The Mysterious Fate of Louis Le Prince

You may not be immediately familiar with this subject’s name but if you’re reading this article with your eyes, you may have Louis Le Prince to thank for that. Well, kind of. Let me explain. Back in the 1880s, technology was advancing and the race was on to capture moving images rather than just photographs.

With various different people improving on different aspects of the process, Frenchman Louis Le Prince was the first person to capture a moving image on a single lens camera. Excited about the possibilities of his new technology, he planned to rejoin his family in the United States and show off his camera and short films to the public for the first time. But he never made it. In September 1890, Le Prince boarded a train from Dijon to Paris and was never seen again.

What happened to the newly-minted “father of cinematography” and could Thomas Edison have had anything to do with it?

Some Background

First of all, thanks to YouTube commenter “TJForceIX” for suggesting this topic. Now, let’s get a bit of background on the key figures in the story, starting with LLP himself. Louis Le Prince was born in Metz, France in 1841. Growing up, he spent a lot of time with his father’s friend, Louis Daguerre.

If this name rings a bell, it’s because he invented the Daguerreotype, the first commercially successful way of producing photographs. This sparked young Louis’s interest in photography and chemistry and he later attended Leipzig University, where he met Yorkshireman, John Whitley. The two became friends with Le Prince eventually moving to Leeds to join John’s father’s company.

Joseph Whitley, John’s dad, was a metallurgist and engineer and held around 50 patents for various things. As well as his son, John, he also had a daughter, Elizabeth, and Louis and Elizabeth got married in 1869. Awwww.

She was an artist and together they started the “Leeds Technical School of Art” which combined their skills and interests and perfected the process of getting coloured photographs printed onto pottery, ceramics and glass — think commemorative plates for Royals and stuff. In fact, there’s a time capsule under Cleopatra’s Needle in London that was apparently made by Joseph Whitley’s company that includes a portrait of Queen Victoria produced by Louis and Elizabeth. There’s also a random assortment of other things, such as some tobacco pipes, children’s toys and 12 photos of what were apparently judged to be the best looking English women of the time which would be quite interesting to see now.

Anyway, in 1881, the Le Princes left Leeds for the bright lights of New York with Louis acting as the US agent for the Whitley company. I don’t know if he spent that much time doing that as he was simultaneously very immersed in his hobby of photography, specifically: designing a motion picture camera. Or a camera capable of recording motion anyway.

It was in 1887 that Le Prince managed to record a few seconds of a man walking, slightly unnaturally, around a corner. This was titled “Man Walking Around A Corner.” Well, say what you see. He used a 16 lens behemoth of a camera and gelatine film.

Also in 1887, Le Prince returned to Leeds and, at 160 Woodhouse Lane, he and a couple of collaborators finetuned his camera down to a single lens and used paper film. This design was patented in 1888. The first short motion picture captured by this camera still survives today and is called “Roundhay Garden Scene”. It’s just a couple of seconds of a group of family and friends messing about in the garden of Le Prince’s in-laws.

Definitely a home movie vibe going on there. There’s also a short clip of Le Prince’s son, Adolphe, playing a type of accordion called a melodeon which was probably shot on the same day or close to it.

Later that year, Le Prince set up his camera to film a few seconds of life going by on Leeds Bridge and the building he recorded from has immortalized him a blue plaque stating: “Louis Aimé August Le Prince came to Leeds in 1866 where he experimented in cinematography. In 1888 he patented a one-lens camera with which he filmed Leeds Bridge from this British Waterways building. These were probably the world’s first successful moving pictures.”

Hedging your bets with the “probably” in there but as there have been no earlier examples found, I think we’re on safe ground here.

If you’ve been thinking that the title “father of cinematography” seems a bit of a stretch, get this — along with another inventor, James Longley, Le Prince was working on the prototypes of a film projector with the eventual aim of being able to show films via projection for a large audience. So there, cinematography or what?

