Louis Le Prince, the Missing Inventor of Motion Pictures

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh. This is the
person that has been on my list for a very
long time, and then it kind of shot to the

(00:22):
top of the list after we did the Edward Moybridge episode.
He's going to come up a little bit today. And
then recently I was a guest at Indiana Coma convention
and I was chatting with my friend and friend of
the show, Brian Young, and he was all, ooh, you
should do an episode on Louis La Prince. And I
was like, I know he had just been reading about

(00:46):
him and was really into the conspiracy of it all.
So here's the thing. I'm going to Sunset Boulevard you
a little bit. On September sixteenth of eighteen ninety, Louis
La Prince vanished. He was never seen or heard from again.
The many events that led to that moment have also

(01:06):
led to a great deal of speculation about what exactly happened,
and that is kind of the most well known thing
about him. It has certainly been discussed a lot in
film circles. That's where I first learned about him when
I was in college getting my theater and Film studies degree.
But he had a whole life before that, some of

(01:27):
which had nothing to do with film and was very
very interesting and filled with other intriguing things. So we
are going to talk about, of course, his work in
cinematography that was very groundbreaking, and his disappearance, but that's
going to be like the last third of the episode,
because there's plenty to talk about in his life before that.
Another thing to talk about is names. So the prince

(01:49):
was named Louis emmet augustein Laplace. He was French. He
didn't go by Louis in his day to day life.
He signed his name as Augustin in most places, including
patent applications and in letters to his wife and some
people he was close to, like in his wife's family,
called him Gus, taking the gus out of Augusta. But

(02:13):
there are a lot of history pieces about him that
use his first name. I also noticed that there seems
to be a family rule that your first name is
not the name you're using. Their children were often named
multiple names, and it was like the middle name was
always what they went by. But this is a case
where he has written about so much as Louis le
Prince or Louis la Prince, that we're going to make

(02:34):
an exception of our usual policy, where we would normally
default calling someone the name they chose to go by.
But even in this case, when I would be reading
books about him, some biographers do use Augustin and it
felt almost like jarring to me. So we're gonna go
by Louis. The other thing is that, as I said

(02:56):
he was French, his last name would have been pronounced
laplace in France, but because he lived in England and
New York in a lot of his lifetime and certainly
in his mature years, like as an adult throughout his career,
a lot of people, including many historians, just used the
more anglicized La Prince. And we will probably do the

(03:17):
same thing. Same thing happened to me. I was watching
a video and at one curator at a museum said Laprince,
and I was like, who are they talking about? It's
that odd if you're familiar with this story. So we
will be calling him Louis la Prince if you want
the more French version to say it. In your head.
Great Louis la Prince was born on August twenty eighth,

(03:39):
eighteen forty one and Metz, France, which is in the
northeast of the country, near the border with Germany and Luxembourg.
His father was Louis Abraham and Bois La Prince, military captain,
and his mother was Elizabeth Marie Antoinette Boulebert. During his
earliest years, La Prince was maybe getting a unique education

(04:02):
through exposure to a family friend that was Louis de Guer.
De Geer was friends with the Prince's father, and while
the inventor of photography and the young La Prince only
overlapped by ten years before Degert died, he is often
cited as an influence on La Prince. Yeah, it's unclear
how much of this is like convenient lore versus how

(04:23):
it actually played out, but Louis La Prince is said
to have often visited de gher in his studio when
he was still a child, although we really don't know
with any certainty if the photography pioneer ever imparted any
of his knowledge to the young man. There is a
degherattype of the La Prince family from the late eighteen forties.
That may or may not have been made by de

(04:44):
Guer himself. It may have also been made by one
of his assistants. After his elementary education, Louis went to
school away from his family in Bourges, France. That's about
three hundred and twenty miles or five hundred and fifteen
kilometers southwest of Mets, near the center of the country.
After that, he moved on to Paris and the Lise

(05:05):
Saint Luis to get an undergraduate degree in science. Then
he moved on to advance study in physics and chemistry
in Germany. He was also interested in art, and he
studied painting and dabbled in photography. After his graduate studies,
Le Prince met a man named John Robinson Whitley, and
that meeting, it is fair to say, changed the course

(05:27):
of his life. Whitley was the son of Joseph and
Sarah Whitley. Joseph was a brass founder, meaning someone who
cast items in brass, and he had opened his own
brass foundry in Leeds, England in eighteen forty four, John,
who was Joseph and Sarah's oldest son, was sent to
Germany to study as part of the preparation for him

(05:48):
to continue to expand the family business, and both John
and Louis attended Leipzig University for a time, but that
was not where they actually met. It wasn't until they
were both in Paris after finishing their education in Germany
that they were connected. After Whitley received a letter from
one of their former professors suggesting that they meet, like, Hey,

(06:10):
do you know Louis la Prince? I think you guys
should really get along. Uh. And he was right because
once they did meet up, Whitley and La Prince became
very good friends. John invited La Prince to come to
Leeds for a visit in eighteen sixty six. Leeds is
in the County of Yorkshire, roughly two hundred miles north
of London and about forty five miles northeast of Manchester.

