Emile Reynaud

Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844 to 1918) was a French inventor whose work links the optical toys of the nineteenth century to the first projected animated films. In 1877 he patented the praxinoscope, a viewing device that improved on the zoetrope, and its commercial success, helped by sales through Paris shops such as Le Bon Marché, let him give up teaching. In 1888 he patented the Théâtre Optique, a projection system whose use of perforations in the picture strip is noted as the first known instance of film perforations. From 28 October 1892 his hand-painted Pantomimes Lumineuses played to regular audiences at the Musée Grévin in Paris, three years before the Lumière brothers gave their first paid public screening of the cinematograph on 26 December 1895, a date often treated as the birth of cinema. Overtaken by the cinematograph, Reynaud ended his shows in 1900 and later destroyed his equipment and most of his films, though his son preserved two of them.