1889 – 1900
the fi rst-ever fi lm on to a screen – Workers Leav-
ing the Lumière Factory, 22 March, to members
of the Société d’Encouragement a L’Industrie
Nationale, at 44 rue de Rennes, Paris. On 28
December the Lumières entertained a paying
audience at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des
Capuchines: cinema was born.• (^) William Randolph Hearst buys up the New York
Journal having built up the San Francisco Exam-
iner, given to him by his father, with sensational
stories of gangsters and Hollywood sex scandals.
1896 First permanent cinema, the 400-seater
Vitascope Hall, opened in New Orleans, 26 June,
by William T. Rock. Admission was 10 cents,
plus another 10 to view the Edison Vitascope
projector. The 5,000-seater Gaumont-Palace,
formerly the Hippodrome Th eatre, opened in
Paris in 1910. Th e largest cinema ever built was
the Roxy Th eater in New York, with 6,200 seats.
In Berlin 300 cinemas were opened during 1908.
In the UK by 1912 there were 4,000 cinemas.
• (^) J.H. Rigg of Leeds manufactures the first
motorized cinema projector. An electrically
powered model was demonstrated at the Royal
Aquarium, London, 6 April.
• (^) UK Daily Mail founded by Alfred Harmsworth,
later Lord Northcliff e.
1897 First wide-screen fi lm on 70mm stock intro-
duced by Enoch J. Rector of the Veriscope Co.,
New York.
1898 The Telegraphone, the first magnetic
recorder, is patented by Danish engineer
Valdemar Poulsen employed by the Copenhagen
Telephone Company. Demonstrated in public
for the fi rst time at the Paris Exposition of 1900,
the Telegraphone used magnetized piano wire
running between spools at 7 feet per second.
• (^) Commercial production began in America in
- An improved model was used by Lee de
Forest for experiments in talking fi lm. Th e use of
metal tape instead of wire came in 1929 with the
Blattnerphone, again used in fi lm production, at
Elstree Studios.
• (^) The use of plastic tape originated in Berlin
with the Magnetophon produced by the firm
AEG. Th is proved the archetype for all recorder
developments from that time.
1900 Film: sound on disc demonstrated to a
paying audience at the Paris Exposition. The
first sound-on-film process was patented by
French-born Eugene Lauste of Brixton in 1906.
His fi rst successful experiment in recording and
reproducing speech on fi lm came in 1910. He
was ready to exploit his system commercially,
only to be interrupted by the outbreak of war in
- He crossed the Atlantic with his idea but
Krayn in Germany in 1910. Amateurs had a
longer wait – until Kodrachrome produced
three-colour roll fi lm in 1936.• (^) UK: Financial Times founded.
1889 UK’s fi rst Offi cial Secrets Act.
• (^) Kansas City undertaker Almon B. Stowger
patents the fi rst automatic telephone exchange.
Th e fi rst exchange was opened at La Porte, Indi-
ana, in November 1892. Dial telephones were
introduced in 1896.
1890 Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliff e,
publishes the fi rst comic, the eight-page Comic
Cuts, edited by Houghton Townley. Nearly
120,000 copies of the fi rst edition were sold and
this rose to 300,000 within a month. In October
1890 a rival to Comic Cuts, Funny Cuts appeared
with the fi rst-ever front-page strip cartoon.
• (^) Telephoto lens invented by New Zealand
geologist Alexander McKay.
• (^) London evening Star prints the fi rst front-page
newspaper headline, 16 July. Th is read: ‘Many
Happy Returns of the Day – Wedding of Profes-
sor Stuart MP’.
1891 Peep-show projector, the Kinetoscope,
developed by William Dickson at the instigation
of his employer, Th omas Alva Edison, has fi rst
public showing in Edison’s workshops in West
Orange, New Jersey, to 147 representatives of the
National Federation of Women’s Clubs.
• (^) The first commercial showing took place at
Holland Bros’ Kinetoscope Parlor, Broadway,
in April 1894. Th e fi lms were produced by the
Edison Co., which was thus the fi rst-ever fi lm
production company. In the same year Greek
showman George Trajedis installed six kineto-
scopes in a converted Old Bond Street store in
London, October, charging 2 pence per fi lm.
1893 UK: fi rst issue of the Sketch.
1894 Th e fi rst commercially viable radio commu-
nication was the work of the Italian Guglielmo
Marconi of Bologna. Experiments conducted in
1894 and 1895 led Marconi to off er his invention
to the Italian Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.
Failing to elicit interest, the inventor moved to
England where customs offi cials broke open his
equipment, suspecting him of being an anar-
chist. Undaunted, Marconi settled in London
and in 1896 applied for a patent for a method by
which ‘electrical actions or manifestations are
transmitted through air, earth or water by means
of electrical oscillations of high frequency’.
• (^) The first public demonstration of Marconi’s
wireless took place on 12 December 1896. In the
following year the Marconi Wireless Telegraph
& Signal Company was formed.
1895 Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière project