This chronology presents a handful of rich historical facts pertaining to Hollywood, the invention of filmmaking rooted in ancient times, the global film industry and the evolution of entertainment technology. Long before motion pictures as "film", there were motion pictures in the form of animation. Image animation had existed since at least 180AD, but it seems to have taken root and become the inspiration for cinematography in the early 1800s, mostly in Belgium and France. The concept of Hollywood as a town began to become a reality in 1887, not yet aware of anything pertaining to film. If the film industry has an exact beginning, it would probably be the very next year, 1888 when Louis Le Prince invented a motion picture camera, preceding the systems of Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers. Edison, with patents on motion picture technology, was financing many films by the late 1800s as well. By 1906, Los Angeles was attracting its very first filmmakers. By 1909, the city had its first studio. And many followed. Then, the industry began to center itself in Hollywood. The rest is history. You can enjoy this history much deeper by going to our Wikipedia Links page. Our chronology begins with the primitive animation that would evolve into motion picture photography.

• circa 300 BC - Greek "father of geometry" Euclid, from Alexandria, Egypt, began to recognize "persistence of motion" an optical principle (or illusion).
  
  
• circa 180 AD - Inventor Ting Huan invents the earliest zoetrope, aka "wheel of life" in China. The device sits over a lamp and turns as it is driven by convection. Vanes consisting of painted transluscent panels on the turning device would create a motion picture. The device was called "The Pipe Which Makes Fantasies Appear". It would not actually be known by the term zoetrope until the 1860s.
  
  
• 1832 - Joseph Plateau of Belgium invents the phenakistoscope, aka "stroboscope". This was the culmination of work beginning in 1829 when he submitted a doctoral thesis pertaining to optical theories such as persistence of motion. His work is attributed as fundamental inspiration to the later development of cinema and its inventions. But he paid a horrible price for his ingenious discoveries. In an experiment, he stared into the sun for 25 seconds, leading to permanent blindness.
  
  
• 1834 - British mathematician William George Horner invents the Daedalum, an updated zoetrope comprized of a cylinder with internal painted images and viewing slits on the sides, and turning on a vertical axis. By the 1860s, the device is popularized. It became known as the zoetrope in America.
  
  
• 1868 September - John Barnes Linnet patents the first flip book, calling it a kineograph (moving picture).
  
  
• 1886 - The "father of Hollywood", Hobart Johnstone "HJ" Whitley is generally credited as coining the town name "Hollywood" while on honeymoon with his wife Gigi. The legend is subject to variations. The term referred to Whitley's real estate development plans in conjunction with a large purchase of ranch land to create the town. Word of Whitley's plan got out to land speculators. At least one of them, farmer Harvey H. Wilcox, jumped the gun in 1887, filing to subdivide his own farmland ahead of Whitley, who would then subdivide his adjacent land. The town began to sprout in that year. Previously it had been a sparsely populated agricultural valley.
  
  
• 1888 October 14 - Louis Le Prince, from Metz, France, shot Roundhay Garden Scene, "the first moving pictures on paper film using a single reflex camera" (quoting Wikipedia) in Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, preceding the earliest film work of both Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers by a few years. In September, 1890, Le Prince disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Dijon, France en route to Paris and the USA to demonstrate a new motion picture camera and was never seen alive again.
  footnote: We have Le Prince linked in our Wikipedia links section. Similar and additional info on Le Prince, including his patents, can be found at the Wapedia.mobi website. Le Prince would seem a great topic for an art house film.
  
  
• 1892 February 12 - Léon Bouly of France filed for patents on a device that acted as both a motion picture camera and projector. He was however unable to pay the fees for his patent. The controversal invention was used by the Lumière brothers, who bought out his license. Louis Lumière is widely believed to have preceded Bouly in the concept. Bouly called the device Cynématographe Léon Bouly. A year later he renamed it the cinématographe (cinematograph). At a minimum, Bouly can apparently be creditied for bringing us the word cinematography.
  
  
• 1894 April 14 - A kinetoscope parlor in New York City exhibits the first commercial motion pictures in the United States. These were ten short films of one minute each, filmed by Edison Studios which began producing films as Edison Manufacturing Company, owned by inventor Thomas Edison. The operation began at Edison's Black Maria Studio in West Orange, New Jersey before moving to Bronx, New York. Through 1911, aproximately 1,200 films were created, mostly shorts. There were 54 feature length films.
  
  
• 1895 December 28 - Auguste Lumière and his brother Louis Lumière did their first public film exhibition involving an admission charge after a previous private exhibition the same year. The public exhibit consisted of ten film shorts at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris.
  