In 1890, Le Prince decided to move back to the States and asked his wife, who had been there the whole time, to help him organize an exhibition of his films in Manhattan for later that year. Before he left for New York, Le Prince wanted to visit his brother in France to sort out some things relating to their mother’s will. She had died, leaving the brothers a nice townhome in Paris and Louis was going to sell his share to his brother, Albert.

On the 16th of September 1890, Le Prince took the train from his brother’s place in Dijon to Paris where he was going to rendez-vous with friends and travel with them back to England. When he didn’t arrive in Paris, his friends had no real choice but to go on without him. Ahh, remember those days before mobile phones?

If your friend was late you either just waited for them or gave up and assumed they’d find you later if they were still even coming. And 99% of the time, there were no issues. Anyway, with no quick way to contact people overseas, his family in New York just thought he was still on schedule and went to meet his ship when it arrived in early November.

No Le Prince was on board, only his father-in-law, Joseph Whitley and a cousin. Whitley said that Le Prince had missed the original connection but couldn’t be too far behind but as the days went by, nobody heard anything from Louis. Eventually, friends checked his workshop in Leeds but it was clearly undisturbed, and with communications taking so long, it was at least a couple of months before Le Prince was declared missing.

Also because multiple countries were involved, Le Prince’s wife Elizabeth ended up spending huge amounts of time and money contacting French and British police but no trace of Le Prince or his luggage containing patent plans and his films, were ever found.

Thomas Edison

Let’s now jump to another character in this tale in a way as smooth as the action from one of Louis Le Prince’s cameras — by which I mean not very smooth, and kind of jerky, in fact.

I knew practically nothing about Thomas Edison prior to researching this story but it turns out he was one sneaky bastard. You’ve probably heard of him via way of the light bulb, Edison vs. Tesla, etc. Well, it seems that he actually got a lot of his success due to the extreme amount of patents he took out and his canny use of patent law. He held over a thousand patents either solely or jointly over his lifetime, which is a lot in case you were wondering. So how does he fit into this story?

Well, in the late 1880s, Edison and William Dickson, although it was mainly Dickson, were working on something called a “kinetograph” which, according to the Museum of Modern Art, at least, was “the world’s first motion picture camera.” Ahem, kind of beg to differ there, MoMA. Read this article, why don’t you.

This used celluloid film and the resulting movie could be viewed via a “kinetoscope” which was like a peephole thing that only one person could look through at a time. Not really the same thing as what Le Prince was envisioning at around the same period. But anyway, Edison being Edison, he was getting patents filed in the US for moving pictures stuff left right and centre.

He held patents for the technologies needed to advance movie making and motion picture cameras and also how screening movies would take place. If anyone was working independently on some aspect of cinematography and tried to file a patent in the US, Edison could counter and sue them or force them to join his consortium which is what ended up happening in a lot of cases. He headed up what became the Motion Picture Patents Company or MPPC which basically held a monopoly over the US domestic film industry and had a chokehold over licensing agreements, access to film stock and production content.

Sounds awful! Thankfully though, the MPPC was actually too cumbersome a body to keep up with all the litigation involving independent filmmakers setting up shop in other areas of the States and in the end it was prosecuted in an antitrust case and deemed an illegal restriction of trade and was dissolved in 1918.

Filmmakers not wanting to bend the knee to Edison in the early 20th century decided their best bet was to try their luck somewhere far away from his reach where judges might be a bit less likely to agree with his stifling patent laws and, hey, where the weather was a bit nicer than on the east coast. Yes, this was the beginnings of Hollywood which is kind of ironic as it’s now seen as a churning hotbed of mass-market brain-dead fodder but there you go, what goes around comes around.

Anyway, the point here is that Edison was ‘patent-master extreme’ and wasn’t above using other people and even poaching ideas to get a jump on the competition when it came to patent law and how he could make money from it and stop other people being more successful than him. Did he go a few steps further and actually bump competitors off, though? Seems far-fetched as he was very busy doing other stuff but the MPPC was not above hiring people to violently stop other people from non-MPPC related filmmaking.

