1833 – Joseph Plateau (Belgium) introduces a scientific demonstration device that creates an optical illusion of movement by mounting drawings on the face of a slotted, spinning disk, later published as the Fantascope (and now better known as the Phenakistoscope). Simon von Stampfer (Vienna) publishes the very similar stroboscopic discs a few months later.
1866 – The Zoetrope is introduced. The device was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When the drum was spun and the pictures viewed through slots on the side of the drum, the pictures appeared to move.
1870s – French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud improved on the Zoetrope idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. He called his invention the Praxinoscope. Reynaud developed other versions of the Praxinoscope too, including a Praxinoscope Theatre, where the device was enclosed in a viewing box, and the Projecting Praxinoscope. Eventually he created the "Théâtre Optique", a large machine based on the Praxinoscope, but able to project longer animated strips.
1878 – Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hires British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle arguments about the strides of horses that were difficult to discern with the naked eye. Muybridge successfully photographed successive positions of horses in fast motion, using a battery of 12 cameras controlled by trip wires and an electrical shutter system. Stanford's experiments were partly inspired by French scientist's Étienne-Jules Marey studies with equipment that graphically recorded data to analyze animal and human movement.
1880 – Eadweard Muybridge holds a public demonstration of his Zoopraxiscope, a magic lantern provided with a rotating disc with artist's renderings of Muybridge's chronophotographic sequences. It was used as a demonstration device by Muybridge in his illustrated lecture (the original preserved in the Museum of Kingston upon Thames in England).
1882 – French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey develops his own version of Janssen's camera: a chronophotographic gun that could photograph twelve successive images per second.
1887 – German chronophotographer Ottomar Anschutz very successfully presents his photographs in motion with his Electrotachyscope that uses transparent pictures in a wheel.
1891 – Designed around the work of Anschutz, 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 – Charles-Émile Reynaud begins public screenings in Paris at the Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his Praxinoscope projector to construct moving image stories that continued for about 15 minutes each.
March 14, 1893 – Thomas Edison is granted Patent #493,426 for "An Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects" (the Kinetoscope).
April 14, 1894 – The first commercial presentation of the Kinetoscope takes place at 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.
November 1895 – In Germany, Emil and Max Skladanowsky start publicly screening their films with their Bioskop.
1895 – In France, Gaumont, the world's oldest extant film studio, is founded as a producer of photographic equipment (the company would start production of films in 1897).
December 1895 – In France, Auguste and Louis Lumière hold their first commercial screenings of films shot with their Cinématographe, a lightweight, hand-held motion picture camera.
January 1896 – In the United States, a projector called the Vitascope is designed by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Armat began working with Thomas Edison to manufacture the Vitascope, which projected motion pictures.
September 28, 1896 – Pathé-Frères is founded in Paris.
1896 – French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès begins experimenting with the new motion picture technology, developing many early special effects techniques.
May 4, 1897 – 125 people die during a film screening at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris after a curtain catches on fire from the ether used to fuel the projector lamp.
September 1899 – The British Mutoscope and Biograph Company makes King John (a very shortsilent film) in London, the first known film based on a Shakespeare play.
September 1899 – Georges Méliès releases The Dreyfus Affair film series in France, with the last episode featuring events of the current month.
October 1899 – Georges Méliès releases Cendrillon in France, the first screen adaptation of the traditional fairy tale "Cinderella".
