It was George Albert Smith who invented the technique of dissolving a sequence into more than one shot or to look at it in another way, Smith created the technique of making cuts within a scene to stay faithful to the continuity of the action across them.
He first showcased this in the British short silent, 1900's Grandma's Reading Glass, showing a little boy playing with a large magnifying glass which his grandmother (who is also featured in the scene) uses to read with. As the child peruses the newspaper, a bird in a cage, his grandmother's eye and so on, there is a cut to a substantial close-up of each of the objects framed in a circular black vignette mask before the camera vacillates back to the more distant shot of he boy as he turns to set his eyes on something else.
The point-of-view shot immediately became popular in progressively elaborate stories made in France and America about voyeuristic activities such as keyhole peeping and by 1905 both it and the inserted close shot were standard elements of film technique.