Henri Joly

In 1895 Joly met Charles Pathé, a Vincennes merchant who sold phonographs, who began importing pirated Kinetoscopes (made by Robert W. Paul in England) in May 1895.

Pathé agreed to fund the development, and on 26 August 1895, Joly filed a patent application for a camera that could provide films both for a projector and for the Kinetoscope.

During the final years of the decade Joly teamed with a French businessman and engineer, Ernest Normandin, to make and exhibit motion pictures.

The process, officially called Joly-Normandin but also billed first as Cinematographe Joly, and then as Royal Biograph, was being exhibited at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897 when a disastrous fire (caused by a Molteni ether lamp) occurred.

In 1900 Joly entered a three-way partnership with Normandin and his brother Edgar, called "Société du Biophonographe", to exploit a system of synchronizing a motion picture projection with sound from a phonograph.