In the book Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry, authors Michael Glover Smith and Adam Selzer state:

The Edison Trust also allegedly resorted to hiring thugs with mob connections, the notorious “Goon Squad”, to enforce MPPC policy. According to Chicago filmmaker and writer William Grisham, “Goon tactics were employed to break the backs of competition. Equipment and films were destroyed, property wrecked, lives threatened.”

Yikes!

Here’s another little tidbit: in 1890 when Le Prince disappeared, the lawyers that had represented him and helped him with US patents for his inventions, Seward and Guthrie, were now working for none other than Thomas Edison.

The Theories

Alright, let’s get back to the main story of what happened to Louis Le Prince. There are several theories as to what might have happened and why and at least one is not very likely but I’m sure someone will bring it up in the comments if I don’t mention every tiny detail about a story so here you go:

Theory 1: His Family Made Him Go Into Hiding For Being Gay

See, not very likely. This theory has been discounted by all and sundry but there is reference to it in the historical record so here we go. Apparently a “famous historian” visited a library in Dijon, France, one day and had a conversation with the director there but it was kept under wraps until 1977. I don’t know who this historian was or when he visited but Dijon was where Le Prince’s brother lived so there may be a connection there.

A journalist called Léo Sauvage saw the note about the conversation in 1977 and it said something like: “Le Prince died in Chicago in 1898, voluntary disappearance at the family’s request. Homosexuality.” Although it was presumably in French. This means that Le Prince did make it back to the States after all but just lived his own life apart from his loved ones until his death.

While homosexuality was viewed very negatively in the nineteenth century, there had been no rumours about Le Prince’s sexuality and he chose a weird time to go off the radar as he was about to go public with his new films and camera technology. If the family had asked him to go away, why did they then spend so much effort trying to find him when he didn’t arrive as planned? This theory has no other evidence surrounding it so I’m willing to chuck it away as a red herring.

Theory 2: He Killed Himself

This theory is also not at the top of the list. I’ve seen differing accounts of Le Prince’s financial situation, from that the work he was doing in the States was profitable, to that he was severely in debt because he spent too much time working on his cameras. Either way, suicide doesn’t make too much sense here.

I know that you can never tell what someone’s thinking and even if everything seems totally normal, it might all change in a split second but Le Prince was getting ready to move back to the States and had all his ducks in a row to finally show his life’s work to the public. All his gear was with him and his luggage was never found so did he intentionally jump off the train at some point and take all traces of his work with him?

Nobody reported anything suspicious on the train, in fact, nobody reported even seeing him at all which is quite surprising as he was over 6 feet tall which was pretty unusual for the time. His brother, Albert, who had spent time with him just before he disappeared did believe that he had killed himself, although he was never able to give specific details as to why he thought this.

There was a body found in the river in 1890, a photo of which was rediscovered in 2003. It bears a likeness to Le Prince, however, the height is different and if there’s one thing you can’t change easily it’s your height. So although it’s unidentified, this wasn’t him. I guess we can’t 100% rule suicide out but other factors point to more likely or at least more entertaining conclusions so let’s go into those.

Theory 3: He Was Whacked by Edison

Remember Thomas Edison and his Goon Squad connections? Is it so far-fetched that he had something happen to Le Prince to clear the way for him to become the undisputed master and commander of cinematography? Well, when you put it like that I suppose it does sound a bit far-fetched. However, there are enough connections between him and Edison that there might be some truth to this theory.

OK, we know it’s an undisputed fact that Le Prince had definitely got the jump on future more well-known names such as Edison and the Lumiere Brothers when it came to capturing motion on film. I don’t really know how this played into Edison’s patent monopoly but it seemed that Le Prince might have had some sort of early legal foothold as he was already preparing to exhibit his work in the States. Maybe Edison’s kinetograph wasn’t similar enough to the single lens camera developed by Le Prince so Le Prince would be able to go on his merry way and make Edison’s kinetograph and kinetoscope obsolete before it even got going.

