Louise Lumiere
Talking about a movie camera is talking about the history of narrative film as well. The evolution of film history is attached to the technology human mind is able to produce. From Lumiére's cinematographer to digital cameras, the way film makers conceive a movie and the demands of the audience has changed a lot. Not only is it a matter of generations, but it is how technology has changed our way of thinking. What we may really be sure about something though: since its invention, human mind has turned visual.
The Lumiere brothers were the pioneers of the film industry. For the construction of their cinematographer, they used the principles of old children's toys, such as the Thaumatrope, the Phenakistocope, the Zoetrope, and the magic lantern. The cinematograph's first experiment was to record a train arraving to the station. For Lumiere brothers, it was just a scientific experiment, but what they did not realize is that they put the first step into the film industry.
Georges Méliès bought the cinematographer (from The Lumiéres) and did some significant innovations like the fade-in, the fade out, and the stop motion photography. He was an illusionist, so he liked to play a lot with special effects. His most famous movie is A trip to the moon (1902), inspired by Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the moon. The film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of lunar inhabitants, and return to Earth with a captive lunar inhabitant.
After the invention of the cinema itself, the most important event in film history was the introduction of sound. Thomas Edison was the first to synchronize sound and image at the same time. Using the principles of two of his greatest inventions, the Cinephonograph and the Kinetophone, he created the Kinetograph achieving a step forward in the film industry. Adapting to new conditions was not easy. Not only because most actors did not speak English, but because the industry was changing so fast. Charlie Chaplin, for example, was able to adapt easily to these changes. One of his most famous pictures is "The great dictator", a parody of Hitler and the Nazi regime, combining his silent movie style in a sound movie. At the end, the silent tramp speaks up in a memorable speech in which he warns us about the dangers of human progress at the cost of its own extinction.
Color was the next obvious step. The Cinemascope cameras had lenses that aloud full color movies. Toll of the sea was the first movie shot in technicolor's two-strip, two color subtractive process, but the one that knocked it out of the park was the film Gone with the wind. This was the first movie that won the Oscar (1939) for the newly created category of Color Cinematography. In 1940, Walt Disney flew higher with Fantasia, using three color Technicolor, and multiple audio channels using a stereophonic sound.
A lot has changed since "The arrival of the train". Cinema has turned digital! Not only is 3D now a common thing, but the HD and 4K cameras are essential for movie making. Personally I think cinema today is so obsessed concentrating on technology that some pictures do not have a good directing or script. Special effects today distracted us so much, we forget we are watching a bad movie. 
