Louis Lumière

Louis Lumière was the son of a Antoine Lumière, a successful pioneer in photography. When Louis was a teenager he developed a photographic process that made the family business even more successful, and then he and his brother Auguste (b. 1862) turned their attention to the new invention of moving pictures. Together they invented a camera/projector called the Cinematograph, and for the first time audiences were able to see large projections of motion pictures (prior to that people watched the new medium through peepshows like those developed by Thomas Edison). The Lumière brothers' produced thousands of short films, usually documents of everyday life, and were instrumental in the development of the cinema as a popular art form.