Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

Pre-1900s

Herein is a detailed timeline (organized by decade) of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

Pre-1900s - Part 2

Year	Event and Significance
1889	Henry Reichenbach developed (and patented) durable and flexible celluloid film strips to be manufactured by the pioneer of photographic equipment, George Eastman, and his Eastman Company.
1890	William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, commissioned by Thomas Alva Edison, built the first motion-picture camera and named it the Kinetograph.
1889 or 1890	William K.L. Dickson filmed his first experimental Kinetoscope trial film, Monkeyshines No. 1, the only surviving film from the cylinder kinetoscope, and apparently the first motion picture ever produced on photographic film in the United States. It featured the movement of laboratory assistant Sacco Albanese, filmed with a system using tiny images that rotated around the cylinder.
1891	Thomas Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson also developed or invented the Kinetoscope, a single-viewer peep-show device in which film was moved past a light. The first public demonstration of motion pictures in the US using the Kinetoscope occurred at the Edison Laboratories to the Federation of Women’s Clubs on May 20, 1891. The very short film’s subject in the test footage, titled Dickson Greeting, was William K.L. Dickson himself, bowing, smiling and ceremoniously taking off his hat. Edison filed for a patent for the Kinetoscope in 1891, granted in 1893. On Saturday, April 14, 1894, a refined version of Edison's Kinetoscope began commercial operation.
June, 1892	The Limelight Department, one of the world's first film studios, was officially established in Melbourne, Australia. In the next nine years, it produced arguably the first feature-length film (a series of 13 films titled Soldiers of the Cross (1900) delivered as a 'multi-media' presentation of songs, slides, films and scripture) and documentary film (the Federation of Australia ceremony (January 1, 1901)) in the world.
1893	Thomas Edison displayed 'his' Kinetoscope projector at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and received patents for his movie camera, the Kinetograph, and his peepshow device. Edison also held the first public exhibition of films shot using his Kinetograph at the Brooklyn Institute in early May.
1893	Edison constructed the world's first motion picture studio in New Jersey, a Kinetograph production center nicknamed the Black Maria (slang for a police van).
1894	Fred Ott's Sneeze (aka Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze), the first film made in Edison's Kinetograph in 1893 and noted for the first medium-closeup, became the first film officially copyrighted on January 7.
1894-1895	The earliest color hand-tinted films ever publically-released were Annabelle Butterfly Dance (1894), Annabelle Sun Dance (1894), and Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) featuring the dancing of vaudeville-music hall performer Annabelle Whitford (known as Peerless Annabelle) Moore, whose routines were filmed at Edison's studio in New Jersey. Male audiences were enthralled watching these early depictions of a clothed female dancer (sometimes color-tinted) on a Kinetoscope - an early peep-show device for projecting short films.
April 14, 1894	The first Kinetoscope parlor, consisting of two rows of coin-operated kinetoscopes, opened at 1155 Broadway in New York City for business on April 14, 1894 -- it was called the Holland Brothers' Kinetoscope Parlor. The first commercial presentation of a motion picture took place here. Spectators could watch films for 25 cents in the amusement arcade. Other parlors opened in London and Paris.
March 22, 1895	The first public testing and demonstration of the Lumieres' camera-projector system (the Cinematographe) in their basement. During the private screening - a trial run for their public screening later in the year (see below), the Lumieres caused a sensation with their first film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumiere a Lyon), although it only consisted of an everyday outdoor image - factory workers leaving the Lumiere factory gate for home or for a lunch break.
April 21, 1895	In New York on Frankfort Street, a device called the Eidoloscope Projector (aka the Pantoptikon) was demonstrated for the NY press by Woodville Latham - one of the first public exhibitions of motion pictures in the world. Latham was credited with the "Latham Loop" - a feature of movie projectors involving a loop to feed the film smoothly. (This showing preceded the landmark exhibition of the Lumieres in Paris by about eight months. See below.)
May 20, 1895	A filmed boxing match between Australian fighter Albert Griffiths (Young Griffo) and Barnett, titled Young Griffo v. Battling Charles Barnett (filmed on the roof of Madison Square Garden on May 4, 1895 by Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Grey) was the first motion picture in the world to be screened before a paying audience, at a storefront at 153 Broadway in New York City. The four minute B&W silent film premiered on May 20, 1895, more than seven months before the Lumière brothers showed their film in Paris (see below).
Sept-Oct, 1895	C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat projected Kinetoscope films at the Cotton States Exposition, Georgia USA, using their Phantascope projector.
