Louis Jean Lumière (; 5 October 1864 – 6 June 1948) was a French

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

and

industrialist A business magnate, also known as an industrialist or tycoon, is a person who is a powerful entrepreneur and investor who controls, through personal enterprise ownership or a dominant shareholding position, a firm or industry whose goods or ser ...

who played a key role in the development of

photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

and cinema.

Early life and education

Lumière was one of four children of Claude-Antoine Lumière, a photographer and painter, and his wife Jeanne-Joséphine (née Costille). At the Martinière Technical School he gained highest marks in his class.

Career

At age 17, Lumière invented a new process for film development using a dry plate. This process was significantly successful for the family business, permitting the opening of a new factory with an eventual production of 15 million plates per year.

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February11, 1847October18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, ...

Kinetoscope The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic approach that woul ...

inspired his and his brother's subsequent work on the

cinematograph Cinematograph or kinematograph is an early term for several types of motion picture film mechanisms. The name was used for movie cameras as well as film projectors, or for complete systems that also provided means to print films (such as the ...

. Louis Lumière is most often associated with the name of his brother,

Auguste Lumière Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (; 19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) was a French engineer, industrialist, biologist, and illusionist. In 1894 and 1895, he and his brother Louis Lumière, Louis invented an animated photographic camera a ...

, under the name of the

Lumière brothers Lumière is French for 'light'. Lumiere, Lumière or Lumieres may refer to: Buildings * Lumière, a building used by the Bibliothèque publique d'information in Paris, France * Lumiere (skyscraper), a cancelled skyscraper development in Leeds, ...

. This comparison is a little excessive with regard to the invention of the

, since in reality, Auguste failed in his attempt to manufacture the first machine, and passed it to his brother who made the invention succeed. On the other hand, Louis was the director of all the first animated photographic views of the Lumière Society, which Auguste sometimes attended only as an amateur actor ('' Le Repas de bébé'', '' La Pêche aux poissons rouges'', '' Démolition d'un mur'', etc.). But the contract signed between the two brothers provided that they be systematically associated, both morally and financially, in all their work and discoveries.

References

External links

Louis Lumière
at

IMDb IMDb, historically known as the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and biograp ...

Auguste and Louis Lumière 1864 births 1948 deaths French silent film directors {{France-photographer-stub