(06:32):
The Prince was happy to accept John Whitley's invitation, in
part because while the two men had been in Paris
after finishing school, John had introduced Louis to John's sister,
Sarah Elizabeth, who went by Lizzie. Lizzie was twenty at
the time. She was in Paris studying art, and she
and the twenty five year old Louis hit it off immediately.

(06:54):
They were a good match. They were both incredibly smart,
and they shared interest in art. They spent a lot
of time together over the course of a few months
in Paris, and at one point even took a long
drive out to the country so that Louis could introduce
Lizzie to his mother. That was a trip that apparently
enchanted Lizzie. Yes, she loved everything about French country life.

(07:15):
John Whitley, though, did have his own agenda in inviting
Louis to Leeds. He was hoping that La Prince would
like it there and that he would become part of
their family business. Whitley had recognized immediately that Louis possessed
this really unique and very beneficial skill set. He was,
as Tracy just said, super smart. He was multi lingual,

(07:36):
he had technical drawing training, he understood the science and
chemistry that could benefit a foundry, and his math skills
were also really really strong. Kind of an amazing package,
and when Whitley proffered an offer of employment, Louis took
it immediately. In eighteen sixty seven, La Prince traveled to
the Exposisy on Universal and Paris as a member of

(07:58):
the Whitley Foundry team. It's not clear whether he had
made the permanent move to Leeds yet at this time,
or he may have taken advantage of the trip back
to France to kind of wrap things up ahead of
a more permanent relocation. The exposition ran for six months
and Louis was there for most of it. That would
have given him time to handle anything that he might

(08:20):
have needed to wrap up while he was in France.
The Whitley Foundry won a silver medal at the exposition,
and once the Expo was finished, le Prince was living
in Leeds, and just as John and Lizzie had both
grown to love Louis, so too did their father, Joseph.
At times, according to Lizzie, it seemed that Joseph and

(08:42):
John might actually have some adversarial friction over their close
friendships with Louis, like they each wanted to be closer
to him. The father and son clearly had some friction
of their own. They would have a bigger conflict later on,
but in the late eighteen sixties they both gladly welcomed
Louis in to their family, and on July first of

(09:02):
eighteen sixty nine, Louis and Lizzie were married. As a
newly married couple, Lizzie and Louis moved into the neighborhood
of Chapeltown. There were more big changes. Louis became a
partner in the Whitley Foundry, and the couple learned they
were expecting a child not long after the wedding. A daughter,
who is sometimes referred to as Marie Gabriella and sometimes

(09:24):
as Mary Ella, was born in early eighteen seventy. Coming up,
we're going to talk about the military conflict that had
a significant impact on Louis la Prince's life, but first
we will pause for a sponsor break. In eighteen seventy,

(09:47):
the Franco Prussian War impacted Louie's life significantly, even though
he was not living in France at the time. That,
of course, is a whole multinational conflict. But the short version,
so that we can give you context, is that France,
which was led by Napoleon the Third at the time,
was getting deeply uneasy about the power amassing in the

(10:07):
coalition of German states that was coming together under Otto
von Bismarck, who was the Prime Minister of Prussia. Bismarck
and Napoleon the Third had ongoing friction and that culminated
eventually in France declaring war on Prussia in July of
eighteen seventy. This was perceived as not a wise move,
and there was not a lot of support for France

(10:29):
in Europe on this one, and Napoleon's military was almost
instantly in over their heads. The Prussian military had superior
mobilization and they were able on several occasions to surprise
the French. Meanwhile, France was trying to fight using pretty
old school tactics of military engagement rather than the more

(10:49):
guerrilla style tactics that Prussia is credited with employing, so
that just did not go well. At the Battle of
Saddan in the first days of September eighteen seventy, Napoleon
the Third surrendered and he was taken prisoner. This did not, though,
result in a treaty, and Paris was in the sights
of the German States coalition. Meanwhile, back in Leeds, in

(11:12):
addition to reading news reports about the conflict, Louis was
also receiving letters from his brother Albert as it became
a parent that Paris was likely to be engulfed in
the war, Louis made the decision to race to the
French capital to try to get his mother out before
things became dangerous for her. He was also hoping to

(11:33):
get Albert's wife, Gabrielle, and their baby out. Louis got
caught up in a riot while he was in Paris.
Biographer Paul Fisher makes this sound very much like he
accidentally stumbled into this conflict from a side street as
things were escalating. In his twenty twenty two book The
Man Who Invented Motion Pictures. There are also news articles

