The Disappearance of Louis Le Prince, the Forgotten Father of Motion Picture (#133)

The Disappearance of Louis le Prince - the Forgotten Father of Cinema

When you think of the “father of cinema” or the one person that might have the honour of being accredited as such, who comes to mind?

Some of the more popular answers would be people like The Lumière Brothers, Georges Méliès, Alice Guy-Blaché or even Thomas Edison.

But in October of 1888, a French inventor named Louis Le Prince recorded what we now know to be the oldest example of a motion picture - a series of moving images from Leeds, England - several years before either Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers! In fact, Le Prince had been granted patents on both a 16-lens device and a single-lens type.

For those who are listening to this instead of watching the clips – the movies were filmed in several areas of Leeds, including ‘Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge’ (clue’s in the name really) and in the inventors own garden (the famous ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’) which was filmed on his single-lens camera filmed at 12 frames per second, and the finished product was made up of 20 frames in total, and lasted for a total of 2 seconds. 

So while The Lumière Brothers can be attributed as the first to publicly exhibit a motion picture, and innovating the commercial industry that cinema would inevitably become, or even Thomas Edison and “his” “invention” of the world-standard 35mm film stock, Louis Le Prince made what is arguably the biggest innovative leap of anyone in the history of art or entertainment, as he was the first to figure out how to make the pictures actually move in the first place.

Though there’s no one person we can attribute to inventing movies as we know it – mostly since it evolved out of a series of innovations from dozens of different people, each one inspired by the last – we can at least agree that Le Prince is pretty much as close as “the inventor of motion pictures” as it gets.

But there is a reason that we, as in the public in general, have not heard of his name – why did it not become a household name like Edisons? For that, I feel we have to learn a little more about the man before we find out what happened to him…

Born on August 28, 1841, Louis Aimá Augustin Le Prince was the son of a respected officer of the Lágion d'Honneur, a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802. The elder Le Prince had some interesting friends, among them the photography pioneer Daguerre from whom his son Louis received photography and chemistry lessons. Later, Louis went on to an education at Paris and Leipzig Universies where he studied painting and chemistry.

In 1866 Le Prince moved from France to England at the invitation of a college friend. Three years later, Louis married his friend's sister, a talented artist. Together the new husband and wife began a school of applied art named the Leeds Technical School of Art. Soon they were well-renowned for their work combining photography on metal and ceramic. The family later moved to the US for some years while Louis managed a small group of French artists there. It was also in the US that Le Prince began to build his sixteen-lens camera and experiment with film stock.

So, what happened to Louis le Prince?

As soon as he broke this fantastic new ground with his new moving picture invention, Louis Le Prince and his family were ecstatic to set up a showcase of Roundhay Garden Scene in their mansion in New York. But before they could, Le Prince had some matters to attend to in France and the U.K., one of them being to patent his new camera.

But on September 16th, 1890, 49-year-old Louis Le Prince disappeared never to be seen again. 

Le Prince had made it as far as Dijon, France, with his brother Albert and was due to see family in the French capital, before soon attending a public screening in New York, where he was set to unveil the world’s first ever moving pictures to be captured on film.Having promised he would re-join his friends for a return journey to England, Louis bade his brother farewell in Dijon and hopped on the express train bound for Paris. However, after boarding his train that autumn morning,he failed to disembark in Paris at the appointed time and was never seen nor heard from again by either his family or friends. The last sighting of him was onboard the train leaving the Dijon platform, and though both French police and Scotland Yard carried out an exhaustive search, neither his luggage or personal belongings were ever recovered, and over 132 years later there’s no clear-cut answer as to what happened on that fateful train journey between Dijon and Paris, joining the Zodiac Killer and Jack the Ripper in the echelon of unsolvable mysteries – even our favourite Ghoul Boys couldn’t crack the case!

The event essentially changed the course of history – instead of finding Le Prince’s name, if you Google “who invented film” today, the top result is world-renowned American inventor Thomas Edison. For others, it’s the French Lumière brothers - from whose “Cinématographe” projector the word “cinema” is derived.

It’s only in recent years that Le Prince has received some of his deserved dues: in 2015 Leeds-born David Wilkinson set out to prove in his documentary The First Film that Le Prince was indeed the world’s first person to produce moving pictures.

In spite of this, Le Prince’s legacy still remains more muted than one might expect: the “History of Film” Wikipedia page features no mention of Louis le Prince’s name, while a blue plaque to Le Prince - on the bridge where he shot his first film - still states that Le Prince “probably” created the world’s first moving pictures in the city.

