The cooperation of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge in film research in the late 19th century realized that films as they are known today were a practical possibility. In 1891 was designed and patented fully developed camera, called the Kinetograph by W.K.L. Dickson who was working under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison. Dickson also designed the viewing apparatus called the Kinetoscope. Kinetoscope was contained within a large box, and only permitted the images to be viewed by one person at a time looking into it through a peephole, after starting the machine by inserting a coin. But a failure in this form left the way free for Louis and Auguste, the Lumière brothers to perfect their apparatus, the Cinématographe. With their Cinématographe they gave the first successful show of projected pictures to an audience in Paris in December 1895. After a few years the 35-mm wide Edison film and the 16-frames-per-second projection speed of the Lumière Cinématographe became standard. The earliest films showed just one scene, which ran for about a minute, which was all that the standard lenghts of film allowed. Most of the early multi-shot films were made by Georges Méliès. In his films, well-known stories such as Cinderella (1899) are told in a series of disconnected scenes joined by dissolves, as was done at the time with slides in a magic-lantern show. Méliès`s long story films were the most commercially successful of all in the first few years of cinema, and they led other film-makers towards producing longer films. Méliès`s films made no real contribution to the development of film construction as we know it. The first known films were Barbershop Scene and A trick on the Gardener. In 1905 was change, because by that time there were enough films that were several minutes long to provide the programming for cinemas running full-time.
An actor and a playwright D.W. Griffith was the first film-maker to appreciated fully and apply the existing techniques of film construction to dramatic storytelling. In 1907 the Selig company of Chicago moved some of its production to California and it was gradually followed by most of the others.
Mack Sennet applied the Griffith style of filming to comedy. In Europe, the most popular comics had been music-hall clowns such as Boireau, also known as Cretinetti. As films several reels long became common, scriptwriting became more important.