(11:54):
from the time that really made clear that Louis was
not at all involved in this event that he became
came a part of. Because Napoleon the Third had surrendered,
the power vacuum that he left behind was seized as
an opportunity for France to become a republic once again.
So at this point France is fighting internally because some
people wanted that and others did not, and they were

(12:17):
fighting against the forces of Prussia and the coalition behind it.
And so when La Prince arrived at this scene of
this riot, he was arrested along with the agitators, and
this set off a kind of wild series of events.
Authorities suspected Labrence was a Prussian spy. When he didn't
arrive when his mother expected him, he was reported as

(12:40):
a missing person. She contacted the paper Latmpe and noted
that a description of a man arrested at the riots
sounded like Louis. This led to an English journalist to
initiating an investigation, and that led to Louis being released
on August twenty second. Yeah, it was suddenly reported like, hey,
we all think Louis the Prince is here somewhere being held,

(13:03):
and he was for about a week. Once he was released,
Louis got his mother and his sister in law and
his baby niece back to Leeds and to safety. But
his arrest and what he had seen while he was
in France had left a really significant impression on him,
and he had become aware of just how dangerous things
were in Paris and what his countrymen were enduring to

(13:25):
try to defend France. So once his family was settled
in safely with Lizzie, Louis returned to France to fight
against the Prussians. He was stationed in Paris and that
fight went very, very poorly. After an initial period where
it was kind of a standoff as Paris was fortifying

(13:45):
and the enemy forces were kind of just hanging outside
the city. A few efforts were made by France to
get the jump on the German states, including using balloons.
This would be a great episode at some point, I
don't know when didn't work great. The French huffs were
not successful, and the transition that then happened through the

(14:06):
fall and into winter led to disease and hunger as
their supplies ran out. So when the French troops that
were at this point trapped in Paris because they were surrounded,
were finally forced to initiate a ground battle out of desperation,
they lost thousands of lives. Throughout all of this, there
was really not much information available to people in England,

(14:29):
so the La Prince family didn't know what was happening
or if they would ever see Louis again. Back in Paris,
La Prince assisted a military surgeon pulling fallen men from
battle for transport and then later burying the bodies of
both men who were killed in the conflict and those
who died from disease. After the new French government surrendered

(14:50):
at the end of January eighteen seventy one. Louis was
able to return home, but the trauma of this experience
as said to have changed his demeanor significantly. The transition
back to work and whatever passed for normal life at
that point for him came at a time when the
Whitley Foundry where he was working was also going through

(15:11):
a huge change because his friend and brother in law,
John was taking over the business from his father Joseph,
and John wanted to make a lot of big changes
to the business in an effort to expand and to
keep pace with the state of the Industrial Revolution. John
Whitley really wanted to take advantage of the growing connectivity
of Europe as the railway expanded, and he wanted to

(15:34):
create new products that would appeal to countries outside of
England that they could now reach thanks to those railroads,
and this plan offered Louis an opportunity to kind of
become a workaholic and focus all of his attention on
his technical draftsman work. This has been interpreted by a
number of biographers as possibly being away that he was

(15:55):
kind of working through his war trauma. There's been some
suspicion that he would probably be diagnosed with something like
PTSD today, but we don't know for sure. But the
problem was that John Whitley had made some egregious errors.
He had overestimated the Whitley Company's potential market and in
producing products that were not proven. He carried the company

(16:19):
into very significant debt and ultimately into bankruptcy. This led
to a huge family conflict among the Whitleys, and John
and his father Joseph stopped speaking to one another. John
moved away to Paris, but he and La Prince remained
close friends. As the company was falling into disarray. Over
the course of several years, Louis and Lizzie were expanding

(16:42):
their family. They welcomed their first son, Louis Adolf, who
went by Adolph, in eighteen seventy two. Two more children
were born in eighteen seventy four. In eighteen seventy five,
their daughter Henriette I Mean and another son, Joseph Augustine,
so three new babies. As the families livelihood was really
in a financial freefall. Louis had invested in Whitley and

(17:05):
that money was not going to come back to him. No.
When he had become a partner, he had bought into
the firm and that was a bad investment. But Lizzie
and Louie recognized what was happening, and before the firm
did declare bankruptcy and shut down, Louie had already tendered
his resignation. The couple were very much a team and
they both applied to get their teaching licenses and took

(17:28):
the Arts and Sciences examination in South Kensington to become
certified as teachers. And they did this not because they
were planning to just go out and seek teaching jobs,
but they were planning to open their own school and
they did, the Leeds Technical School of Art, and that
opened at the beginning of eighteen seventy five. This was
a private school that they ran out of their home

(17:50):
at thirty three Park Square and it was really quite successful.
Even so, the la Princes did end up taking some
side teaching jobs to supplement their incomes. A bit of
good fortune grew out of their work with the art
school when Louis and Lizzie and many of their students
brought items they had been working on to display at
the Yorkshire Exhibition of Arts and Manufacturers in the late

(18:13):
spring of eighteen seventy five. Louis had been working on
creating tiny enamel portraits on porcelain tiles. He had developed
a careful firing process for these so that none of
the really delicate work would be damaged in the kill.
These got the attention of Queen Victoria's son, Prince Alfred,
the first Duke of Edinburgh, when he visited the expo.

