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American George Eastman begins to commercially manufacture dry plates for photography.
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American inventor George Eastman founds the Eastman Dry Plate Company.
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George Eastman begins experimenting with new types of photographic film, with his employee, William Walker
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George Eastman and Hannibal Goodwin each invent a sensitized celluloid base roll photographic film to replace the glass plates then in use.
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Thomas Edison meets with Eadweard Muybridge to discuss adding sound to moving pictures. Edison begins his own experiments.
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1888 - Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince creates the first motion picture films created on paper rolls of film.
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Edison holds the first public exhibition of films shot using his Kinetograph (the camera) at the Brooklyn Institute. Unfortunately, only one person at a time could use his Kinetoscope viewing machine.
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Edison films his assistant, Fred Ott sneezing with the Kinetoscope at the "Black Maria."
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Kinetoscope viewing parlors begin to open in major cities. Each parlor contains several machines.
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Auguste and Louis Lumière design and build a lightweight, hand-held motion picture camera called the Cinématographe. The brothers discover that their machine can also be used to project images onto a large screen. They create several short films at this time that are considered to be pivotal in the history of motion pictures.
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A total of 125 people die during a film screening at the Charity Bazaar in Paris after a curtain catches on fire from the ether used to fuel the projector lamp.
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The decade of the "Picture Palaces": large urban theaters that could seat 1-2,000 guests at a time
