The history
360 years from a candle behind painted glass to laser light, micromirror chips and glowing LED walls.
People first threw pictures onto walls with a lamp and a lens. In 1895 inventors learned to pull a strip of film past that lamp one frozen frame at a time, fast enough to fool the eye into seeing motion, and cinema was born. For a hundred years projectors grew brighter, louder and bigger, with sound printed on the film and giant screens like IMAX. Then a chip covered in tiny moving mirrors replaced the film itself, and movies began arriving by hard drive and satellite, from Hollywood to small towns across India.
c. 1659
Magic lantern
Christiaan Huygens, Netherlands
28 December 1895
Paid public film show
Lumière brothers, Paris
7 July 1896
Films shown in India
Marius Sestier, Watson's Hotel, Bombay
1896
Maltese cross in a projector
Oskar Messter, Max Gliewe and Robert W. Paul
1902
Three-bladed shutter
Theodor Pätzold, made by Messter, Germany
30 October 1950
Public xenon-lamp projection
Osram, Berlin
1970
IMAX film
Tiger Child, Expo '70, Osaka
18 June 1999
Digital cinema screenings
Star Wars: Episode I, USA
2005
Satellite digital cinema network
UFO Moviez, India
July 2017
LED cinema screen
Samsung Onyx, Seoul
1659 – 1894
The magic lantern shines a lamp through painted glass and a lens. Showmen tour Europe and beyond with still pictures, ghosts and stories on a screen.
1659
c. 1659
The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens is widely credited with the first working magic lantern. The oldest known document about it is his page of sketches of a skeleton taking off its skull, thought to date from 1659. A lamp shone through a small painted glass slide, and a lens threw a big, bright copy of it onto a wall.
Why it mattered. Lamp, slide, lens and screen: every projector since, even a digital one, still has these four parts.
1664
1664–1671
The Danish mathematician Thomas Walgensten toured Europe showing the lantern from 1664, and he is credited with calling it the laterna magica. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who had written about projecting images in 1645, described the magic lantern in the 1671 edition of his book on light. Historians still argue about how much each man added.
Why it mattered. Travelling shows made people everywhere used to sitting in the dark and watching pictures on a screen.
1895 – 1930
Film starts to move. Inventors in France, the US, Britain and Germany build hand-cranked projectors with a Maltese cross and a spinning shutter, and moving pictures reach Bombay within months.
1895
13 February 1895
The Lumière brothers patented a machine that could film, print and project moving pictures. It was a hand-cranked wooden box that pulled the film along with a claw, one frame at a time. It ran at about 16 frames each second, which became the usual speed of early silent films.
Why it mattered. Moving the film in short, exact steps, not smoothly, is the trick that makes still frames look like motion.
1895
28 December 1895
In a basement room of the Grand Café in Paris, the Lumières showed ten short films to a paying audience of about thirty people. Within weeks, crowds of up to 2,500 a day queued to get in. It is widely seen as the birth of cinema as a paid show, though others, like the Eidoloscope in New York, had shown films for money a few months earlier.
Why it mattered. A projector and a big screen let many people share one film, which is what made cinema a business.
1896
23 April 1896
Armat and Jenkins built a projector called the Phantoscope. Edison's company agreed to make it, but only if it was sold as a new Edison invention, the Vitascope. Its first theatre show was at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York.
Why it mattered. It brought projected films to American theatres, and showed how much a famous name could sell a machine.
1896
7 July 1896
Just six months after Paris, the Lumière operator Marius Sestier showed six short films at Watson's Hotel in Bombay, now Mumbai. It was the first time moving pictures were shown in India. A second show followed a week later at the Novelty Theatre.
Why it mattered. The projector carried cinema around the world in a suitcase, and India would go on to make more films than any other country.
1896
Projectors began to use the Geneva drive, or Maltese cross: a wheel with four slots that is nudged a quarter turn by a pin, then held still. The first uses in projectors date to 1896, in machines by Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe in Germany and in Robert W. Paul's Theatrograph in London. Each turn moves the film exactly one frame, then locks it steady while it is lit.
Why it mattered. Almost every film projector for the next hundred years used this clever star-shaped wheel.
1902
Early films flickered badly, because the light went dark each time the film moved. The first three-bladed shutter is credited to Theodor Pätzold and went into production with Messter in 1902. It blinks the light three times for every frame, so the eye sees a fast, steady flicker it can no longer notice.
Why it mattered. Flashing each frame two or three times is still how film projectors trick the eye, at 48 or 72 flashes a second.
1905
early 1900s
Early cinemas switched to carbon arc lamps: a blazing spark between two carbon rods. They were the only light bright enough for a large screen. The rods burned away, so projectionists had to keep adjusting the gap and change the rods often.
Why it mattered. A brighter lamp meant bigger screens and bigger audiences, and carbon arcs lit cinemas until the late 1960s.