I am sure that Edison was aware of Le Prince’s achievements, even if just on paper. Elizabeth Le Prince, Louis’ wife, confirmed that lawyers who had seen patent applications and detailed information about Le Prince’s camera were working for Edison at the time of Le Prince’s death. One of these lawyers wrote to her in 1899 confirming that he had seen what Louis had been developing a few years earlier but couldn’t really remember much about it so not to worry. I’m paraphrasing, obviously, but there does seem like some sort of conflict of interest here or industrial espionage or just plain old stealing.

Unfortunately for the Le Prince family, they couldn’t make any headway with his patents or technology in the US as he had disappeared and no body had been found. As he was missing and not officially dead, they couldn’t actually declare him dead for seven years, leaving them unable to profit from anything he produced and allowing his competitors to run roughshod over his ideas and basically use his inventions for themselves.

In another Edison twist, the man he developed the initial kinetoscope with, William Dickson, founded a rival company called The Biograph Company, later incorporated to form the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. While they did become part of Edison’s MPPC juggernaut, Dickson filed litigation against Edison in 1898 to stop him from crowning himself the legal discoverer or inventor of cinematography which I believe would have allowed him to claim royalties for basically every motion picture ever shown. Something like that, anyway. There were a lot of royalties involved.

The Le Prince family supported Dickson in his claim, with Louis’ son, Adolphe, travelling back to Leeds and carrying out a lot of research in order to prove Edison was not the originator of cinematography. He also gave evidence in the legal proceedings. It was kind of a double edged sword, though, as they couldn’t exhibit any of Le Prince’s cameras due to filing regulations and by proving that Le Prince had developed this method, it would just name a different person as the inventor of cinematography, not helping Dickson’s case at all.

In 1901, the court ruled in Edison’s favour. That same year, Adolphe was found dead of a gunshot wound while out with his duck hunting rifle near the family’s summer home in New York. He was 29. Was he murdered because he was causing ripples with Edison? This is not known but his mother at least believed he was killed for speaking out against him. Thankfully, the next year, Edison’s court victory was overturned. So yeah, far-fetched and yet not.

I’ll also tack on here that I came across a reference of someone finding a note in Edison’s diary that was him admitting to arranging a hit on Le Prince. This appears to be from a piece of creative writing, however, not real life. Let’s move on.

Theory 4: His Brother Did It

You might have been jumping up and down yelling “it was his brother!” this whole time. Well, now’s your time to shine. Albert Le Prince was the last person to see his brother alive. He has stated that he saw him depart on the train that would have arrived in time to meet up with his friends in Paris. He literally has said that he waved him off so we have to assume that Le Prince caught the correct train and disappeared somewhere en route.

So what if he never caught the train at all and Albert is just making it up? As previously mentioned, Louis Le Prince was quite a striking character at over 6 feet tall, with a hat, coat and luggage he would definitely have stuck in some people’s minds, yet nobody came forward to confirm having seen him on the train or even at the station. Albert said that he thought his brother had killed himself, presumably by leaping from the train. If this was the case, why didn’t he mention this to police at the time or try to stop his brother leaving?

Or mention it to Le Prince’s family? Yes, posting letters was slow but they never heard anything about Louis potentially killing himself from Albert.

Did Albert kill his brother? If so, why? Their mother had left them a property in Paris in her will which they were sorting out prior to Louis’ disappearance. Louis wanted Albert to pay him his half and apparently Albert was unable to do this at the time.

Did this escalate into violence? While it does seem suspicious that Albert was the last one to see Louis alive, relations between the two were supposedly very good. Both men were outwardly successful so it seems unlikely that they would come to murderous blows over money. But money is one of the things people come to murderous blows over all the time and this Paris townhouse they’d inherited was worth a lot.

If one or the other man was in debt, this would really strain their relationship. I saw a couple of articles that referenced the fact that Louis had been in debt to a creditor in Leeds for some time and had been unable to pay back his mounting balance. This portion of the townhouse would have been a great help so if Albert couldn’t pay up, this would definitely have raised tensions. Albert would have gained nothing from killing Louis, financially or otherwise though.

