Auguste and Louis Lumière

• Born: October 19, 1862
• Birthplace: Besançon, France
• Died: April 10, 1954
• Place of death: Lyon, France

French photographers and inventors

The Lumière brothers introduced many successful innovations to the manufacture of photographic materials and to the art of photography. Most significantly, they developed one of the first motion-picture cameras, the first commercially viable projected motion pictures, and the color photographic process known as Autochrome.

Early Lives

Auguste Lumière (aw-goost loo-myehr) was born two years before his brother Louis (lwee). Their father, Claude-Antoine, was born in 1840 at Ormoy, near Besançon, a city in the foothills of the Jura Mountains in southeastern France. Antoine, as he was later known, lost his parents to cholera in 1854, but he was taken in by the painter Auguste Constantin, who taught him drawing. Antoine first took up the trade of sign painting, but by 1860 he established himself as a painter and photographer in Besançon, where he married Jeanne-Joséphine Costille. The couple were to have, in addition to Auguste and Louis, a daughter, Jeanne, and a son, Édouard, who died as an aviator in World War I.

After nearly a decade as the proprietor of his own studio in Besançon, Antoine accepted a partnership with a photographer in Lyons beginning in 1871. Within three years, he had gained recognition for his photography by winning medals in Vienna, Lyons, and Paris. Intelligent and industrious, Antoine fostered his sons’ interest in science and technology. In 1880, Louis placed first in his class at the Martinière Technical School in Lyons during a period in which he was pursuing the improvement of a type of photographic plate known as a gelatin-bromide, or “dry” plate. Since the early 1850’s, the most practicable kind of photographic material for picture taking was the collodion, or “wet” plate, which required that a darkroom be available near the camera for the manipulation of the plate both before and after exposure. A more convenient dry-plate material was avidly researched in the early 1870’s, and by the end of the decade dry plates were widely available from manufacturers in Europe and the United States, providing greater convenience as well as increased emulsion speed to photographers. With the encouragement and the financial support of their father, in 1882, Louis and Auguste entered into the production of an improved dry plate, and in 1883 a company with the name Antoine Lumière et Ses Fils (Antoine Lumière and sons) began operating at 21 Chemin de Saint Victor in Lyons. The initial daily production of sixty dozen plates increased dramatically as Louis’ “blue label” plate became famous; in 1886, the factory produced nearly 1.5 million of the plates, and by 1894 annual production had reached 15 million.

The individual contributions of Louis and Auguste to the family enterprises are seldom easy to distinguish during this early period. It is clear that both brothers had a considerable knowledge of organic chemistry, which formed the basis of numerous researches into the nature of photographic materials. In general, however, Louis’ scientific interests inclined toward physics, while Auguste was drawn to biochemistry and medicine. Their investigations reveal strong theoretical knowledge combined with a desire to make material improvements of economic value. These traits, combined with the brothers’ managerial acumen, allowed the Lumière business to thrive in its early years, setting the stage for more far-reaching advances in the 1890’s.

Lives’ Work

From the first public appearance of photography in 1839, its monochromatic character was widely considered a shortcoming of the medium, and many researchers attempted to devise a method of generating the colors of nature on photographic plates and prints. Some approaches to the problem that were theoretically sound were impractical for widespread use, such as the method of the English scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who showed in 1861 that a photographic representation of the colors of the spectrum could be achieved by recording a scene by photographing it on three separate plates through red, green, and blue filters. The physical result of Maxwell’s demonstration was a projected image, which was inadequate mostly because of the unequal sensitivity of the emulsions of the day to the various colors of light. The first successful experiments in the production of color prints, which could be viewed in a conventional manner, were carried out in 1868 and 1869 by a French investigator, Louis Ducos du Hauron. This investigator made negatives through blue, green, and orange filters and then superimposed red, yellow, and blue monochrome positives made from these to produce a color print. The foundations of color photography, which involved many other talented inventors, were well established when the Lumière brothers began to consider problems of color photography in the early 1890’s. Their diverse experiments, later culminating in the Autochrome process, are chiefly notable not for their originality but for their technical refinement, which was achieved through methodical experimentation supported by the expert staff of technical personnel employed in the Lumière laboratories.

An early indicator of the brothers’ involvement in exacting methodologies was their improvement of a technique introduced by the physicist Gabriel Lippmann, in which the interference property of light enabled colors to be photographed directly on a silver halide emulsion that could be processed in a customary manner. In the summer of 1893, Auguste and Louis were the first to produce a portrait in natural colors, which was shown at the International Photographic Exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland. The Lumières’ contribution to Lippmann’s process, characteristically, was to apply their advanced emulsion technology to the problem, supplanting Lippmann’s albumen and potassium bromide emulsion with a particularly fine-grained gelatin-bromide emulsion. Of special importance in this and subsequent color experiments was the Lumières’ expertise in extending the spectral sensitivity of their plates from the inherent range of blue to green light into the yellow and red region, a virtual necessity to the future practicability of color photography.

