1870’s- French inventor Emile Reynaud modifies the zoetrope to enlarge and project the images. Edweard Muybridge undertakes his now famous experiment to photograph a horse in motion by setting up twelve cameras in a row to record a running race horse.

1885- American inventor George Eastman invents film on a paper roll, replacing the glass plates previously used.

1889- Eastman replaces the paper roll with celluloid creating the earliest form of modern film.

1892- British inventor William Dickson, working under Thomas Edison, perfects the kinetograph and the kinetoscope, the first to record a moving image, the second to view it. The motion picture camera is born. insert Encarta pic

1892- Renaud begins public screenings using drawn images to create moving pictures as long fifteen minutes, such viewings were the precursor to the movie industry that would be born the next century.

1893- Edison creates a studio on his laboratory grounds, where he shoots a number of motion shorts to be viewed in the kinetoscope, still problematic, as only one person could watch through the tiny window.

1895- The Lumiere brothers create the first hand held camera. They soon realized that using a light source the image could be projected for an audience. The first public viewing of an actual recorded image takes place in Paris in December, 1895. Though other inventors created similar devices very shortly thereafter, the Lumiere brothers were also renowned for their work as film makers, gaining fame for their actuality films which depicted real life and not a staged story.

1908- With the proliferation of nickelodeon theaters (empty storefronts that were cheaply and often unsafely converted into theaters) and the accompanying flood of small independent movies that played in them, Edison and other leading producers from ten major film companies form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC) which extended its control over of distribution, prices, and other factors so as to standardize the industry. Independent producers not associated with the MPCC often found their shoots disrupted by hired thugs, though their pictures remain the most popular with audiences.

1914- Lois Weber becomes the first woman to direct a feature film, The Merchant of Venice.

1915- The MPCC, though highly ineffectual in stemming independent movie production, drew attention from the U.S. Government as a monopoly and subsequently lost its power. At the same time independent producers began banding into studios that would soon dominate American cinema.

1914-18- World War I. Prior to the Great War, the vast majority of films came from the cultural centers of Europe, primarily France, Germany, and Italy. As the continent was disrupted by the warfare, filmmaking slowed, and American companies stepped into the fill the void, producing almost 75% of the worlds films by the 1920’s.

1919- Oscar Micheaux becomes the first black producer with his feature film, The Homesteader.