Have a question? Need assistance? Use our online form to ask a librarian for help.
Chat with a librarian, Monday through Friday, 12-2 pm Eastern Time (except Federal Holidays).
Chronicling America is a searchable digital collection of historic newspaper pages through 1963 sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
Follow @ChronAmLOC External and subscribe to email alerts and RSS feeds.
Also, see the Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries, a searchable index to newspapers published in the United States since 1690, which helps researchers identify what titles exist for a specific place and time, and how to access them.
Before the advent of television came the cinema. At its beginnings, the cinema began through the development of cameras and successive "moving" pictures. Later, cameras were invented to project onto large screens. From then on, exhibitions and moving pictures shows became popular and wide-spread as a leisure past-time. Read more about it!
The information in this guide focuses on primary source materials found in the digitized historic newspapers from the digital collection Chronicling America.
The timeline below highlights important dates related to this topic and a section of this guide provides some suggested search strategies for further research in the collection.
| 1882 | E.J. Marey develops the Chronophotographic camera. It was able to shoot 12 successive pictures which was illustrated by birds in flight. |
|---|---|
| 1889 | George Eastman commercially sells his camera "Kodak" which used celluloid film. This film he invented was a superior format compared to glass negatives. |
| May 20, 1891 | Edison holds the first public exhibit of his Kinetoscope, a viewer. During the same year, he invents the Kinetograph camera. |
| December 28, 1895 | The Lumièr brothers in France hold the first public exhibition with their Cinématographe. It was the first camera to project to a large screen. |
| April 1896 | Edison releases his own projection camera, Vitascope which used an improved version of Thomas Armat's Phantascope. |
| 1902 | Armat successfully sues Edison. Edison was disallowed from having a monopoly on the motion picture industry. |
| 1905 | First "nickelodeon" opens. By 1908, there are over 5,000 in the United States. |
| 1910 | The funeral of King Edward VII was shot in color. |