(18:35):
He was given several of the pieces as gifts on
the spot, and this led to some commissioned work for
the royal family. As a consequence, Louis found his social
profile elevated. He was asked to be involved in a
number of art societies and charitable organizations, and he also
became a freemason during this time. Building on the success

(18:57):
of those miniature portraits, the Prince started work working on
finding more ways to embellish porcelain, which led him to
start thinking about applying photographs to not just tiles, but
also to things like cups and plates. So this is
really the beginning of novelty Chinaware. If you buy those today,

(19:18):
you can thank Louis le Prince. He figured out how
to glaze and fire these so that the image remained
super clear, and if there was a color picture involved,
that those colors stayed super vibrant. Le Prince continued to
work with the idea of photo transfer until he could
also replicate images on metal, and he took a number
of his finest pieces to the Exposition Universell in eighteen

(19:41):
seventy eight, returning once more to Paris, and that was
a very successful outing for him. He won special recognition
at the expo. As he was preparing for the expo,
Louis and Lizzie welcomed another son, Leon Fernand, who went
by Fernand, and then in eighteen eighty they had their
last child, another son named on John died at the

(20:01):
age of two, and the remaining five La Prince's children
lived into adulthood. Louie's oldest son, Adolf, started to assist
him in the lab at an early age after showing
a lot of interest in his father's work. La Prince
didn't allow his kids in the lab because of the
chemicals that were stored there, but after Adulf snuck in

(20:22):
multiple times and apparently broke some items. At one point,
Louis decided to teach his son about his work. Yeah
apparently he could not keep a Dolph out of that room.
At the beginning of the eighteen eighties, Louis was once
again connected with his old friend and former business partner
and still his brother in law, John Whitley. Whitley at

(20:43):
this point had gotten connected to the home decor industry
and was working with a flooring and wall covering inventor
who maybe a future episode, almost certainly to develop products
for the US market, and he once again made an
offer to La Prince to move to another country, but
this time to New York. This might seem sort of random,

(21:04):
but Louie and Lizzie were involved already in home decre
through their design school, and they had both been teaching
courses on it and working on the side as designers
for people taking commissions, so it really made a lot
of sense, and Louie agreed to go with John on
what was basically a scouting visit to the US to
see if the market seemed lucrative. And Whitley was banking

(21:28):
on the nouveau reach of New York to just want
tons of home decor because that was the popular style,
right was a lot of layered things, chochkeys of plenty, stuff, stuff, stuff,
and Louie really fell in love with the city and
when he returned to Leeds after this scouting trip. He
and Lizzie discussed the idea of what it would take
to relocate the whole family and whether it was worth it,

(21:50):
and they made the decision that they were going to go.
So they closed down their school and they headed to
New York. That decision was probably informed in part by
a significant debt that Louis Le Prince had from the
time when the Whitley Foundry had collapsed. He had borrowed
three hundred and fifty pounds and he had not repaid it.
Lizzie had discovered this information when a letter arrived at

(22:13):
the house while Louis was on the scouting trip demanding repayment.
They paid a small amount back before leaving England, with
the intent that more installments would follow. Yeah. He basically
came home to Lizzie being like, Hey, were you gonna
tell me about this? Uh? Their new life in New
York was rocky at the start. Lizzie's brother John had

(22:34):
really not gotten any better at running a business than
he had been when he drove the foundry into the ground,
and as his home deck business was tanking, John then
decided he wanted Louie to travel across the US with him,
a lot of it on horseback, to find a tract
of land where they could start an artists colony. This

(22:55):
was apparently a very grueling trip. Louie actually really enjoyed it. John,
on the other hand, did not, and he lost interest
in this whole artist colony idea, and by the time
they had gone to the West Coast, he was like,
you know what, I'm going to move back to England.
But Louis wanted to stay in New York. He really
liked being in the US, and he started his own

(23:16):
decor business with a different partner. That business was called
Le Prince and Pepper. During this time, Lizzie started working
at a job that she found incredibly fulfilling. She started
teaching at the Washington Heights School for the Deaf and Mute,
and she established and ran its art department. This was
something she and her husband ended up working on together,