But we do love a conspiracy theory on this podcast. And there are a great many theories and conspiracies as to what might have happened to him:

Killed off by competitors

One of the rumours advanced by Le Prince’s wife, Elizabeth Le Prince, in the years following his disappearance was that rival Thomas Edison had something to do with Le Prince’s vanishing.

The theory goes that Thomas Edison was keen to eliminate competition in the race to be crowned the inventor of moving pictures, and thus ordered a hitman to kill Le Prince before he had a chance to screen his moving pictures in New York.

In fact, just one year after Le Prince’s fateful train ride, Edison claimed for himself the patent of inventing the motion picture with his Kinetoscope invention – or what you may know as that one nickel-powered peephole machine. And, understandably, the Le Prince family sued.

Edison, who wasn’t a stranger to patent lawsuits – as he regularly incited them himself, including and especially inventions that he obviously came second to creating, but wanted credit for anyways – fought hard. It was the rich and already established company man versus family of a nobody inventor who never lived to see his legacy; I’ll let you take a minute to consider who might have won.

Though, in a miraculous turn of favour, the court actually reversed their original ruling in favour of Edison and appealed the case. After his father’s disappearance, Adolphe had become involved in trying to establish his legacy as the inventor of film and served as a witness in the 1891 court case where Thomas Edison was attempting to win the title.Basically, he had become one of the biggest proponents in defence of keeping his father’s camera patent.

So what makes this theory of foul play even more suspicious (and in my mind, that little bit more likely) was that Adolphe le Prince was then shot and killed in 1901, after the courts original ruling but before the appeal case, while hunting. And, like father like son, his death was never resolved, and the killer (if it wasn’t himself) has yet to be identified… awfully convenient that Edison’s one and only threat to him being dethroned from his title of “inventor of motion pictures” was killed before he could attend the appeal case. But I digress.

Killed by his brother

The theory that Le Prince was a victim of fratricide by his own brother, Albert, rests on the fact that Albert was the last person who claimed to have seen Le Prince before he boarded his train to Paris.

It’s known that Albert was the architect and executor of their mother’s estate upon her death in 1887, and that Louis was owed money as part of her will.

Some theorise that Albert killed Louis in a row over the will, and that Albert’s claim to have waved his brother off at the station may in fact have been false.

Laurie Snyder, a living descendent of the Le Princes, contests this theory, saying that the relationship between the two brothers was known to have been warm and loving, as evidenced by surviving letters between the pair.

Political assassination

In the wake of his 2015 film hitting cinemas, David says he was contacted by someone who had, in his opinion, the most credible theory as to Le Prince’s disappearance yet.

The caller explained that several other French people died in similarly mysterious or strange circumstances around the same time as Le Prince:

“He told me that he had the evidence to show that in the late 1880s and early 1890s, France was on the verge of another revolution...and the [French] government had set up a unit to look for subversives.”

Louis Le Prince, explains David, had previously been involved in a “semi-revolution” in Paris. What’s more, the fact that the inventor lived abroad - in Leeds - and was tinkering with inventions would have made him “automatically suspicious”, says David.

The conclusion of the caller was thus that Le Prince was assassinated by the government as a potential political enemy.

Suicide or voluntary disembarkment

Another theory as to Le Prince’s disappearance suggests that the inventor either voluntarily disembarked from the train before it reached Paris, or that he took his own life.

It’s known that Le Prince was in debt at the time, and some believe that may have motivated him to willingly disappear or kill himself.

Others, however, point out that the fact Le Prince had booked a screening in New York to reveal his breakthrough to the public makes this theory implausible.

Random accident

Laurie Snyder - Le Prince’s great-great granddaughter - told the BBC in 2015 that her theory on Le Prince’s disappearance is far more “mundane” than suicide or assassination.

She believes that Le Prince simply arrived in the wrong place at the wrong time, pointing to memoirs of Elizabeth Le Prince that suggest Le Prince would have arrived in Paris around 11pm.

“Being so late”, she told the BBC, “he probably hailed a hansom cab [a horse-drawn carriage] to take him to his workshop.

“I think the driver, taking advantage of the hour and the darkness, took him to a remote location near the Seine, hit him over the head and threw him in the Seine. There were two articles from this time that suggest that thieves were targeting lone travellers and Le Prince was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I simply can't believe that a man who loved his family as much as he did, as evidenced by his letters, would either commit suicide or disappear on his own,” she added.

Whatever happened to Le Prince, David Wilkinson believes that the world could be a very different place today had he disembarked from his train in Paris.

But whatever the real story is, that two-second clip of Le Prince’s relatives marching playfully in Roundhay Park survives today as proof that the Father of Cinema is not who you’d think, and that the unlikely city of Leeds was the true birthplace of film.