Origins.

The galloping horse sequence

Eadweard Muybridge

12 synchronized photographic cameras

A series of exposures was used to examine whether a galloping horse lifted all four hooves off the ground.

The photographic gun

Étienne-Jules Marey

Chronophotographic gun

A device shaped like a gun captured successive phases of movement and helped pioneer motion analysis.

Photographing motion on one plate

Étienne-Jules Marey

Chronophotographic plate camera

A rotating shutter recorded multiple stages of an action onto the same photographic plate.

First Edison motion-picture tests

Edison laboratory / W. K. L. Dickson

Kinetograph

Dickson and his colleagues developed motion-picture camera technology in Edison’s laboratory.

The Black Maria studio

Edison laboratory

Kinetograph

The rotating early motion-picture studio used natural daylight and Kinetograph cameras.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory

Lumière brothers

Cinématographe Lumière

A famous early motion picture made with a compact camera that could also print and project film.

A shared cinema audience is born

Lumière brothers

Cinématographe Lumière

Unlike a peep-show viewer, the Cinématographe brought moving images before an audience.

Early Gaumont fiction films

Alice Guy-Blaché

Likely Demenÿ–Gaumont 60mm chronophotograph

Her memoirs do not identify the exact camera; historical research suggests the 60mm Gaumont apparatus.

Probable model — treat precise model as provisional.

The magician builds a movie camera

Georges Méliès

Robert W. Paul projector converted to 35mm camera

The Cinémathèque française identifies a surviving apparatus of the kind converted for Méliès’s early films.