(23:37):
as his firm didn't have enough work to really keep
him busy, so he started teaching art lessons at the
school as part of an art therapy program. But he
needed an income, and his work at the school with
Lizzie was a volunteer situation. He did become close friends
with Lizzie's boss, Isaac Lewis Peat, and that relationship would
benefit him in a later endeavor. As he hunted for

(24:01):
other opportunities, Louis made the acquaintance of another French gentleman
in the city, panorama painter Teofi la Puigpot. Like La Prince,
Pualpo had an art background, and he had also served
in the Franco Prussian War, so the two men probably
had a lot in common. We've discussed the popularity of
panoramas during the late nineteenth century on the show before,

(24:25):
and Pualpo was very good at it. He had more
work than he could keep up with, so he hired
Louis to help him, both as an artist and kind
of as a business manager, and this partnership really got
La Prince back on his feet financially. He did one
very big project for Puelpo that got a lot of
critical acclaim and brought in a lot of cash. But

(24:45):
he didn't stay with Puagpo for long, even though he
was invited to, because Louis La Prince had become fascinated
with the idea of moving pictures. It was something that
had been on his mind even before meeting the panoramist
and working in panorama had actually only stoked that fire.
In just a minute, we will finally get to the

(25:06):
motion picture part of la Prince's life, but first we
will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going blue.
La Prince's interest in moving pictures seems pretty natural when

(25:27):
you consider his already established lifelong interest in art and
photography and new ways to reproduce images. At the same
time that La Prince was working on fixative methods to
create unique porcelain, prior podcast subject, Edward Moybridge was developing
his method for capturing the movement of a galloping horse

(25:47):
by using an array of still cameras and snapping them
in sequence as the horse ran by. That was kind
of the dawn of cinema, but Moybridge's though a praxiscope,
was just a single rotating glass plate, he couldn't really
capture anything more than a few seconds of movement. The
next step forward for motion picture was the invention of

(26:08):
the krona photograph. This was the work of a French scientist,
Ettianjul Moray, who may be a future episode, and it
was something that Murray, who was a physiologist worked on
to advance his own understanding of body mechanics through movement.
This was an interesting looking device. Was literally a shotgun

(26:28):
style mechanism with a circular magazine on it that contained
photosensitive silver bromide gelatin plates. It captured twelve images per
second and then put every image on the same plate.
It was also very cool, but not a way to
capture motion for replay. Yeah, if you look at a
photograph of this, it's literally a gun with his weird

(26:50):
big barrel on it. People actually call it a camera
gun sometimes and then enter an episcopal priest named Hannibal Goodwin.
So Goodwin was interested in photography as a hobby, and
he developed the first film that was flexible and could
be rolled up like Murray. He was solving a problem

(27:11):
for his own unrelated work. He wanted to make photographs
of biblical scenes that he could use in Sunday school lessons,
but the existing ways to capture images were heavy and cumbersome,
and he thought that if he could come up with
a lighter setup or an easier setup, it would just
make his whole project infinitely easier and better. The Kodak

(27:32):
camera that was available at the time solved some of
the problem, but you then had to send the entire
camera back to Kodak to their factory to have your
images processed, and Goodwin didn't like that either, so he
invented a new film that he could process himself. This
new film was the first celluloid. It was made using

(27:52):
nitro cellulose, that cellulose that has been exposed to nitric
acid and sulfuric acid and nitroben more commonly known today
as nitro benzene that is a highly toxic yellow liquid
with an oily texture, and this what's often described as
a sharp almond aroma. Nitro Cellulose is highly flammable, So

(28:14):
in combining these two things and then diluting them with alcohol,
Goodwin was doing something really risky in terms of just
chemical exposure, although he probably was not at all aware
of just how risky. When Goodwin poured his toxic mixture
onto glass and let the moisture evaporate from it, the
remaining film could capture images after it was coated with emulsion,

(28:36):
and it could be cut in strips and rolled into film.
Goodwin and Kodak applied for role film patents at the
same time, which resulted in a court battle that was
not settled for years. Goodwin's estate finally got a large
payout from Kodak in the early nineteen hundreds, which was
several years after Goodwin died. So all of this was

(28:56):
going on at the same time that Louis la Prince
was getting really excited about film, and this takes us
back to that friendship we mentioned earlier with Lizzie's boss.
So the school had a workshop and Pete let La
Prince use it as he tried to build on the
work of these other inventors to unify their ideas into
a device that could finally capture movement on film to

(29:21):
be replayed later. But exactly how la Prince went about
this is very unclear because he did not make any
notes of his process. What we know about it actually
comes from statements that were given later after the fact
by people who La Prince hired to make or assist
with various components. But we know that in eighteen eighty six,

