Antoine Lumière

October 18, 1840 — Besançon, France

Antoine Lumière (born October 18, 1840 – February 10, 1904) was a French businessman and photographer, best known as the father of the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis. In 1860, he left his hometown in the Haute-Saône to establish a photography business in Besançon. By 1870, he had moved to Lyons, where he expanded his business and built an industrial plant for manufacturing photographic plates. Under his leadership, the Lumière Company became a major producer, eventually employing 300 people and producing 15 million photographic plates annually. In 1893, Antoine's sons, Auguste and Louis, took over the factory, and it was their innovations that led to the development of cinema, with the Lumière brothers' invention of the Cinématographe revolutionizing the film industry.