1913
3 May 1913
Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra had a private preview at the Olympia Theatre on 21 April 1913, then opened to the public at the Coronation Cinematograph on 3 May. It ran four shows a day and was so popular its run was extended. Soon it was touring other cities on travelling projectors.
Why it mattered. It proved that Indian stories on an Indian screen could fill a hall, and Phalke is called the father of Indian cinema.
1927 – 1998
Sound is printed on the film, xenon lamps replace hissing carbon arcs, platters let one projector run a whole film, and IMAX makes the screen enormous.
1927
1923–1927
Lee de Forest's Phonofilm showed sound-on-film shorts in New York in 1923. Fox's Movietone system, by Case and Sponable, put the sound as a strip of light and dark next to the pictures, and Sunrise (1927) was the first professional feature with an optical soundtrack. A lamp and a light sensor in the projector turned that strip back into sound.
Why it mattered. Sound needed a fixed speed, so 24 frames a second became the standard that cinemas still use.
1931
14 March 1931
Alam Ara, India's first sound film, premiered in Bombay. Its sound was recorded straight onto the film with a single-system camera. Cinemas across India had to fit sound heads and speakers to their projectors to show the new talkies.
Why it mattered. Songs and dialogue became the heart of Indian cinema, and projectors everywhere had to learn to play them.
1950
30 October 1950
Osram engineers built a lamp that sparks an arc through xenon gas inside a strong glass bulb. The first public projection with it was in Berlin in 1950, and Osram began selling cinema lamps in 1952. They reached the US in 1963 and became common in the 1970s.
Why it mattered. A xenon lamp gives steady white light for thousands of hours without anyone adjusting rods, and many digital projectors still use one.
1968
1968–1969
A feature film used to come on several reels, so cinemas needed two projectors and a quick changeover. Big flat platters let the whole film lie spliced together on one turntable, feeding the projector from the middle and winding back on another. The German cinema owner Willi Burth is credited with the idea, and Kinoton sold its ST 200 platter from about 1968.
Why it mattered. No rewinding and no changeovers meant one projectionist could run many screens, which helped make multiplexes possible.
1970
15 March 1970
A team from Canada showed the first IMAX film, Tiger Child, at the Fuji Group Pavilion in Osaka. IMAX film runs sideways, and each frame is 15 perforations wide on 70 mm film, about ten times the area of a normal 35 mm frame. The first permanent IMAX cinema, the Cinesphere in Toronto, opened in 1971.
Why it mattered. It showed that a bigger frame could fill your whole view, the idea behind every giant screen since.
1971
1970–1971
IMAX film is so large that a claw would tear it. The Australian machinist Ron Jones had invented a rolling loop that moves film in a gentle wave, and William Shaw adapted it for IMAX. A blast of air holds each frame flat against the lens while it is shown.
Why it mattered. It let huge, heavy film move steadily enough to show sharp pictures on a screen many storeys high.
1975
15 August 1975
Sholay was shot on 35 mm film but blown up for a wide 70 mm release, with the first stereophonic soundtrack in an Indian film. It ran at Bombay's Minerva theatre for more than five years. The wide 70 mm prints needed special projectors and very bright lamps.
Why it mattered. It showed Indian audiences what a wide screen and big sound could do, decades before multiplexes.
1997
June 1997
PVR turned the old Anupam cinema in Saket into a four-screen multiplex, widely called India's first. It offered several films at once, comfy seats and better sound and projection. Multiplexes then spread across Indian cities in the 2000s.
Why it mattered. Many screens in one building changed how India went to the movies, and slowly squeezed the old single-screen halls.
2001
The film company Adlabs opened India's first IMAX theatre at Wadala in Mumbai. Its giant screen ran 15/70 film on an IMAX projector. Today India has many IMAX screens, most of them digital or laser.
Why it mattered. It brought the world's biggest film format to Indian audiences.
1987 – 2015
A chip covered in tiny tilting mirrors replaces the film strip. Studios agree on one digital standard, India sends films by satellite, and 35 mm prints almost vanish.
1987
Larry Hornbeck invented the digital micromirror device, a chip covered in hundreds of thousands of aluminium mirrors, each about 16 micrometres wide. Each mirror tilts about 10 to 12 degrees to send light to the screen or away from it, switching thousands of times a second. It became the heart of DLP projectors, and in 2015 Hornbeck received an Oscar for it.
Why it mattered. Each mirror is one pixel, so a film could become pure data with no film strip at all.
1999
18 June 1999
Star Wars: Episode I was shown to paying audiences on four screens without any film. Two used Texas Instruments' DLP mirror chip, and two used a rival projector from Hughes-JVC. It is widely seen as the start of digital cinema.
Why it mattered. It proved a chip could match film on a real cinema screen, and DLP went on to power most digital cinemas.
2005
March 2002 – 20 July 2005
In March 2002 seven big Hollywood studios formed Digital Cinema Initiatives to agree on how digital films should be packed, locked and shown. On 20 July 2005 they published version 1.0 of the DCI Specification. It set 2K and 4K pictures, JPEG 2000 compression and encrypted files that only open with a digital key.
