December 17th: The beginning of movies

shati wants me to talk about "the invention of film in the 1990s 1890s". Fixed your typo there, shati.

...actually, yes.  I think that covers it.

Except that if we're talking "moving pictures" when we talk about film, then we have to go a bit farther back. There were early experiments in toying with persistence of vision leading up to the invention of film as we know it, including the Zoetrope (invented in China in 180 AD, but most Western histories record it as the 1830s because that's when Europe did it) and the Praxinoscope (made in the 1870s).

The earliest motion picture technology that roughly resembles what we think about when we think about movies was invented by Louis Le Prince in the late 1880s. The consecutive still images were recorded to paper film. The earliest surviving example of this is the epic Roundhay Garden Scene which clocks in at a stunning 2+ seconds.

When we talk about film being invented in the 1890s, what we're generally talking about is our idea of film starting to come into being at that time, because that's the decade where somebody looked at the invention and said, "Hey, we can use this for narratives."

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