The Historic Disappearance of Louis Le Prince

**"The Historic Disappearance of Louis Le Prince"** is a video made by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, uploaded onto YouTube on March 9, 2018. It was the seventh episode of the third season of *BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime*, and the fifty-seventh episode overall. You can find it here.

## Description

This French inventor stepped onto a train... and disappeared from history.

## Background

Any casual cinema fan would likely tell you that Thomas Edison invented the motion picture camera in the late 1800s.
In 1888, Thomas Edison wrote, "I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion." Being a film student himself, Ryan learned about Edison in film school, but what if he told you the true father of moving pictures may actually be a brilliant Frenchman named Louis Le Prince? You might say, well, if this were true, then why have I never heard of him? Maybe you were never supposed to, because on one fateful afternoon, on Monday, September 16th, 1890, Louis Le Prince would step onto a train and never be seen again, a vanishing that would essentially wipe him from the history books.

Louis Le Prince was born in the northeastern city of Metz, France, on August 28, 1841. Louis was a student of art, chemistry, and physics. In 1866, Louis moved to Leeds, England, to work as an agent at a brass foundry called Whitley Partners. In 1869, Louis married a fellow artist, Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Whitley. In 1881, Louis, Lizzie, and their children moved to New York. It's here that Louis would manage artists painting panoramic landscapes. These immersive paintings would inspire Louis to create an even more immersive experience: pictures that moved.

Louis began working on moving pictures as early as 1885, inventing a camera with 16 lenses that he hoped could create what we now call movies. It's thought that Louis began building and testing an early version of his single-lens camera soon after. According to Louis's daughter, Marie, who was a teenager at the time, she recalled seeing her father project moving images on a wall in their workshop as early as 1886. This was long before Thomas Edison had even begun conceptualizing motion picture designs about two years later. In 1886, Louis applied for a United States patent for his 16 lens camera that included brief phrasing, allowing for a single-lens version. This process would take nearly two years. In 1887, Louis moved back to Leeds, a move that, according to a New York Times article, was motivated by a desire to hide out from those who might steal his work, such as "industrial spies", as his wife Lizzie would describe them.

In 1888, Louis built what would be his true claim to being the father of moving pictures: a working version of the single-lens motion picture camera. It was wooden, mahogany, and weighed 40 pounds. It had a hand crank that manually moved light-sensitive paper along between the lens and shutter. Here's Toni Booth of the National Science and Media Museum in the UK on Louis's single-lens camera: "if you look at the mechanism that camera is using, it's a very similar mechanism to all the subsequent moving image cameras that came after that. It is a single roll of film moving from one spool to another through a shutter and taking sequential images which then were designed to be projected to reproduce that movement. As a piece of moving image recording live action, yes, I would say he was the first one to do that."

Louis's single-lens camera would produce viewable films in 1888, three of which have survived. One of these films, which you're seeing now, was claimed to have been shot on October 14th, 1888, showing Louis's son, in-laws, and a friend walking around. The date of October 14th, 1888, is backed up by the fact that one of the women shown in the film died 10 days later on October 24th, 1888. Keep in mind, Edison's earliest film wouldn't even be shot until nearly three years later in 1891.

Though Louis had a working camera, the problem Louis now faced was that he needed, A, a way to show these films, and B, a more durable material than his light-sensitive paper in order to plan for repeated projections of his movies. He experimented and finally landed on celluloid in 1889, which he had began using for both shooting and projection. This eliminated many of the problems he'd been having with his projector, such as glass plates that kept breaking. Louis made early, unofficial demonstrations of his device. On March 30th, 1890, Louis projected his moving pictures at the National Opera in Paris. Ferdinand Mobisson, secretary of the National Opera, swore in an affidavit that he had witnessed what the projector could do and had even, "made a complete study of this system". Meanwhile, Edison would not publicly show his motion pictures until three and a half years later. In the summer of 1890, Louis wrote to Lizzie, who was back in New York with the rest of the family. In the letter, Louis stated his intent to return to New York in September, where he would publicly and officially demonstrate his moving pictures to the world.

