Precursors

• Several inventions during the 19th century were essential to the creation of the projector. The photograph was the first necessary step, followed by the advancement of taking them on paper instead of metal plates. Celluloid would later be used as the basis for photographic film. The first "projector" was the magic lantern, which projected still images onto a screen, lit by a candle. Optical toys were developed that exploited the eye's "persistence of vision" in order to creation the illusion of motion. These two concepts, projection and motion, began to merge with inventions like the praxinoscope (first to project a series of images onto a screen) and the zoopraxiscope, (a very primitive projector that projected photos printed on a rotating glass disc).
  
  

Capturing Motion

• The modern movie projector needed one more thing to surface before its creation: a camera that could take pictures rapidly enough to capture motion. Two French inventors, Etienne-Jules Marey and Louis Le Prince, separately invented ways of doing this, both using rolls of photographic material which could be pulled through cameras. These early rolls of film were improved upon by American George Eastman, whose experiments culminated in the creation of perforated celluloid roll film.
  
  

The Kinetoscope

• Old Film Projector (photo by André Koehne http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Andr%C3%A9_Koehne)
  
  Meanwhile, William Dickson and Thomas Edison were working together to create an early version of the projector, called a kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was a coin-operated booth which held one person at a time, showing movies using continuously looped images rotating in front of a shutter and an electric lamp. This new form of entertainment was wildly successful, but the idea of showing movies for more people at once inspired several inventors to continue working on improvements to this early projector.
  
  

The Lumiere's Cinematographe and Other Projectors

• Back in France, brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere drew inspiration from Dickson and Edison. Their contribution, which has led for them to be called the true inventors of modern film, was a combination of movie camera and projector. It was also hand-held and lightweight, able to project movie images onto a large screen. American Woodville Latham and his sons, possibly working with Dickson, also created a projector, called the Eidoloscope projector. In Atlanta, two inventors named C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat unveiled a projector they named the Phantoscope. After the first exhibition, they parted, each claiming to have invented the projector.
  
  

The Vitascope

• An Advertisement for the Vitascope
  
  Armat took the Phantoscope to the Kinetoscope Company (part of the Edison Company), where Edison had since parted with Dickson. The Edison Company agreed to produce the machines, so long as the name could be changed to the Vitascope and the credit could go to the company. The Edison Company later abandoned the Vitascope in favor of its own projector design, the Projectoscope. It was the Vitascope, however, along with the Eidoloscope and the Lumiere's Cinématographe, that became the first projectors used widely in commercial theaters across the United States.