I just stumbled upon this description of a proposal for a patent on an invention in 1876 by Wordsworth Donisthorpe: “The taking of a succession of photographic pictures at equal intervals of time, in order to record the changes taking place in or the movement of the object being photographed, and also by means of a succession of pictures so taken of any moving object to give to the eye a presentation of the object in continuous movement as it appeared when being photographed.” Today we call it a movie.

(Donisthorpe was not initially successful. But he did did eventually film one of the first films ever, London’s Trafalgar Square, in 1890.)