At this point, Louis had been granted patents in France and Britain that covered his single-lens motion picture camera. However, none of the patents were thorough enough to legally proclaim him as the inventor of a working version. If Louis were able to publicly demonstrate his moving pictures in New York as planned, Louis surely would have secured his spot in history, legally, as the inventor of the motion picture camera. As bad luck would have it, this brings us to his disappearance.

At the time, Louis was visiting his brother, Albert Le Prince, in Dijon, France. On September 16th, 1890, at 2:37 p.m., Louis Le Prince boarded a train for Paris as part of a trip back to Leeds, where he would retrieve his film devices, and then travel back to New York to meet his family and show his invention. With him, Louis only carried a black suitcase. According to Christopher Rawlence, author of a book on the case, the suitcase contained some rather important documents. Inside the suitcase was Louis's latest work on his patents. At the time, Louis was still tweaking his patents on his single-lens camera to further protect himself from the theft of his inventions. As Frederick Mason would remind reporters decades later, not only did Louis disappear, but the suitcase did as well. All efforts to find Louis failed. Louis Le Prince, carrying paperwork meant to protect his creation, boarded a train to share his invention with the world, and vanished.

Shortly after Louis's disappearance, a family associate would enter Louis workshop and discover Louis's machine safe, packed for the journey to America, untouched. Unfortunately, in a missing persons case, nobody, not even a spouse, is allowed to use the missing person's patent for seven years, meaning Louis's wife Lizzie would be unable to commercialize Louis's invention until 1897, but as mentioned before, Edison displayed his kinetoscope movies in 1894 and projected his films as early as April, 1896. As history would tell, Edison would often be credited with inventing the motion picture camera, and Louis would be forgotten.

