The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, were the first to achieve a satisfactory system for taking and projecting moving pictures made on a celluloid strip. Their invention, the Cinématographe, became the world's first commercially successful motion picture camera. The brothers began work designing a camera in 1894, after seeing a piece of Edison Kinetoscope film which had just arrived in Paris. Their successful device with a mechanism based on a sewing machine movement was patented in France on 13 February 1895. The machine combined both a camera and a projector and the perforated film was moved intermittently by a claw mechanism.


Initially the invention was kept secret and only demonstrated at private screenings, where it met with great enthusiasm. Although originally produced in late 1895 in a batch of just ten, these first models were prototypes for trial purposes and not available for sale. It was not until 1896 that the Cinématographe went on sale to the public. The following serial numbers correspond approximately to the years of production; all models were based on the original 1895 patent until a new model was introduced towards the end of 1898: 1895 - nos. 1-10; 1896 - nos. 10-250; 1896-1898 - nos. 250-450.

A condition report is available on request.