Presumably on Louis’ death, his portion of the townhouse would go to his dependents, not Albert. Nothing ever came of any police investigations into the disappearance so I guess we’ll just have to park this theory somewhere in a grey area. Here’s another:

Theory 5: A Random Attack

According to modern day living relatives of Louis Le Prince, they don’t believe his brother did him in. His great-great-granddaughter, Laurie Snyder, believes that Le Prince simply took a later train than planned. Arriving in Paris too late to meet up with his friends, he maybe took some other transport like a hansom cab and came to a bad end.

Either the driver or random ne’er-do-wells took advantage of a lone traveller late at night and either his body was never found or it has never been identified. While Paris was not necessarily a murder hub, there were other reports of attacks and muggings at the same time Le Prince went missing so maybe he just got really, really unlucky.

This doesn’t explain Albert Le Prince asserting he saw Louis on the correct, earlier train, however. Maybe Louis got off the train at an earlier stop for some reason or hopped off after Albert had left. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

Conclusion

Louis Le Prince was declared dead in 1897. While he was at the forefront of developing motion picture technology, it was an industry that was evolving in different places at the same time and other people’s advances in cameras, film and projection devices were heralding in this new era of capturing motion. Did Le Prince get there first? Yes, he did, by several years.

Did he give up his burgeoning fame to live out his last few years in shame because he was gay? I don’t think so. Was he murdered because of his invention? It’s intriguing but doubtful.

Did his brother murder him over an argument about money? According to close family members, this is also doubtful. Did Le Prince throw it all away on the verge of potential success? Potentially, but also doubtful.

Was he attacked by strangers in a random act of violence? Maybe.

Basically, I have no real idea what happened to him but at least he hasn’t totally disappeared from the historical narrative and now you can watch his very short clips on YouTube where I even saw one that had been improved with neural networks and coloured to make it better. Without Le Prince, the film industry would probably have evolved into what it is now anyway but his early ideas for capturing motion, projection and use of film strips were visionary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Louis Le Prince?

Louis Le Prince was a Frenchman born in Metz, France in 1841. He was the first person to capture a moving image on a single-lens camera in the 1880s.

What was Louis Le Prince’s significant achievement?

Louis Le Prince’s significant achievement was capturing the first moving image on a single-lens camera, which included short films like ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’ and ‘Man Walking Around A Corner.‘

What happened to Louis Le Prince?

Louis Le Prince disappeared in September 1890 after boarding a train from Dijon to Paris. He was never seen again, and his fate remains a mystery.

What was the relationship between Louis Le Prince and Thomas Edison?

Thomas Edison was a rival in the field of cinematography. Edison held numerous patents related to motion picture technology and was known for his aggressive patent strategies. There are theories suggesting Edison might have had something to do with Le Prince’s disappearance.

What theories exist about Louis Le Prince’s disappearance?

Several theories exist, including that he was murdered by Thomas Edison, that he was killed by his brother over a financial dispute, that he committed suicide, that he went into hiding due to his sexuality, or that he was a victim of a random attack.

What was the significance of Louis Le Prince’s work?

Louis Le Prince’s work was significant because he was at the forefront of developing motion picture technology. His inventions included a single-lens camera and early film projection devices, which were visionary for their time.

What was the ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’?

The ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’ is a short motion picture captured by Louis Le Prince in 1888. It shows a group of family and friends in the garden of Le Prince’s in-laws and is considered one of the world’s first successful moving pictures.

What was the ‘Man Walking Around A Corner’?

The ‘Man Walking Around A Corner’ is a short film captured by Louis Le Prince in 1887. It shows a man walking, slightly unnaturally, around a corner and was one of his early experiments with motion picture technology.

What was the ‘Motion Picture Patents Company’ (MPPC)?

The Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) was a consortium headed by Thomas Edison that held a monopoly over the U.S. domestic film industry. It controlled licensing agreements, access to film stock, and production content, stifling competition and independent filmmakers.

What happened to Louis Le Prince’s patents and technology after his disappearance?

After Louis Le Prince’s disappearance, his family was unable to profit from his patents or technology because he was missing and not officially declared dead. This allowed competitors like Thomas Edison to use his inventions for themselves.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Mysterious Fate of Louis Le Prince
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.