Invention of Motion Pictures

Motion pictures allow people to tell stories and express themselves through images and videos. The mid 19th century is really when photography was introduced to the world, especially during the Civil War to document the battlefields during that time. An English photographer by the name of Eadweard Muybridge took a series of pictures showing a horse in full gallop on October 19, 1878. He was hired by Leland Standford, who was a well-known horse breeder because he wanted to prove that when a horse is in full gallop that the horse will lift all four hooves off the ground at once. In order for the public to view these pictures in a "video" like manner, they were given instructions to view them through a zoetrope. A zoetrope is an old fashion way of viewing moving images by displaying a sequence of pictures showing progressive motion. There is a light in the center of the device and you spin it which depicts the "moving" image on a wall or any flat surface. After watching the series of images, Standford was evidently right about a horse lifting all four hooves off the ground at the same time. A French physiologist named Etienne-Jules Marey had a similar idea when depicting animals in motion. He developed a camera that could take 12 pictures per second of any moving object. This technique was later named chronophotography. Marey and Muybridge's work is considered to be the founding concepts of motion picture cameras and projectors.
 Here is what a zoetrope looks like.

In 1890 Thomas Edison and William Dickson invented the Kinetograph which was a primitive motion picture camera. Two years later, they developed the first machine that could project moving images onto a screen, a Kinetoscope. Edison developed the first public film screenings, almost like the modern-day movie theaters we have today, called "Kinetograph Parlors. Following Edison's and Dickson's Kinetograph breakthrough, Auguste and Louis Lumière created a projector that could show 16 frames per second, called the Cinématographe. 

   Edison and Dickson in 1891.

The first feature-length film debuted in 1906. The film was The Story of the Kelly Gang and ran for over an hour long with a reel length of 4,000 feet. A reel of film that runs at 25 FPS (frames per second) is about 1,000 feet long and produces only 11 minutes of footage. When Titanic came out in 1997, the film reel was 17.7 reels long. Meaning, that the Titanic, running 3 hours and 15 minutes, had over 17,700 feet of film for a single movie. Nowadays, movie theaters don't use reels of film, they use something called Digital Light Processing and can now send films through the internet, satellite or hard drive. 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-early-history-motion-pictures/
https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/fun-facts-film-history