1832 - Joseph Plateau builds the Phenakisticope, a toy that creates an optical illusion of movement by mounting drawings on the face of a slotted, spinning disk.
1834 - The Zoetrope is invented. The device was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When the drum was spun, the pictures appeared to move.
1870s - French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on the Zoetrope idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. Some time later, Reynaud developed a projecting version of the Zoetrope, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images.
1878 - Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four of its feet off the ground. Muybridge successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of 12 cameras controlled by trip wires. Muybridge's photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground. Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope. Muybridge’s experiments inspired French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to invent equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. Marey called his invention the chronophotographic camera, which was able to take multiple images superimposed on top of one another.
1882 - French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey invents the chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that photographs twelve successive images each second.
1891 - Designed around the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman, Thomas Edison's employee, William K. L. Dickson finishes work on a motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph, and a viewing machine, called the Kinetoscope.
1892 In France, Émile Reynaud began to have public screenings in Paris at the Theatre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his Zeotrope projector to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.
1892 - The Eastman Company becomes the Eastman Kodak Company.
1893Thomas Edison builds a motion-picture studio near his laboratory, dubbed the "Black Maria" by his staff.
May 9, 1893 - In America, Thomas Edison holds the first public exhibition of films shot using his Kinetograph at the Brooklyn Institute. Unfortunately, only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope.
April 14, 1894 - The first commercial presentation of the Kinetoscope took place in the Holland Brothers' Kinetoscope Parlor at 1155 Broadway, New York City.
1894 - Kinetoscope viewing parlors begin to open in major cities. Each parlor contains several machines.
1895 - In France, brothers named Auguste and Louis Lumière, designed and built a lightweight, hand-held motion picture camera called the Cinématographe. The Lumière brothers discovered that their machine could also be used to project images onto a large screen. The Lumière brothers created several short films at this time that are considered to be pivotal in the history of motion pictures.
November, 1895 - In Germany, Emil and Max Skladanowsky develop their own film projector.
December, 1895 - In France, Auguste and Louis Lumière hold their first public screening of films shot with their Cinématographe.
January, 1896 - In Britain, Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul developed their own film projector, the Theatrograph (later known as the Animatograph).
1896 - French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès begins experimenting with the new motion picture technology, developing a lot of early special effects techniques, including stop-motion photography.
1897 - 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.