(29:43):
with the help of several different mechanics and machinists, La
Prince developed a sixteen lens camera. He applied for a
US patent on this device on November tewod. His patent
was for both the camera and the procedure for using it,
including projection from the same apparatus. It was titled Method
of an Apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery

(30:06):
and life. Here is how la Prince described his device quote,
in order to carry out my method, I provide an
apparatus consisting of a receiver or photo camera and a
deliverer or stereo opticon adapted to throw the transparent pictures
obtained by same order and time in which they were taken,
as will be hereinafter fully described and claimed, the transparent

(30:30):
pictures thrown in quick succession on a finely ground plate, glass,
or other suitable material will produce on the eye of
the spectator the same effect or impression as the objects
themselves when in motion in front of the camera receiver.
He received approval for the patent in early eighteen eighty eight.
That was a long time for it to clear, and

(30:52):
that's because there were problems. The patent office noted that
he was really patenting two different devices, a camera and
a projector, and the patent office also thought that his
camera might be too similar to other patents that had
been filed, including Edward Moybridge's La Prence got a lawyer involved,
and a lot of back and forth ensued with the

(31:13):
patent office, including La Prince going in person to the
patent office to discover that there were some misunderstandings about
the workings of his invention, specifically that it was one
apparatus that did both the filming and the projecting, not
two different things under one patent application. But eventually things
were resolved and he received his patents. But that combination

(31:37):
patent might have been more of a problem than it
was worth, because La Prince had a really hard time
getting the projection element to work, so much so that
he had to cancel public demonstrations that were planned to
showcase it. There were people in his inner circle who
later claimed to have seen it work though, Yeah, one
of his daughters in particular claimed that she had snuck

(31:59):
in his workshop and had seen it functioning, But other
people he knew also said the same thing, that they
had seen it. But in that time, I mean it
was a year and change before that patent came through.
La Prince actually moved back to Europe sort of temporarily.
He had been offered use of the old Whitley Foundry
workshop in Leeds by his in laws, and his mother

(32:22):
was also quite ill in Paris, so in early eighteen
eighty seven he and his oldest son Adolf crossed the
Atlantic and then he went on to Paris to be
with his mother. In May. Lizzie stayed in New York
with the rest of their children because the Prince had
not wanted to relocate all of them just for what
he thought was a temporary work travel. While he was

(32:44):
there in Paris, he reconnected with the Panoramas Pois Pout
who was back there, and he also worked with some
machinists locally to continue refining his camera. His mother, Elizabeth
died on May twenty eighth, and he kept working on
his camera while griev and then eventually moved back to
Leeds to continue his work back with his in laws.

(33:05):
One of the problems with the existing apparatus was that
while sixteen lenses captured movement well, the incremental shifts and
angles created weird distortions when the picture was projected. He
eventually ditched the sixteen lens design and paired it down
to a single lens, But like his initial work, we
just don't know much about why specifically he changed it

(33:29):
so drastically. What we know is mostly from what he
shared in letters to Lizzie. He noted that having to
plan each little detail was astonishing and it took so
much time to get parts, and he worried that he'd
be held up through Christmas. It was actually well passed that.

(33:49):
Once he had the US patent and refined his machine
in January of eighteen eighty eight, La Prince immediately filed
for patents in Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary and it yeah,
he was not messing around with patents. And then later
that year in October, La Prince captured what is believed
today to be the world's first film. It is known

(34:11):
as round Hay Garden scene, and that's a reference to
the garden at his in law's house. We've talked about
early film efforts on the show before, and this one
is his unassuming and consequently sort of charming as any other.
If Eature's four People in a Garden in Leeds. It
is La Prince's son Adolf, his in laws Joseph and
Sarah Whitley, and a family friend named Annie Hartley. It

(34:35):
was shot on paper roll film made by Kodak, and
it's only a few seconds long, and it shows all
four people in motion. One is walking, one is stepping backwards,
the other two are dancing. And in recent years there
have been additional frames of films that he made that
have been discovered, but round Hay Garden scene really remains

(34:55):
kind of the most well known and the one that
is believed to have been the first. Once the Prince
had perfected the camera, he wanted to do the same
for the projector part of the device, and that ran
right into eighteen eighty nine. The solution ended up being celluloid.
Prior to that, he'd been using emulsion coded paper, but
the superior flexibility of celluloid would have solved some of

(35:18):
the problems that he was having with threading and continuity.
He was so convinced that he had perfected his camera
that he sent Adolph back to New York in the
autumn of eighteen eighty nine with instructions to have Lizzie
start looking for venues where they could demonstrate the new
version of the machine. She purchased the historic and rumored
to be haunted Morris Jammel Mansion in Washington Heights and

(35:41):
started to renovate it as their home and the showcase
for her husband's work. Louis did continue to tinker with
his invention even after he had sent a Dolph home, though,
because he kept writing to Lizzie that he had new
problems popping up that had to be solved with it,
and as he updated the apparatus, he was pretty careful
to file addendums to his various patents, and those addendums,

