Watch “Roundhay Garden Scene,” the world’s very first motion picture—all 2 seconds of it.

When you click play on the YouTube video embedded in this email, you’d better not blink or you’ll miss a significant portion of it. It’s 2.11 seconds long. You’ve just seen the first motion picture in human history, called “Roundhay Garden Scene,” and it was filmed on October 14, 1888, exactly 136 years ago today.

The film was shot by French inventor Louis Le Prince. He was around cameras all his life, having hung around in his childhood with Louis Daguerre, a pioneer of photography for whom the Daguerreotype is named. Later in his life Le Prince became a photographic inventor himself. Entranced with the idea of a moving picture, he labored to build a special camera that could shoot it. His first version, created in 1887, filmed the action from sixteen different lenses. Because the image was shot from slightly different angles, it “wobbled” noticeably when projected and was not a success. Le Prince knew he needed to make a movie camera that could photograph a subject from a single lens on a number of frames whose angles didn’t vary. He succeeded. “Roundhay Garden Scene” was his first practical test of the technology.

The test reel was filmed in the garden of an English manor called Oakwood Grange, in the town of Roundhay in England, near Leeds, where Le Prince was working at the time. The man walking around is Adolphe Le Prince, Louis Le Prince’s son. You can tell it’s a rather windy day.

Look at the woman in the dark dress who appears to be walking backwards. That’s Sarah Whitley, Louis Le Prince’s mother-in-law. Born in 1816, she died only ten days after this film was taken. The only human being on Earth born before she was to have appeared in a motion picture film is Pope Leo XIII, who was born in 1810. Thus, in this tiny stretch of film, we have a record of someone whose life stretches back almost to the 18th century. Sarah Whitley is a ghost out of the past.

Though he lived longer than his mother-in-law, Louis Le Prince also didn’t survive that much longer into this era. Only two years after “Roundhay Garden Scene” was filmed, in September 1890, he vanished mysteriously on a railroad trip between Dijon and Paris. His disappearance has never been solved and has engendered much speculation, but an 1890 photo of a drowning victim, resembling Le Prince, was discovered in a Paris library in 2003.

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