  
• 1900 - Los Angeles was still a very small city, with a population of 102,479. (source: US Census).
  
  
• 1903 - Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality.
  
  
• 1903 - The Great Train Robbery is filmed in New Jersey. It is written and directed by Edwin S. Porter, working for Thomas Edison.
  
  
• 1906 - The Biograph Company shot A Daring Hold-Up, a short film in Los Angeles.
  
  
• 1908 - Thomas Edison formed an alliance of film producers called The Motion Picture Patents Company, in an effort gain a monopoly on the film industry. Federal antitrust action broke up the company in 1915.
  
  
• 1909 - In a most historic year, Chicago-based Selig Polyscope Company set up the first Los Angeles area film studio in a rented bungalo in Edendale, just northwest of downtown LA, and quickly expanded. This preceded any studios in Hollwood. The company, owned by William Selig, would soon move its Chicago office to Los Angeles. Through the 1910s, Edendale would be the center of a quickly burgeoning motion picture industry in California, with many other studios locating there.
  
  
• 1910 - The Biograph Company sent film director D. W. Griffith and a team of actors to the Los Angeles area to create films because the locale was sunny and scenic, making it reliable for outdoor production. In the same year Griffith directs In Old California, the first film shot in Hollywood.
  
  
• 1910 - Hollywood voted to annex itself to Los Angeles in order to benefit by attaching to LA's water and sewer infrastructure.
  
  
• 1910 - Los Angeles had a population of 319,198. (source: US Census).
  
  
• 1911 October 27 - Nestor Studios of Bayonne, New Jersey opened the first Hollywood motion picture company at the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. The location had been a tavern. The frist stage was built in a lot behind the tavern. In less than one year, Universal Film Company was formed and would absorb Nestor Studios.
  
  
• 1915 - Birth of a Nation (originally titled "The Clansman"), directed by D. W. Griffith, touched upon the topic of a black man accused of raping a white woman. The film glorified the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War, leading to the group's massive and popular resurgence. It also acted as propaganda that denigrated and distorted African Americans and arguably increased social oppression of blacks significantly, especially in the south. By the 1920s, the KKK had a membership numbering three million and oppressive Jim Crow laws would eventually arise from the flames of racial hatred.
  
  
• circa 1918 - World War One caused European film studios to suffer financially. This helped set the stage for Hollywood to become the world's film capitol by the early 1920s.
  
  
• 1920 - Los Angeles had a population of 576,673. (source: US Census).
  
  
• 1923 - Real estate speculators installed a sign in the foothills above Hollywood, hoping to sell more land. The sign said "HollywoodLand" and had fifty foot letters.
  
  
• 1927 - Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, a mostly silent film that pioneered the use of sound in some of its scenes. "The talkies" were thus born.
  
  
• 1928 - Steamboat Willie became the first widely viewed animated film. It starred Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse.
  
  
• 1941 - America's entry into World War Two delayed the advent of television as a consumer product.
  
  
• 1945 - The last four letters of the famous HollywoodLand sign were permanently removed. Thereafter, the sign branded the town of Hollywood in the global consciousness as it became forever reproduced and glorified. World War Two ended with Japan's surrender in August.
  
  
• 1947 January 15 - The bisected body of 22 year old Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles. It is described as the most horrific murder ever in Los Angeles and is named the Black Dahlia murder.
  
  
• 1947 January 22 - KTLA, the first TV station west of the Mississippi River, was licensed by the FCC for commercial operation on Channel 5 in Hollywood. There were only an estimated 350 to 600 TV sets in all of greater Los Angeles at the time. KTLA was originally owned by a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures and located on the Paramount studio lot. It first went on the air in 1942. (source: Wikipedia).
  
  
• 1951 - Television exploded nationwide in the USA, becoming a must-have consumer product for the first time. The post-war American economy boomed largely because foreign industry had been bombed back into the stone age. The world thus depended on American products. This created decades of American prosperity that defined the baby boom and a thirst for home entertainment.
  
  
• 1954 January 1 - The first-ever coast-to-coast color television broadcast occurs when NBC telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade. Color TV would remain a status symbol until it became a standard home item by the mid-1960s.
  
  
• 2009 June 11 - American over-the-air high power TV broadcasting goes all-digital in the USA, following an FCC directive and standards of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). Specifically, the FCC directive ends all high power analog TV transmissions over the airwaves. Enactment of the directive had been delayed since February 17 by an act of Congress, to allow time for transition by broadcasters and TV buyers.

Credit: Our preeminent source of reference is Wikipedia for many of the above historic timeline events. But we also go through countless other sources in print and online.

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