The birth of cinema began in the late 19th Century, although the first known experiment with a camera of some description was Athanasius Kircher's 'magic lantern' in the 17th Century. Further experiments with film and cameras took place during the early to mid 19th Century starting in 1824 and the first known capture of movement on screen was Eadweard Muybridge's Race Horse in 1878. This took place at a race track in Sacremento, California and comprised a multiple series of cameras to record the horse's gallops

 

In the late 1880's, the great American inventor Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson began constructing devices for recording movement on film and also for viewing the film. In 1890, Dickson devised the Kinetograph, a crude motorized camera that could photograph motion pictures. The Kinetograph was formally introduced in October 1892 and set the standard for theatrical motion picture cameras still used to this day. Dickson also designed the earliest known movie-picture projector, the Kinetoscope in 1891 and his first experimental film was Monkey Shines No.1, the first motion picture produced on photographic film in America. On May 20 that same year Dickson Greeting was the subject of the first public demonstration of motion pictures in America.

 

In December 1892, construction began on the world’s first film production studio, the Black Maria on the grounds of Edison laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey and was completed on February 1 1893. In May that year, Edison held the world’s first public exhibition of films in Brooklyn where the subject was Blacksmith Scene.

 

In June 1894, Charles F. Jenkins became the first person to project a filmed motion picture onto a screen for an audience using his projector, the Phantoscope. His first film was Annabelle Butterfly Dance, the first motion picture with colour. The first motion picture screened for a paying audience was Young Griffo v. Battling Charles Bennett in New York on May 20 1895 and made by the Latham family.

  

By this time, the Lumiere brothers of France were conducting their own experiments with movie camera and projector, inspired by Thomas Edison. The first public demonstration of their portable, lightweight, hand-held device, the Cinematographe was made on March 22 1895 and the subject was called Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. The Lumiere brothers’ first commercial and public exhibition took place in the first movie theatre, the Salon Indien, on December 28 1895 in Paris. The exhibition was 20 minutes long and included ten shorts and the Lumiere brothers became well known for their short of a train arriving at La Ciotat that same year. By 1898, the Lumiere brothers’ company had produced a short film catalog with over 1000 titles.

 

In 1897, The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight became the longest known film to date at a reported 100 minutes in length when it was screened in New York on May 22. Thomas Edison’s Studios also created the first advertising film Admiral Cigarette in the summer of 1897.

 

The first permanent movie theatre was the Edisonia Vitascope Hall in Buffalo, New York. It opened on October 19 1896 and was created by Mitchell H. Mark. The first purposely built movie theatre was Sigmund Lubin’s Cineograph Theatre in West Philadelphia in 1899.

 

French born Alice Guy (Blache) became the first female director when her first film The Cabbage Fairy was made in April 1896, considered the first narrative fiction film.

 

George Melies set up the first European film studio in 1897. The previous year, Melies had created his first films The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin and The Haunted Castle. Melies became the first film-maker to use artificially arranged scenes to tell a narrative story, his most influential was Cinderella in 1899 and he created 500 films within the next 15 years. Melies’ most popular work was A Trip to the Moon in 1902, the first sci-fi film.

 

In 1896, J Stuart Blackton and Albert E Smith formed the American Vitagraph Company. The company’s first fictional film was The Burglar on the Roof in 1897 and it was soon turning out 200 films a year, making it the largest film company at the time.

 

William Dickson co-founded the American Mutoscope Company in 1895 and this would soon become the most popular film company in America. It’s most popular film was The Haverstraw Tunnel in 1897, the first phantom ride film.

 

Edwin S Porter directed the first known docudrama The Life of an American Fireman in 1903. That same year, he also produced The Great Train Robbery, the first real motion-picture smash hit.

The first known full length feature film was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang, released in Australia in 1906. The following year, Michel Carre created the first European feature length film L’enfant Prodigue in France and the first feature length film created in America was Vitagraph’s Les Miserables in 1909, albeit in separate installments. The first feature length film released in its entirety in America was Dante’s Inferno in 1911 and the first to be shown in its entirety in America was Oliver Twist in 1912.

 

1908 saw the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), comprising nine companies known as the Edison’s Trust or Patent’s Trust. That year, American DW Griffith created his first film The Adventures of Dollie. Griffith would go on to make over 450 films by 1913.

 

In 1903, Hollywood was officially incorporated as a municipality. Only 5,000 lived there in 1910, within a decade, that number had risen to 35,000 due to the influence of independent film makers. By 1915, film production in the Los Angeles/Hollywood area accounted for 60% of all American film-making.

 

Carl Laemmle created the star system when he catapulted the actress Florence Lawrence to fame in 1910 with a large personal publicity campaign, making her first American film star, although the Kalem company started this trend. Up until then, the actors’ names had been kept anonymous as movie acting was considered inferior to stage acting at the time.               

 

(Source - http://www.earlycinema.com/timeline/)