Antoine Lumière(1840-1911)
In 1860 Antoine Lumière left his hometown in the Haute-Saône to set up
a photography business in Besançon. His first son, Auguste was born in
1862, and the second, Louis, arrived two years later. In 1870 Antoine
moved to Lyons with his family and opened a new workshop. Over the next
10 years he gradually built up an industrial manufacturing plant for
photographic plates. The factory was taken over by Auguste and Louis in
1893. By 1894, when Edison's kinetoscope arrive on the scene in France,
the Lumière Company, with a capital of 3 million francs, already had a
work force of 300 people and was producing 15 million photographic
plates a year.
