The first moving-picture shows appear in New…

The first moving-picture shows appear in New York in the 1890s.

The introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion picture cameras, which can photograph an indefinitely long rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed several minutes of action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film by the end of the 1880s.

Some early films are made to be viewed by one person at a time through a "peep show" device such as the Kinetoscope and the mutoscope.

Others are intended for a projector, mechanically similar to the camera and sometimes actually the same machine, which is used to shine an intense light through the processed and printed film and into a projection lens so that these "moving pictures" can be shown tremendously enlarged on a screen for viewing by an entire audience.

The first kinetoscope film shown in public exhibition was Blacksmith Scene, produced by Edison Manufacturing Company in 1893.

The following year the company began Edison Studios, which will become an early leader in the film industry with notable early shorts including The Kiss, and will go on to produce close to twelve hundred films.

The first public screenings of films at which admission is charged are made in 1895 by the American Woodville Latham and his sons, using films produced by their Eidoloscope company.

Another opinion is that the first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in America had been at Brooklyn Institute in New York City May 9, 1893.