March 22, 1895

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory

The Lumières demonstrate the Cinématographe with Workers Leaving the Factory

The programme was one strip long: workers walking out through a factory gate for roughly fifty seconds, in front of a room of invited professionals.

22 March 1895, before the Société d'encouragement

Louis and Auguste Lumière demonstrated their Cinématographe on 22 March 1895 to a restricted Paris audience at the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, projecting a single moving photographic view, La Sortie d'usine.

The scene showed employees — many of them women, along with bicycles and a dog — passing through the gate of the Lumière photographic factory in Lyon-Monplaisir.

This was a restricted institutional audience, not a ticketed public cinema show.

The engineer in the room

At the meeting Louis encountered the engineer Jules Carpentier, who undertook to refine and manufacture the Cinématographe.

The apparatus ran at 16–18 frames per second, and the Lumière film strip topped out at 17 metres — roughly fifty seconds of running time.

Eleven further demonstrations followed during 1895.

Which strip, and whose first

The 22 March date is the projection date, not the filming date; the Institut Lumière puts the original filming probably on 19 March 1895.

The exact strip shown that day is not securely represented by the surviving catalogue versions, which the Catalogue Lumière dates to 26 May 1895, 10 March 1896 and 15 August 1896.

Whether this counts as the first public projection depends on how film, photography, projection and "public" are defined; surviving sequences by Louis Le Prince and other experiments predate it.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The date and venue of the demonstration are well supported; the disputed element is its claim to absolute priority among projected motion-picture demonstrations.
The Institut Lumière dates the filming of the original factory view probably to 19 March 1895. The 22 March date is the projection date, not the filming date.
The exact strip shown on 22 March is not securely represented by the later surviving catalogue versions. The Catalogue Lumière dates its surviving versions to 26 May 1895, 10 March 1896 and 15 August 1896.
Whether this was the first public projection depends on definitions of film, photography, projection and “public”; earlier moving-image systems and demonstrations complicate any single-inventor origin story.