Who Were the First People in America To See Movies?

Firsts

Thomas Edison invented the first motion picture machine in 1889, but Edison's machine was a lot different from the projector we use today.

In Edison's machine, a strip of film was moved across a light source, and the viewer had to stare into a small window in the machine to see the moving images.

Then in 1895, two Frenchmen, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, invented a machine that could project the moving images on a screen. An American, Thomas Armat, improved this machine, and on April 23, 1896, the first American movies were shown in a music hall in New York City.

Viewers were so surprised by the real- looking images that when ocean waves were shown crashing against a shore, people in the theater ducked!