Why it mattered. With one standard, any film could play on any approved projector anywhere in the world.
2005
UFO Moviez, founded in Mumbai in 2004, began converting cinemas in 2005 to digital projectors that download films by satellite. Chennai's Qube Cinema launched its own digital cinema system the same year. By March 2008 UFO had digitised more than 1,000 cinemas, many in small towns.
Why it mattered. Cheaper digital copies let small-town halls show new films on the same day as big cities, years before most of the world went digital.
2009
2005–2009
The first RealD 3D cinemas opened in North America in 2005. One digital projector flashes left-eye and right-eye pictures in turn, three times each per frame, and a filter and glasses send each picture to the right eye. By 2009 more than 10,000 screens were 3D-ready, and Avatar made 3D a worldwide hit.
Why it mattered. 3D needed fast, exact digital projectors, so it pushed many cinemas to switch from film.
2014
January 2014
Paramount became the first major Hollywood studio to stop sending 35 mm prints to US cinemas: Anchorman 2 was its last film release, and The Wolf of Wall Street went out only as digital files. About 92% of US screens were already digital. By the end of 2014, about 90% of the world's cinema screens were digital.
Why it mattered. Once studios stopped making prints, film projectors went quiet in almost every cinema on Earth.
By the numbers
In just five years most of the world's cinema screens swapped their film projectors for digital ones.
2012 – today
Lasers replace lamps, some screens light up by themselves, films try faster frame rates, and India's single-screen halls give way to multiplexes.
2012
December 2012
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was the first widely released feature shot and shown at 48 frames a second, twice the usual 24. About 450 cinemas in North America showed the high frame rate version. Some viewers loved the smooth motion, and others said it looked too real, like video.
Why it mattered. It showed digital projectors could change the frame rate, a choice film projectors had fixed for 85 years.
2014
Christie installed what it called the first permanent laser cinema projector at the Seattle Cinerama in early 2014, after demonstrations in 2012 and 2013. In December 2014 IMAX with Laser opened in Toronto. Red, green and blue lasers replace the xenon lamp, giving brighter, more colourful light that barely fades with age.
Why it mattered. Lasers made 3D and giant screens bright enough, and are slowly replacing lamps in cinemas everywhere.
2017
July 2017
Samsung's Onyx, the first LED cinema screen, opened at Lotte Cinema World Tower in Seoul. The screen is made of millions of tiny LEDs that make their own light, so there is no projector, lamp or lens at all. India's first Onyx screen opened at PVR Icon in Vasant Kunj, Delhi, in 2018.
Why it mattered. For the first time since the magic lantern, a cinema picture did not have to be thrown across a room.
2019
October 2019
Gemini Man was shot at 120 frames a second in 3D and shown at that speed on a few specially equipped screens. That is five times the usual 24. Most cinemas showed slower versions, because few projectors could keep up.
Why it mattered. It tested how far digital projection could push smooth motion, and showed that audiences do not all want it.
2025
India had roughly 12,000 to 13,000 single-screen halls in the 1980s. The FICCI-EY 2026 report counted 10,033 screens of all kinds in 2025, as multiplexes grew and many single screens shut, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2025 alone, 240 screens opened and 124 closed, mostly single screens.
Why it mattered. Digital projectors made it cheap to run many small screens in one building, reshaping where India watches films.
Did you know?
A film projector shows each frame two or three times, so a 24-frame film flickers at 48 or 72 flashes a second, too fast to notice.
Each mirror on a DLP cinema chip is about 16 micrometres wide, several times thinner than a human hair, and can flip thousands of times a second.
The cinema standard for screen brightness is about 14 foot-lamberts, or 48 candelas per square metre, far dimmer than a phone screen.
Sholay ran at Bombay's Minerva theatre for more than five years.
IMAX's first film, Tiger Child, was shown to an audience riding a slowly rotating platform, so each person started watching at a different point.
The people
1629 – 1695 · Scientist · Netherlands
Widely credited with the first magic lantern, which he later thought too frivolous.
1864 – 1948 · Inventor and filmmaker · France
With his brother Auguste, built the Cinématographe and held the famous first paid show.
1861 – 1928 · Lumière operator · France
A trained pharmacist who gave India its first film show, then helped open Australia's first cinema.
1866 – 1943 · Inventor and producer · Germany
Built early projectors with a Maltese cross and produced the first three-bladed shutter.
1867 – 1934 · Inventor · USA
Co-built the Phantoscope that Edison sold as the Vitascope.
1870 – 1944 · Filmmaker · India
Made Raja Harishchandra, India's first feature film, in 1913.
c. 1929 – 2002 · Engineer · Canada
Adapted the rolling loop so IMAX projectors could move giant film smoothly.
born 1943 · Physicist · USA
Invented the micromirror chip behind DLP projectors and won an Oscar for it in 2015.
1929 – 2021 · Filmmaker · Canada
Co-founded IMAX and helped name it after the idea of the maximum image.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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