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22/8/1895: Gaumont's Girl Guy
In mid-1895 Felix Richard, proprietor of a photographic shop at 57 Rue Saint-Roch in Paris became embroiled in a legal battle with his brother, Jules. In June of the same year, he offered to sell the business to his young assistant, who had been with him since 1893. The assistant willingly agreed. His name was Leon Gaumont,
Born in 1864, Gaumont worked for Jules Carpentier – who would go on to manufacture the Lumiere’s Cinématographe – from 1881. In 1888 he married Camille Maillard, whose dowry was a piece of land on the rue des Alouettes on which the Gaumont Studios would eventually be built.
Gaumont
bought
Richard’s business on the 10th August 1895, in partnership with
Gustav
Eiffel (builder of the famous tower), an astronomer named
Joseph
Vallot, and a financier named
Alfred
Besnier.
Richard’s
Comptoir génerale
de photographie
was renamed
Leon
Gaumont et Cie. The company accepted a proposal from
Georges
Demeny on 22nd August 1895 to manufacture and market his
chronophotographic camera and
Phonoscope projector-viewer.
Gaumont
began marketing these as the
Biographe and
Bioscope respectively in November but, with the arrival of the Lumiere’s
camera and projector,
Demeny’s
invention was already outdated, and the venture was unsuccessful.
Sometime in 1895, Gaumont was paid a visit by (or paid a visit on) the Lumieres, who demonstrated their cinématographe for him. While Gaumont was suitably impressed, he couldn’t really see any commercial potential in the Lumiere’s invention. Gaumont’s secretary on that visit, however, was one Alice Guy, and she did see some potential, although she kept her lip buttoned at the time.
Known largely only to movie historians today, Guy would quickly go on to become one of the most influential of the pioneers of the cinema… [ADD]
Further Reading:
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