In the middle of these successful experiments, which were conducted in an atmosphere of financial prosperity for the Lumière family, Louis and Auguste became interested in the budding technology of moving pictures. As with research in color photography, which despite mixed successes occupied many talented individuals over a period of decades, the development of the motion picture was a goal pursued by seemingly countless inventors. No single contribution to early film technology represents a crucial advance without which the advent of the cinema would have been greatly delayed, and the technical innovations supplied by the Lumières should be ascribed more to effective technical problem solving than to theoretical or mechanical genius.

The preeminent figure in early attempts to record motion with a photographic apparatus was Eadweard Muybridge, an Englishman who had become an accomplished photographer while working as a bookseller in San Francisco. Muybridge’s well-documented work was initially aimed at analyzing the motion of a horse and later grew to encompass the photography of humans and animals in motion. Around 1880, he developed an apparatus for projecting sequences of his instantaneous serial photographs of horses, but the duration of the sequence thus synthesized was limited by the placement of the photographs on the circumference of a glass disc. In the early 1880’s, the charismatic Muybridge met and influenced the American inventor Thomas Edison and the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, both of whom soon contributed innovations to the photography of movement. By 1889, Edison and his associates had produced his “kinetograph,” a device for taking motion photographs on a continuous strip of photographic paper 35 millimeters wide; this device was joined in 1893 by a “kinetoscope” for viewing the kinetograph pictures. The kinetoscope “peep box,” which accommodated only one viewer at a time, was popular but was clearly vulnerable to competition from a successful projection system.

In the summer of 1894, Louis and Auguste began their work on the problem of the projection of moving images. Louis later stated that the main problem to be solved was that of driving the strip of film bearing the series of images. Edison’s kinetoscope operated by passing a continuously moving strip of paper in front of a viewing lens, employing a slotted disk to hide the view of the paper except during the instant the images passed under the lens, an arrangement that compromised clarity for simplicity. One night when Louis was unable to sleep, the solution to this problem came to him: It was to adapt the “presser foot” mechanism of the sewing machine to the camera, permitting the photographic material to be advanced in quick steps in front of the lens and to be momentarily stationary during exposure. Louis gave sketches of his idea to the chief mechanic at the Lumière works, who built the prototype camera that was to become known as the Cinématograph. At first, Louis used strips of photographic paper in the camera to verify the quality of his apparatus, and then as sheets of celluloid film became available from the United States they were cut, perforated for the presser-foot mechanism, and sensitized in the Lumière factory for use in the camera.

Louis later stated that after he arrived at the presser-foot concept, Auguste ceased being interested in the technical side of the invention. This statement, however, does not imply any sense of antagonism between the brothers. Throughout their careers, Louis and Auguste signed jointly the work on which they reported as well as the patents they filed. On the basis of this record of collaboration, as well as on photographs and films of the Lumière family, it appears that the brothers greatly esteemed each other. An interview with Louis, filmed for French television only months before his death, also reveals his affection for his colleagues and employees of former years.

The development of the Cinematograph was partly a leisure-time activity for the Lumière brothers, but they were not indifferent to the commercial potential of their invention and cleverly added two important features to the device: The camera was used not only to make the negative of the original scene but also to print the required positive image from it, which was then projected by the camera apparatus itself. This versatility, combined with the excellence of the projections, gave the Cinematograph a competitive advantage over other systems appearing in the same period. Louis’ first film, La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), was made at the end of the summer of 1894 and was first shown to the public in Paris before the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale on March 22, 1895. The first commercial showing of the invention took place on December 28 in the Salon Indien, a basement room of the Grand Café located on the Boulevard des Capuchines in Paris. The press was initially indifferent, and the proprietor of the café, skeptical of the moneymaking potential of the show, declined the Lumières’ offer of 20 percent of receipts from admissions in favor of a daily rental of thirty francs. After three weeks, the show of nine or ten brief films was earning an average of twenty-five hundred francs per day.

The success of the Cinematograph propelled the Lumières into a new business of producing, distributing, and presenting films in France and elsewhere. Louis himself was for a time an avid film photographer and showed a flair for exploiting the new and often startling properties of the medium it was reported that when his film Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (arrival of a train at La Ciotat station) was first shown in 1895 in Paris, shocked spectators ran for cover at the rapid approach of the train, which seemed to be happening in reality and not in shadows on a screen. Auguste also used the camera but was much less involved in this branch of their activity. As more Cinematograph machines were constructed, the conduct of the fledgling industry passed almost wholly into the hands of collaborators and employees.