## Theories

* **The first theory is that Louis was abducted or killed by men working for non other than Thomas Edison.** This theory was held by Louis's wife Lizzie who believed Edison's motive was to stop Louis's invention from reaching the public.
	+ The timelines certainly do match up. In 1888, Edison began to seriously think about moving pictures, while by that time, Louis had already successfully shot films with his single-lens camera. Behind the scenes, Thomas Edison was said to be an egotistical genius, though a good deal of his success was built on taking credit for others' ideas, such as the ideas of people that he employed. Edison had many rivals and he even ruined some of them, but he was pretty adept at doing so through legal battles. He frequently claimed others were encroaching on his patents and often won these lawsuits and used the leverage to his financial benefit.
	+ Piggybacking off that, in 1898, Edison sued American Mutoscope and Biograph Company on the grounds of patent infringement on his kinetoscope motion picture camera patent. This lawsuit would ironically bring Louis Le Prince into the spotlight, as Mutoscope would call Louis's son, Adolphe Le Prince, as one of its witnesses. Adolphe actually took a year off from Columbia to travel and gather evidence to make the case that his father invented the motion picture camera, not Edison, as Edison was claiming. According to Rawlence, Lizzie and other family members still held onto the possibility that Louis was being held captive, having been kidnapped in 1890, and that once it was known in a court of law that he was the true inventor of the motion picture camera, his captors would let him go.
	+ During the trial, Adolphe proved the films had been made prior to October 24th, 1888, by producing him grandmother's death certificate, dated on that day, as she appears in one of the films, yet this wasn't totally incontrovertible proof that the single-lens camera built by Louis was the same one that took the films in 1888. When examining Louis's patents, the lawyers in the case focused solely on Louis's US patent, and sadly for Louis, this particular patent, unlike his ones in Britain and France, was meant mainly for his previous 16 lens camera and did not include specifications for the single-lens camera, the camera being focused on in the trial. By bad luck, the phrase, "one of more lenses", which would have covered both of Louis's inventions, was removed by the US Patent Office on the grounds that they already had granted for a single-lens camera in the past, though that particular patent was for a still camera, not a motion picture camera like Louis's. This omission would prove to be disastrous in trial.
	+ The trial would initially go for Edison, and over the years, the trial would go back and forth, starting the famed patent wars. As such, Adolphe's testimony would move out of focus and his father, Louis Le Prince, would once again be forgotten. Perhaps tangentially related, in 1901, 3 years after Adolphe testified, Adolphe was found dead in the woods, bloody and broken. He had apparently been shot dead. He had been out shooting and a gun was found by his side. It was assumed he died of a hunting accident. Some believed it was suicide, while some in the family believed he'd been murdered.
	+ However, in regards to Edison playing any part in foul play regarding Louis, or even Adolphe, authors Jean-Jacques Aulas and Jacques Pfend point out that there is no evidence to support this theory. For what it's worth, Laurie Snyder, Louis's great great granddaughter, has also voiced her doubts that Edison, a busy and successful man, would care enough to send a henchman to kill a man.
* **Albert Le Prince, Louis's brother, was responsible for Louis's disappearance.** Louis's brother Albert, an architect, was notably the only person who claimed to have seen Louis board the train.
	+ According to Rawlence, Albert even spoke to Louis through his train compartment window. However, the 1890 investigation never turned up a single train passenger who could say they saw Louis on board. This is odd, considering the fact the Louis was a gargantuan man, standing at six foot four, probably not a man that could get lost in a crowd.
	+ Perhaps the main reason some are suspicious of Albert involves the will of Louis and Albert's other, who passed away in 1887. Albert was the executor of their mother's will, and according to author Christopher Rawlence, Louis had traveled to Dijon, France, not just to visit Albert, but to receive his share of the inheritance, worth over $140,000 by today's standards. This gets even more interesting when you consider the investigators in 1890 did not seem to know about the inheritance, which would give Albert a motive, and furthermore, they did not seem to question Albert's testimony regarding seeing Louis board the train. Laurie Synder, Louis's great great granddaughter, once again doubts this theory, basing her beliefs on Lizzie Le Prince's memoirs, which depict a close, loving family. Authors Aulas and Phend also note there is no evidence to support this theory, and emphasize that Albert's family strongly denies it.
* **The final theory is perhaps the bleakest, that Louis Le Prince simply didn't want to be found.** This is the theory of Louis's great nephew, who is the grandson of Albert.
	+ The theory goes that Louis was greatly in debt, to the tune of $84,000 by today's standards. During the mid 1870s, Louis gave a bad loan to Lizzie's family business that didn't pan out. Toward the end, the dual income of Louis and Lizzie had to not only provide for the family, but also finance Louis's film experiments, and according to author Christoper Rawlence, Louis hadn't worked steadily for an income for about three years leading up to his disappearance. In April, 1890, Louis wrote to Lizzie about problems with the projector, adding, "I hope to send the word, it is, in my next, and also some cash, which unfortunately I have not at hand, and it makes me feel very uneasy as I know you do not make much just now."
	+ It's been suggested that in the end, Louis relied on his mother's inheritance in order to continue working on his projector, but learned during his trip to France that he didn't have immediate access to the money. Of Louis's breakout invention, some, like author Christopher Rawlence, believe that Louis, a noted perfectionist, felt his projector was not up to the standards he had envisioned. His letters offer evidence that Louis was unhappy with the quality of the projector's picture. It was bright and the picture was jumpy. According to Rawlence, it's possible that Louis just got off the train between Dijon and Paris, rather than face his family in defeat. For people who believe this, people the believe maybe he wasn't pleased with his projector.
	+ Frederick Mason, Louis's assistant, believed that Louis would only stand to gain from his inventions, which would thus make it nonsensical for him to intentionally disappear on the cusp of his debut. David Wilkinson, a producer on a documentary on Louis, said, "I am absolutely convinced that he would have raised money from a very distinguished audience so then he could start manufacturing on quite a big scale. He would've done what Edison and the Lumieres did, but before them. He would've been known."