(36:05):
in some cases offer clues to just how similar his
work was to the motion picture machines that eventually came
to be, including one that describes transparency strips with holes
punched along the edges that fitted onto teeth on guide rollers. Finally,
in early eighteen ninety, La Prince was satisfied with the

(36:26):
apparatus enough so that he demonstrated it to the secretary
of the Paris Opera, Fernand Moobson, who documented this meeting.
It seemed as though things were starting to click into place.
La Prince, who had been in a fragile financial situation
for years at that point, seemed poised to turn things

(36:46):
around with the product of his work. He was going
to visit his brother, then make his way home to
New York. In September, he traveled to Brittany with a
couple he knew from Leeds, and then onto Dijon alone.
Were still settling the estate of their late mother and
the prince, who was going to get a lot of
money from his mother's family fortune, hoped to wrap that

(37:09):
up and get back home to his family. He had
been away for several years at this point. He made
plans to meet his friends back in Leeds, then travel
together with them to Liverpool to board the ship for
New York, but he missed that meeting. His friends went
on thinking he had just extended his stay with his brother.
Lizzie waited in New York for her husband to return.

(37:31):
When he failed to appear for weeks after his planned arrival,
Lizzie contacted Albert by Transatlantic cable asking for information. Albert
responded saying that Louis had missed his first train, but
that then he had accompanied his brother to the train
station and put him on the afternoon train to Paris
on September sixteenth, and that that train had left the

(37:53):
station at two thirty seven pm, and that was all
Albert knew, and no one ever saw Louis again, nobody
was ever recovered, and his cameraon projector apparatus vanished with him.
He was finally declared dead seven years after his disappearance.
The family searched for Le Prince in every imaginable way

(38:16):
in the years that followed, and it really took a toll.
His father in law, Joseph Whitley, had a mental breakdown
and died in eighteen ninety one. His son Adolph died
in nineteen oh one from a self inflicted gunshot wound,
and it's unknown if this was an accidental discharge or
a suicide. Lizzie not only spent a great deal of
time and money trying to find her husband, she also

(38:39):
fought to get his work recognized as happening before that
of Thomas Edison, but with little success. Yeah, there's a
lot of characterizations as of her reading in the paper
the morning that Thomas Edison's film work was announced and
feeling very uneasy and weird about the whole thing. What

(39:03):
happened till le Prince has been the source of speculation
for more than one hundred and thirty years, and the
theories ranged from really pretty plausible to less plausible, depending
on your point of view, with some verging kind of
on conspiracy theory. A very common one is that Louis
la Prince died by suicide in the face of financial ruin,

(39:24):
but detractors to that theory point out that he really
seemed to be in a very hopeful place. He believed
that he had truly cracked open the future of moving pictures,
and he was also set to inherit a significant sum
of money, so this didn't make a lot of sense.
Another theory is that his brother Albert had killed him.
Albert had also gone through a lot in the years

(39:45):
from eighteen eighty seven to eighteen ninety. His wife had
died suddenly, as had their mother, and he too was destitute.
That last visit he had with Louis was about their inheritance,
of course, from their mother's estate, and people who want
to point a finger at Albert say that he was
trying to get the whole inheritance, but correspondence from his

(40:06):
family to the New York La Princes all indicated that
that visit was very cordial and amicable, and the brothers
were very close and on good terms. A popular theory
and one that Lizzie la Prince seemed to believe was
that Thomas Edison recognized that he had a real competitor
in La Prince and had him killed. Lizzie, who lived

(40:29):
until nineteen twenty five, wrote a memoir which was never
published but which has been made available to a lot
of biographers. This is a handwritten, unedited version of her
life and her husband's, and there are some instances where
it seems like she might be tying together threads that
aren't quite right. For example, she stated that La Prince
was getting celluloid from the Lumier brothers in eighteen eighty nine,

(40:53):
but it's not clear whether they would have had access
to reels of it at that time. She makes a
case that Prince was acting strangely and secretive in New
York before he left in eighteen eighty seven, and that
he might have been warned about Edison. There's really no
substantiation for that other than that it's pretty well established

(41:15):
that Edison was cutthroat in business and kind of a jerk.
It's not he did not have a reputation for murdering
human beings. Yeah, there was what was, at least to
me a somewhat funny development in the Edison theory in
the twenty first century. So in two thousand and eight,

(41:35):
the periodical Materials Today, which is a material science journal,
had a writing competition and one of the entries into
that competition was a piece titled The Disappearance of Louis
Le Prince, and it was written by a Tree Gupta.
This is a work of fiction, but it seemed to
confuse people a little bit because the setup of the

