Antoine Lumière

In 1860 Antoine Lumière left his hometown in the Haute-Saône to set up a photography business in Besançon. His first son, Auguste was born in 1862, and the second, Louis, arrived two years later. In 1870 Antoine moved to Lyons with his family and opened a new workshop. Over the next 10 years he gradually built up an industrial manufacturing plant for photographic plates. The factory was taken over by Auguste and Louis in 1893. By 1894, when Edison's kinetoscope arrive on the scene in France, the Lumière Company, with a capital of 3 million francs, already had a work force of 300 people and was producing 15 million photographic plates a year.