Well now,news of the new system in Americatravelled fast and a number of rival Europeansystems started to appear once people had heardabout it.The single problem with all the systems wasthey couldn't really project the film onto a screen -you know,so more than one person could seeit.Then in 1895,three systems were alldeveloped,more or less at the same time andindependently of each other,I guess the mostfamous of these was by the Lumiere Brothers fromFrance,and they called their system thecinematographe which of course is where the wordcinema comes from.There were also two brothers in Germany who developed a successfulsystem and they called it a bioskop.
Well now,once the problem of projection had been solved,the next challenge for the inventorswas to make the films longer and more interesting.A continuing problem at the time was thatthe films had a tendency to break when they were being played - a problem which was causedby the tension between the two wheels,or 'reels' as they are called,which hold the film.Now thisproblem was solved by two American brothers.They developed the 'Lantham Loop',which wasthe simple addition of a third reel between the two main reels,and this took all the tensionaway with the result that the film stopped snapping.