A Basic Film Chronology

• the Chauvet cave paintings (about 30,000 BC)
• the Egyptian Isis columns (about 2,500 BC)
• the Greek wrestling vases (about 450 BC)
• da Vinci’s camera oscura (between 1500-1519 AD)
• Huygen’s laterna magica (1660)
• Niepce’s first wet-plate photographs (1822)
• Rôget’s "Theory of the Persistence of Vision" (1824)
• Paris’ thaumatrope (1826)
• Plateau’s phenakistoscope and Stampfer’s stroboscope (1832)
• Horner’s Zoetrope ("The Wheel of Life") (1834)
• Fox-Talbot’s first dry-plate photographs (early 1840s)
• Barnes-Linnet patents the first flipbook (1868)
• Muybridge’s first experiments in photographing motion (1872)
• Reynaud’s praxinoscope (1877)
• Muybridge’s zoöpraxinoscope (1880)
• Marey’s photographic gun (1882)
• Reynaud’s “Theatre Optique” opens (1888)
• Eastman’s perfection of flexible celluloid film (1892)
• Edison’s kinetoscope (actually invented by Dickson) (1894)
• Casler’s Mutoscope (1894)
• the Lumiére Brothers’ first film showing (Dec. 28, 1895)
• Edison’s Vitascope (actually invented by Armat) (1896)
• Méliès’ A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)
• Porter’s THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1903)
• Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)