That step was taken 1895 in London.

The moving picture theater certainly began in England.

But there was one source of the stream springing up in America, which long preceded Edison: the photographic efforts of the Englishman Muybridge, who made his experiments in California as early as 1872.

His aim was to have photographs of various phases of a continuous movement, for instance of the different positions which a trotting horse is passing through.

His purpose was the analysis of the movement into its component parts, not the synthesis of a moving picture from such parts.