropes laid the foundations. Photography was also necessary for film to develop. Key inventors and dates included Eadweard Muybridge who captured horse motion in 1872, followed by film pioneers like the Lumiere Brothers, Thomas Edison, and George Eastman who developed technologies allowing motion pictures.

1. Film History The Beginnings

2. Three Ways to Look at Film History Technology Art Business

9. Photography Had to have photography before motion pictures

12. "View from the Window at Le Gras, France“ The birth of photography happened in 1826 when a French scientist, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, put a plate coated with bitumen (an asphalt used in ancient times as a cement or mortar) in a camera obscura. He put the camera obscura facing his house for eight hours and made a photograph. It is the earliest camera photograph that we still have today.

13. This is a picture of one of the first commercially made daguerreotype cameras that was made in 1839. It was designed by Mr. Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype.

14. Birth of “motion” pictures Leland Stanford unwittingly started a chain of events that contributed to the development of motion pictures. To settle a wager regarding the position of a trotting horse's legs, he sent for Eadweard Muybridge, a British photographer who had recently been acclaimed for his photographs of Yosemite.

19. Motion Picture Photography Solved! Filmmakers now had to find a way to show their images.

24. These are a few of the contributions from America. The history now goes back to Europe.

25. Projection Projection was a difficult problem to solve. Its roots go back as far as 1646.