(41:56):
writing is that it is a news article written about
a discovery made by a person named Alexis Bedford, who
the piece says is a graduate student at the University
of New York. And there are fake interview segments with
Bedford in this fake article in which he describes finding
a book while looking through an archive collection of Thomas

(42:16):
Edison's papers, and in the book, which appears to be
a journal, is an entry that seems like it suggests
that Edison is confessing to involvement in the murder of
la Prince. Because of its news article style and the
very strong writing, it's really well written, and the fact
that it appeared in a science journal, a lot of

(42:37):
people thought this was real, even though Materials Today put
a header at the top of the article that read
our writing competition winner leads us into the dark and
murky past of some well known inventors of the twentieth century.
So it you know how things spread like wildfire online.
It led to a lot of new speculation, but it

(42:59):
was not a gun. It's fiction. La Prince's great great granddaughter,
Laurie Snyder, was interviewed by the BBC in twenty fifteen
as part of coverage of a new documentary about La Prince,
titled The First Film by filmmaker David Wilkinson. Her explanation
is the least fantastical, she told the BBC. Quote, my

(43:21):
personal theory is pretty mundane. According to Lizzie's memoirs, the
train Louis took would have arrived in Paris at about
twenty three hundred. Being so late, he probably hailed a
handsome cab 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 sin, hit

(43:41):
him over the head and threw him in the sin.
There were two articles from this time that suggests that
thieves were targeting lone travelers and La Prince was in
the wrong place at the wrong time. She goes on
to note that he deeply loved his family, so she
did not believe that the suicide theory or the one
that he orchestrated his disappearance to dodge creditors. She also

(44:04):
dismissed the idea that Albert could have killed him as ludicrous,
noting how close and loving the family was, and of Edison,
she said quote, although he was certainly ruthless, he probably
had better things to do than order a hit on
a competitor. While Lizzie fought in vain to have her
husband recognized as a pioneer of cinema in her lifetime,

(44:26):
in the twentieth century, his work has finally gained recognition.
In nineteen thirty his workshop in Leeds got a commemorative plaque,
and seventy years later, in two thousand and three, the
University of Leeds named its Cinematography and Media Center after him.
La Prince's daughter donated the two existing prototypes of his
cameras to London's Science and Media Museum. They are part

(44:50):
of the permanent collection there. Yeah, and they have a
great online galleries of those two if you want to
see them. That is Louis La Prince, who's very, very
very fast, aged me. Yeah, do you also have listener mail? Yes,
of course I do. This one made me laugh and laugh.
This is from our listener, Jen, who writes, hello my

(45:11):
favorite podcast hosts, Hi, Jen, thank you. That's so sweet,
Jen Condinius. I thought you might get a kick out
of this story. I'm catching up on podcasts. I don't
even remember which episode I was listening to on Thursday
last week, where someone sent in pictures of some roosters
as a pet tax. Holly told her story about her
attack roosters who would hide in the woods and jump
out at them. Then, on Friday, I went to a

(45:33):
farm amusement place with my four year old nanny kid,
an actual kid, not a goat. While we were eating lunch,
this rooster snuck up behind us like a ninja, really
close and crowed. Scared the living daylights out of both
of us. He then stood there and watched us eat.
I suspect he thought my tuna salad was chicken salad. Later,
I witnessed him and his posse terrorizing a mom with

(45:54):
three young children. She had to get staff to shoot
them away. I think he might be related to Holly's
roosters update. I've been writing this email this morning between
everything else I'm doing. I'm currently on a mini farm
that has chickens. Usually they are in their coup. I
did not know they were free ranging it this morning.

(46:14):
I just opened the door to the car poard and
there were six chickens standing there right on the other
side of the door. They flapped their wings and took off.
So now I've been scared by chickens twice since listening
to the podcast, and I don't think that had ever
happened before. Thanks Holly, Jen. She included a picture of
one of these roosters. Listen, I can tell you that
one's probably not related to mine. Mine were a barred

(46:37):
rock and a Rhode Island red and I will never
forget them. And they were awful and I hated them,
and I was afraid because I was little. Keep in mind,
sure I was like seven, and when a two and
a half foot tall angry bird is coming at you
with talents. And also they weren't just there to scare it.
They would literally tear into people if they could. They
were awful, But I do love that Jen had benign
and funny interactions with roosters, even if they scared I've

(47:03):
been told that some roosters are great and very sweet.
I just haven't known any. I'm sure they're out there.
I'm ready to meet one. If you would like to
write to us and tell us about the benign but
sometimes frightening appearing animals in your life, or anything. Really,
you don't have to even send us pet pictures or
any pictures, just whatever you want. You can do that.

(47:26):
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(47:47):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Louis Le Prince, the Missing Inventor of Motion Pictures