Their first commercial public screening on 28 December 1895, for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema.

In an interview with Georges Sadoul given in 1948, Louis claimed that he shot the film in August 1894 – before the arrival of the kinetoscope in France.

On 22 March 1895, in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry, in front of a small audience, one of whom was said to be Léon Gaumont, then director of the company Comptoir Géneral de la Photographie, the Lumières privately screened a single film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

[10] The Lumières gave their first paid public screening on 28 December 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris.

[14] The Lumières went on tour with the cinématographe in 1896, visiting places like Brussels, Bombay, London, Montreal, New York City, Palestine, and Buenos Aires.

[16][17] The brothers stated that "the cinema is an invention without any future" and declined to sell their camera to other filmmakers such as Georges Méliès.

A Polish inventor Kazimierz Prószyński built his camera and projecting device, called Pleograph, in 1894, before those made by the Lumière brothers.

Le Prince went missing in 1890, before he got around to give public demonstrations of the patented cameras and projectors he had been developing during the previous years.

[23] Lauste and Latham's Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on 21 April 1895, and opened to the paying public on Broadway on 20 May.

[24] They shot films up to twenty minutes long at speeds over thirty frames per second and showed them in many US cities.

Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioscop, had offered projected moving images to a paying public in Berlin from 1 November 1895, until the end of the month.