France was a center of filmmaking in the 1890s, and here we have some film from 1896-1900 that has been revived with modern software to meet our present-day standards. Cameras were bulky then, so they would be positioned in one spot and the cameraman would crank a handle to make them work. So, you don't get many action sequences unless the camera was mounted on a boat or vehicle. Fortunately, we do get some interesting shots in this batch of clips because Paris was quite a lively town.

The restoration really brings out the high couture worn by everyday women on the streets of Paris. It is easy to understand why women overseas waited anxiously for the "latest fashions from Paris." Women in New York City during this era generally wore formless and severe black dresses, quite unlike the fancy and colorful attire of  Belle Époque-era Paris.

Traffic was brisk in the 1890s.

As you can see, the Avenue des Champ-Elysées was a wild affair in the 1890s. Huge carriages pulled by half a dozen horses carried ten or more people on top, while bicyclists darted around them and hoped they didn't fall off under the horses' hooves.

Rue de l'Avenir.

You will notice a two-speed moving sidewalk. That was the Rue de l'Avenir ('Street of the Future'), a 3.5 km long moving walkway designed as an attraction for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. It was designed in 1893 by American engineers Schmidt and Silsbee and installed on a seven-meter-high viaduct made up of three platforms, two of which were movable. The slower one was going at a speed of 4 km/h and the second at 8 km/h, both rather brisk paces for 1900. In 1888, futurist Edward Bellamy published his novel "Looking Backward: 2000–1887" in which he prophesied that these types of sidewalks would be the highways of the future. Apparently, the Parisians took him seriously and set up this demonstration project. 

I'm betting that you didn't know they had flying trains in 1902. Well, I didn't know that. But then, I don't live in Wuppertal, Germany. It was and still is called the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn.

It turns out that the people running Wuppertal at the end of the 19th Century decided they needed a modern subway system. However, they had nowhere to put it, because their city was crowded between two mountains and a river ran down the center. So, they got creative and put their subway above the river - handing down from steampunk-style supports. Fortunately, a film of this ride was taken in 1902 by someone who knew what he was doing, and now you, too, can take a ride on the Wuppertal flying train in 1902.

Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern visited New York City in 1911 and took some footage that has survived. While it was not color film, modern technology can supply that well enough. What you see on this page are original images from 1911 that have been processed to bring them up as close as possible to modern standards.

In 1911, the film industry was just beginning to transition from the neighborhoods shown in this film to Hollywood, California. A good cross-section of Manhattan is shown, including the Williamsburgh and Brooklyn Bridges, the Flatiron Building, the docks down near the South Street Seaport, cars and horse-drawn wagons jostling for position on crowded city streets, Greenwich Village, Herald Square, elevated subways (which were just about to be sent underground), Times Square, paddlewheel steamer Rosedale (sunk on 16 July 1912 off Rockaway Beach), and many other sites.
If you love history as I do, you may find this film quite evocative of a time long gone.If you enjoy history as much as I do, you may find this film to be quite evocative of an age long gone by. I also have some classic footage of: