In 1894, a small group of people got together in Richmond, Indiana, to watch images which had been rolled through a projector and shown on a large screen. The piece of equipment was called the Phantoscope, and they called what they were watching cinema, from the Greek kinema, which means movement, or motion.

Thomas Edison learned of the Phantoscope and purchased it, renaming it Edison's Vitascope. In 1896, he began showing films at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, which was on 34th Street in New York City. He decided to sell a small number of the Vitascopes.The country's first theater a building which didn't share space with another business but was only for the showing of movies was on Canal Street in New Orleans, also in 1896. That's no longer in operation, but the State Theatre, in Washington, Iowa, has been showing films since 1897.By the 1920s, the big screen or silver screen deluxe movie theater had become a regular fixture of many towns. They had giant screens, plush seats and air conditioning. Soon the seats were made with a pivot, so that the seat bottom could be tilted to allow patrons to squeeze down a row.There were five major movie chains: Paramount, Warner Brothers, Loews (which owned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM), Fox and RKO. Today, Paramount, Warner and Fox remain, along with industry giants Sony, Universal and Walt Disney.The Angela Theatre, Phillips Street, Coaldale, originally opened Oct. 11, 1949. It was owned by Peter Magazzu. It was purchased by Mike and Deborah Danchak in 1993, and reopened five years later with a showing of "Titanic."During the '50s and '60s, viewing expanded to include drive-in movie theaters and also adult movie theaters. Not surprisingly, midway through the '60s, the industry established a rating system for movies, based on the content of the movies and the appropriate age of the viewers.In the 1980s, the industry experience a slump in revenue, blamed on the influx of improved technology for home viewing of movies. Soon it was common for people to have the "big screen" in their living room. In the last decade, though, according to movie industry statistics, people are returning to movie theaters to experience the improved technology and "atmosphere" of going out to the movies.