Certificate of 5 Shares of 100F each issued in Brussels in 1895.

The Kinetoscope is the oldest device in the history of cinema, intended to visualize a photographic work giving the illusion of movement. This process was imagined in 1887 by the American inventor and industrialist Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, who dreamed of bringing "for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He entrusted the Franco-British William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a technology-savvy photographer, with the manufacture of the first cameras.

In France, Charles Lucien Lépine (1859-1941), a French native of Bordeaux, Lépine filed in 1899 the patent for a living room cinematographic device. This device, inspired by the Edison Kinetoscope, was marketed by Pathé in 1900.

Lépine filed another patent in 1919 for a device for direct observation and projection of fixed views on film. In France, the patent was filed by Pathé which, after a few modifications and two new patents, successfully marketed the device under the name Pathéorama in 1923.