Audiences did not flee the Lumières' Arrival of a Train; it is most likely an urban legend.

1895 · 1896 · apart: 1 year

Historians have found no contemporary report of a panic, which would surely have made the papers.

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The event

• First Lumière film screening1895 · Paris. On 28 December 1895, at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines, Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first paid public screening of films with their Cinématographe. The date is widely regarded as the birth of cinema.

19th century

More amazing facts

• 1895 In 1895 Popov demonstrated a radio receiver in St Petersburg, and the Lumière brothers held the first paid film screening in Paris.
• 1895 'I have seen my death!' cried Röntgen's wife when she saw the first X-ray of her hand about six weeks after he discovered the rays.
• 1895 · 1901 Röntgen refused to patent his rays and gave his Nobel Prize money, from the first physics prize ever, to his university.
• 1896 There were no gold medals at the first modern Olympics in 1896.
• 1896 Kandinsky took up painting at 30.
• 1896 Five weeks after Ethiopia routed an Italian army at Adwa, the first modern Olympics opened in Athens.

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