The world's first films

The world's first films

Some incredible footage now of the earliest moving pictures, taken by the eccentric British inventor Eadweard Muybridge (whose own life sounds like it would make a great film in itself!).

Although technically inferior to the later Lumiere Brothers' cinematograph, which was the forerunner to today's modern film cameras, Muybridge's wonderfully-named "Zoopraxiscope" was able to capture moving images almost 20 years before the Lumieres' attempts.

While Muybridge's method proved to be a dead-end, the theory still lives on today in the form of flicker books, and the value of this footage as examples of the very earliest cinema cannot be overstated.