Eadweard Muybridge's 'The Horse in Motion', a grid of photographs of a galloping horse taken one after another
The Horse in Motion, 1878
Marked Leeds

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The moving picture

The first moving pictures were shot in Leeds in 1888. The Lumière brothers showed films to a paying audience in Paris in 1895, and by the 1930s cinemas everywhere showed talking pictures, in black and white and colour.

Place
Leeds · Paris · Hollywood · BombayThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
Eadweard Muybridge, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforePictures that stood still.

  1. ILeeds Bridge, 1888
  2. IIThe Lumières’ first show
  3. IIIMéliès and the trip to the Moon
  4. IVSilent stars
  5. VTalkies
  6. VIBollywood begins

AfterPictures that moved and talked, for everyone.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Louis Le Prince
  • Auguste and Louis Lumière
  • Alice Guy-Blaché
  • Georges Méliès
  • Charlie Chaplin
  • Dadasaheb Phalke

Objects

  • Le Prince’s camera
  • Early film posters

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1888 to 1939. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?