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 even began to work on motion pictures! In fact, Le Prince had been granted patents on both a 16-lens device and a single-lens type.
In 1886, neither Edison in America nor Lumiere in France had initiated research on motion pictures. Le Prince’s patent request was granted on Jan. 10, 1888, but a crucial phrase mentioning that the camera could have ”one or more lenses” was eliminated by the patent office on the grounds that a Mr. Dumont had patented a single-lens camera in 1861. Dumont’s device, however, was a single-lens still camera that could also take multiple photos. It was not intended to create moving pictures. This omission in Le Prince’s patent registration would later prove disastrous for Edison’s competitors as it undermined their attempts to legally establish that other inventors had clearly pre-dated Edison’s claim.
Le Prince’s first effort at the moving picture rotated between the 16 lenses to take a sequence of frames. He anticipated that for the brain to see a continuous image as opposed to the familiar flick-book effect, there needed to be 16 frames per second. Le Prince’s first solution to this problem was very much an Occam’s Razor kind of approach; if you would like sixteen pictures, use sixteen lenses. However, this produced an obvious problem: each lens was — if only marginally — in a different position from its predecessor, and thus, the resulting frames when put in a row and projected would create a very wobbly motion picture. Nevertheless, this was Le Prince’s first patent, which interestingly covered cameras and projectors with as many as 16 lenses.
Le Prince returned to Leeds in April 1887 to get away from what his wife described as industrial spies in New York who were trying to steal his ideas. He opened a workshop and in 1888 built what he called a Receiver, or single-lens parallax view-finder motion picture camera. It was fashioned from Honduras mahogany and weighed approximately 40 pounds. A light-sensitized strip of paper was advanced between a lens and a shutter by cranking a handle along one side.
There were a number of problems to be overcome if motion pictures were to be achieved, and the mind-bending action cam-esque results from Le Prince’s sixteen camera crate were one part of a multifaceted challenge. He had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t as straightforward as having the shutter open and close sixteen times per second, as the exposure wouldn’t be correct and the film would be moving, which would create blurred results. Le Prince created a sort of clamp that would stop the film every time the shutter “opened,” but this could cause the film to snap as it makes its way through the process. This meant that there had to be an additional alteration where the film only moved when the shutter was “closed.” The solution is the reason for “opened” and “closed” being in quotations when discussing this single-lens camera. The camera’s shutter was actually nothing more than a hole in a rotating disc — a very intelligent approach.
Unfortunately, capturing the motion picture was only half the problem. The next minefield to be navigated was projecting the results as the intended moving image. With flexible celluloid not being readily available quite yet, the only real option was for the images to be put on to glass slides and to have them move in front of a lens. The slides would be on a sort of conveyor belt that would rotate them in order in front of the lens and then back around again so that a continuous projection could be achieved. As you might have spotted, the difficulties with doing this are nearly a perfect mirror of capturing the images in the first place: namely, the slides had to move at the same speed they were captured and without the slides moving within the device too much. Nevertheless, Le Prince had made a monumental breakthrough. The first motion picture captured (and it is believed to be the first ever) was from Leeds Bridge in 1888.
Le Prince was proud of his invention and excited to share his few motion pictures created with his wife who had remained in the US. His wife prepared a theater in their home for the grand unveiling, and Le Prince packed up his equipment and set off first to resolve some family business in France before making his way to New York to demonstrate his creations and patent the new technology and methods. He never made it to New York.
Mysterious Disappearance
In early September 1890, prior to his voyage to New York to rejoin his family, Le Prince made his way to Bourges in central France to visit some friends for a few days. Then, on September 13, he traveled east to the capital of the Burgundy region, Dijon, where he stayed with his brother, Albert. Three days later, Le Prince waved farewell to his brother at the Dijon station as he boarded the Dijon to Paris express train. When the train arrived at the Parisian station later on September 16, Le Prince’s friends were met with an unusual circumstance: Louis didn’t get off the train. Even more unsettling, he wasn’t on the train and nor were any trace of his luggage or belongings. The Dijon to Paris express was said to have had no stops in between, and his brother Arthur confirmed his departure. None of the other commuters reported any strange behavior or emergency exits. The French Police, London’s Scotland Yard, and Le Prince’s family and friends launched extensive searches and an investigation into his whereabouts, but Louis, his 49 year old corpse, his belongings, nor any clues were ever found. It isn’t often that a person vanishes without a trace, and Le Prince’s family and friends claimed foul play for many years, suspecting his competitors. There have never been any conclusive results to the case, and he was declared dead in absentia in 1897.
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.
After his father’s disappearance, Adolphe, Louis’ son, 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 defense of keeping his father’s camera patent.
So what makes this theory of foul play even more suspicious 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 has yet to be identified. It’s 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, and this after his initial competitor disappeared mysteriously on his way to America to promote his new invention.
Edison was a big fan of the caveat, a sort of prepatent, in which an inventor declares their intention to file a full submission soon. This could be used to establish priority over a device, and helped someone like Edison snuff out rivals. If a rival applied to certify a similar process, the Patent Office put it on hold, notified the caveat holder, and gave them three months to file a formal application. Edison used the caveat 120 times.
So even though Le Prince was the first to design film reels and a camera and projector with a single lens each, thus abandoning the use of glass plates, his advances were, thanks to Edison’s sophisticated—some would say amoral—use of the patent laws, pretty much nullified.
“A lot of the nefarious stuff that can be associated with Edison isn’t very different from the practices of large corporations today,” says Paul Fischer, author of ‘The Man Who Invented Motion Picture’. “He disparaged the competition and sometimes stole from them and often sued smaller rivals into the ground. He exploited the patent system in a way not too dissimilar to the way a company like Disney uses its own weight to exploit copyright law to its own advantage.”
Fratricide?
Arthur, Le Prince’s brother, was the last person to see Louis alive and claims to have watched him depart on the express train he never disembarked from. Perhaps it could be said that Arthur had the means to kill his brother, but the real question is of motive. In Jean Mitry’s book, Histoire du Cinéma, Mitry claims that the most likely scenario is that Le Prince didn’t ever board that train in Dijon and that he was either killed by Arthur for money, or that Arthur made no attempt to stop his suicide. As has been covered already, however, no family or friends at the time felt that Louis was suicidal, and evidence appears to point to the contrary; Le Prince was excited by his new invention and had a profit-making business. His brother would have been better served to let the new invention materialize if repayment of a debt was the motive. Neither of these theories have anywhere near the motive that his competitors had and the families intuition is usually right.
Whatever the cause for his untimely death, Louis Le Prince’s legacy has been growing ever since, with his recognition finally materializing. The event essentially changed the course of history – internet searches, trivia games, etc. when asked recently: “who invented film?” the answer was often world-renowned American inventor Thomas Edison. Perhaps even the French Lumière brothers – from whose “Cinématographe” projector the word “cinema” is derived. Even the “History of Film” Wikipedia page recently featured 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. In recent years, however, Le Prince has been credited as the original inventor of the moving picture camera and his genius is finally being appreciated.
Sources:
