The movie camera was the internet of its day. As in, it was touted as this great technical achievement that would revolutionize science and usher in a new era of progress and enlightenment. But, instead, people almost immediately started using it to make dirty movies and goof around. Georges Méliès was really into the latter (though probably also the former since he was an old-timey French dude and all.)
Born in the mid-19th century, Méliès was an illusionist who wanted to use the camera to film plays and his magic acts. He soon started messing around with tricks like double exposure and the like to try and bring some of his stage magic to the projection screen, which was probably just his sex-stained bedsheet. Hey, like we said, the dude was an old-timey French dude.
Then one day, a weird thing happened. When filming scenes of city life, Méliès’ camera jammed. It took him a few seconds to fix, and when he later developed the film, he noticed that he accidentally invented the jump cut/stop trick. While the camera was malfunctioning, the scenery around the amateur filmmaker continued to change, none of which was being captured on film until Méliès started rolling again. And because the angle and position of the camera didn’t change, the resulting film seemed to show objects disappearing, a man turning into a woman, or a carriage turning into a hearse, etc. It was a total game-changer, like when early internet users discovered that certain combinations of characters could look like stuff, including farting Kirby which, incidentally, looks like this: 8>( > 0_0)>.