February 12 1892 – 14 Shevat 5652
Paris
Léon Bouly invented the cinematograph – a hand-cranked camera that could both capture and project a sequence of moving pictures. The word, meaning “writing in motion,” was also Bouly’’s invention, but he sold his rights to both the camera and its name to brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Three years later, they screened a fifty-second clip,Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, and a new genre was born. The Lumières’ ingenious machine soon spread as far as India and China, and in 1897 Alexander Promio used it to make movies of Jaffa and Jerusalem.