This week will mark the March 22, 1895 anniversary of the Lumière brothers' Paris premiere of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, a short film screened for a ten members of the Society for the Development of the National Industry. What the film may have lacked in plot development was made up for by being one of the world's first motion pictures.
Other inventors predated the achievements of Auguste and Louis Lumière. For example, fellow French inventor Louis Le Prince, created of the 3-second film Rounday Garden Scene on October 14, 1888. But the Lumière brothers, inventors who also operated a photography manufacturing business (the aforementioned Lumière factory), also succeeded in making a both commercially viable product and successfully marketing it. For that reason, the brothers' commercial screening the following December, which also featured an additional nine short films and a re-make of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, has since traditionally been regarded as the birth of modern cinema.
In the aftermath of the screening, the brothers took their Cinématographe, a hand-cranked 16-lb motion-picture camera that was also equipped with a projector, on a world tour. But its popularity had already spawned similar devices. On May 20, 1895, Woodville Latham and Eugene Lauste presented their motion picture system, the Eidoloscope, to audiences in New York City.
Within a few decades, these technological achievements would produce an array of cinematographic products, including the first movie camera intended for home use. The Ciné-Kodak, a 16mm film camera manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company, was released in June 1923. This catalog cover is from a 1927 catalog for the Ciné-Kodak. It included an overview of the Eastman Kodak Company's growing product line, instructions for use, stills from films and home movies made on Eastman Kodak equipment, and directories for film libraries and "finishing stations" that would prepare home movies for projection.
The catalog is part of Hagley Library's large collection of pamphlets and trade catalogs, which consists of over 25,000 publications dating from 1783 and which document America's commercial, technological, and industrial development, as well as the growth of modern distribution and communication systems linking manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers.
To view the catalog in full, click here. To browse a selection of trade catalogs available on our Digital Archives, click here.
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