As the Cinematograph and its many competitors became commonplace, Louis again turned to researches in color photography, typically following up solid leads by earlier investigators with the intention of producing a commercially viable medium. On May 30, 1904, he presented the Autochrome process to a session of the Académie des Sciences in Paris (though the material did not become commercially available until 1907). The Autochrome process depends on the property of minute spots of color to fuse visually, at an appropriate distance from the viewer’s eye, into a gradation of intermediate colors. A glass plate was evenly coated with a thin layer of starch grains colored red, green, and blue, which was lightly rolled and then dusted with an opaque material to fill in the spaces between the grains. A gelatin-bromide emulsion, carefully sensitized to record all the colors of the visible spectrum, was then applied over the layer of starch grains. After exposure in a conventional camera, the emulsion was developed to a positive image through which the mosaic of starch grains could again be seen. The plate had to be viewed by transmitted light, as a transparency. Where the image of a red object had fallen on the emulsion, the image was relatively clear in those areas corresponding to the red starch grains and allowed light passing through the grains to represent the color of the object. Other colors were similarly shown violet, for example, being the blending of blue and red spots moderately exposed. Yellow, in keeping with the optical theory of the mixture of primaries of colored light, was composed of a mixture of red and green mosaic components. Thus, the entire visible spectrum was recorded with some degree of success.

Most important, however, the Autochrome plate could be handled by the photographer much like any dry-plate material and made color photography widely available. The Autochrome medium was relatively expensive, required longer exposures than did most black-and-white materials, and did not produce images of great brilliance, but it was widely accepted by professional and amateur photographers alike. For many years it was unexcelled in its class of materials, and it remained in production for more than three decades.

Significance

With many inventions to their credit, the Lumière brothers did not relax their activity in scientific and technological research. Auguste concentrated increasingly on medical topics in tuberculosis, cancer, and pharmacology. In 1914, he was named head of the radiology department of a major hospital and in 1928 published his book La Vie, la maladie, et la mort: Phénomènes colloïdaux (life, illness and death: colloidal phenomena). Louis’ interest in cinema and optical instrumentation continued, resulting in methods of measuring objects in relief by photographic means (1920) and relief cinematography (1935). Both brothers received public honors, Auguste being elected to the Legion of Honor like his father before him, and Louis becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences. Louis, the younger brother, died on June 6, 1948, at age eighty-three, and Auguste died six years later on April 10, 1954, at the age of ninety-one.

Auguste and Louis seem to embody the optimism of nineteenth century science, which offered apparently limitless material improvements to society. Louis was particularly comfortable in the world of daily events, and some commentators have remarked on the rationalist, extroverted quality of his early Cinematograph films as evidence of a representative cultural sensibility embracing the materialist ethos of modern industrial society. Some critics have even described him as a kind of symbolic founder of the documentary branch of the art of film and have contrasted him with his near contemporary, the theatrical filmmaker George Méliès. While one might doubt that Louis approached filmmaking with a conscious aesthetic, his brief turn as a producer of films was more than an accident of fate, and in this connection it should be noted that his father was first a painter and only later an industrialist. That both Louis and Auguste were avid photographers seems natural in view of their business interests, but the progress of their varied careers suggests that, beyond being generalists in an increasingly specialized world, they lived with the confidence that their efforts, wherever directed, would be both useful to society and profitable to them.

Bibliography

Eder, Josef Maria. History of Photography. Translated by Edward Epstean. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1978. Although indispensable to the study of the history of photography, this largely technical treatise dating from the turn of the century is occasionally poorly organized. Eder, a contemporary of the Lumières, was a participant in many of the advances of the day, which lends flavor and authenticity to the book.

Jones, Bernard E., ed. The Encyclopaedia of Early Photography. Portland, Oreg.: ISBS, 1981. This reprint of a 1911 work, originally titled Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Photography, reveals a glimpse of the physical and chemical complexity of the preparation of an Autochrome plate.

Lumière, Louis. “The Lumière Cinematograph.” In A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, compiled by Raymond Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. This article is Louis Lumière’s account not only of the Cinematograph apparatus but also of a monumental projection arrangement for the “Gallery of Machines” at the Paris Exposition of 1898.

Macgowan, Kenneth. Behind the Screen: The History and Techniques of the Motion Picture. New York: Delacorte Press, 1965. The author does a fine job of untangling the complex web of inventions leading to, and beyond, the introduction of the Lumières’ Cinematograph.

Rosenblum, Naomi A. World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984. This beautifully illustrated volume has surprising depth for a survey of the history of photography. Particularly valuable are the reproductions of Autochrome photographs and concise accounts of early color photography methods, though the latter are not invariably clear.

Rossell, Deac. Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. The work of the Lumière brothers is described in this chronicle of the international development of the first motion pictures.

Sadoul, Georges. “Louis Lumière: The Last Interview.” In Rediscovering French Film, edited by Mary Lea Bandy. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982. In the absence of a translation from the French of Sadoul’s book on Louis Lumière, this short but poignant article is the best introduction to Louis in the context of the art of the film.

Tosi, Virgilio. Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography. Translated by Sergio Angelini. London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 2005. The English translation of a book first published in Italian in 1984 that chronicled the work of the earliest cinematographers, including the Lumière brothers.

Walter, Claude. “The Story of Lumière.” In Ciba Journal, Spring, 1964: 28-35. Useful for its unique photographs and human anecdotes, this article consists largely of an account of the integration of the Lumière business into the Ciba Company.