Dec. 28, 1895	In France, two brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the Cinématographe which was patented in early 1895. It was a combination hand-held movie camera and projector, capable of showing an image that could be viewed by a large audience. They held their first public screening or commercial exhibition - often considered "the birth of film" - when they projected a motion picture onto a screen for the first time at Salon Indien at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The 20-minute afternoon program shown to an invited audience included ten short films with twenty showings a day. The ten shorts included the famous first comedy of a gardener with a watering hose (aka The Sprinkler Sprinkled, Waterer and Watered, or L'Arrouseur Arrose), the factory worker short (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumière à Lyon, or Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory), a sequence of a horse-drawn carriage approaching toward the camera, and a scene of the feeding of a baby. The Lumieres also became known for their 50-second short Arrivee d'un train en gare a La Ciotat (1895) (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), which some sources reported was shocking to its first unsophisticated viewing audience. With a few exceptions, the early films were mostly documentaries (or films of every-day life) - or so-called actualités.
1895	In the early 1890s, Edison and Dickson also devised a prototype sound-film system called the Kinetophonograph or Kinetophone - a precursor of the 1891 Kinetoscope with a cylinder-playing phonograph (and connected earphone tubes) to provide the unsynchronized sound. The projector was connected to the phonograph with a pulley system, but it didn't work very well and was difficult to synchronize. It was formally introduced in 1895, but soon proved to be unsuccessful since competitive, better synchronized devices were also beginning to appear at the time. The first known (and only surviving) film with live-recorded sound made to test the Kinetophone was the 17-second Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894-1895).
April 23, 1896	Edison's Company (because it was unable to produce a workable projector on its own) purchased an improved version of Thomas Armat's 1895 movie projection machine (the Phantascope, originally invented by C. Francis Jenkins in 1893), and renamed it the Vitascope. It was the first commercially-successful celluloid motion picture projector in the US. Thomas Edison presented the first publically-projected Vitascope motion picture (with hand-tinting) in the US to a paying American audience on a screen, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, with his latest invention - the projecting kinetoscope. Customers watched the Edison Company's Vitascope project a ballet sequence in an amusement arcade during a vaudeville act.
1896	The Kiss (1896) (aka The May Irwin Kiss) was the first film ever made of a couple kissing in cinematic history. May Irwin and John Rice re-enacted a lingering kiss for Thomas Edison's film camera in this 20-second long short, from their 1895 Broadway stage play The Widow Jones. It became the most popular film produced that year by Edison's film company (it was filmed at Edison's Black Maria studio, in West Orange, NJ), but was also notorious as the first film to be criticized as scandalous and bringing demands for censorship.
1896	Alice Guy-Blaché, generally acknowledged as the world's first female film director (with France's Gaumont Film Company), was the first film-maker to contribute to the development of narrative film-making, with her first film made in April of 1896, the one-minute in length fictional film La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy).
1896	The roots of horror films (and vampire films in particular) may be traced back to French film-maker Georges Méliès' two-minute short film Le Manoir du Diable (1896) (aka Manor/House of the Devil, or The Devil's Castle), although it was meant to be an amusing, entertaining film.
1898	The Spanish-American War drew camera operators to Cuba, but they were shut out by the U.S. Army. Since they could not capture the battles on film, many went into studios and created them using models and painted backdrops -- the start of scale-model effects.
1898	The oldest major talent agency in Hollywood was the William Morris Agency, founded in 1898. However, its first offices were in New York City, and it didn't move out to the LA area until around 1930.
1899	Two of the earliest westerns (or cowboy-related) films were both Edison films made at Black Maria: the one-shot (less than one minute short) Thomas Edison's Cripple Creek Bar Room Scene - with the 'first' western saloon setting, and Poker at Dawson City.
1899	The French magician Georges Melies became the film industry's first film-maker to use artificially-arranged scenes to construct and tell a narrative story, with Cendrillon (aka Cinderella). Melies wrote, designed, directed, and acted in hundreds of his own fairy tales and science fiction films, and developed techniques such as stop-motion photography, double and multiple-exposures, time-lapse photography, "special effects" such as disappearing objects (using stop-trick or substitution photography), and dissolves/fades.
1899	The first known Shakespearean film, an adaptation of one of the Bard's plays, was the UK film King John, with the title character played by stage actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Directed by William K.L. Dickson and Walter Pfeffer Dando, and composed of only four short scenes, only one survived - the last scene of the King's death.