In it you will find over 300 biographies of people behind and in front of the camera, from all around the world, both the famous and the obscure, and not just those directly involved in filmmaking but the many different kinds of people who got caught up in the new medium. As we say in the introduction:
So you'll find Thomas Edison, Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès, but also a host of others, from Ruth St Denis (dancer) to Mary Hitchcock (explorer), and from Herbert Booth (evangelist) to Komada Koyo (benshi). There are also background essays, illustrations of early cinema technology, guides by country and type of person, and other research resources.What this website tries to do is to show something of the lives of the many hundreds of people worldwide who by their efforts in the closing years of the nineteenth century collectively invented the cinema. Scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, sportsmen, artists, politicians, dancers, photographers, reporters, showmen, propagandists and crooks: the whole extraordinary variousness of the late Victorian era.
The site is here http://victorian-cinema.net/
and I've written a short history behind book and website here: http://lukemckernan.com/2012/11/28/meet-the-victorians/" target="_blank
