The birth of Hollywood owes a surprising amount to the untimely demise of a single Frenchman.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We all need a break from the constant cycle to
learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses
Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick up a
new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball, the Rise
of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court,
(00:25):
and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the dots on
several stories from history. Right now, they're giving our listeners
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special U r L go to the Great Courses Plus
dot com slash as. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
(00:45):
com slash o z y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash as. My name is Chris rulans Um. I'm
a writer and filmmaker, so that's what I do, and
really most of my craft over the last thirty forty
(01:06):
years has been in filmmaking. Back in the six Rawlins
took a job with a theater group in Leeds in
Northern England and needed somewhere to live um and this
large um terrorist Victorian terrorist house came possible for us
to buy. Unfortunately, the house was so run down that
(01:29):
it was under threat of demolition, and at that point
the guy selling it to us said, oh, there won't
be able to knock this down. The inventor of the
movie camera once lived here. No, not Thomas Edison. He
lived in New Jersey. And we thought, ho, ho, it
is just just a means for you to get your money,
and he said no. Look these like these rooms are
deliberately long. You can project from the front door of
(01:52):
the house to the back an uninterrupted being. Rawlins bought
the house and it turned out that the seller was right.
A troubled French and turnamed Augustine La Prince had lived
there back in the late nineteenth century. Chris Rawlins, the filmmaker,
had in fact just moved into the house where some
of the first film images ever were shot. But Rawlins
soon discovered there was so much more to the story
(02:14):
of Augustine La Prince than just that. Back in eighteen ninety,
La Prince boarded a train to Paris. He planned next
to sale to New York to share his new motion
picture camera invention. With the world. But La Prince disappeared
from that train and from the pages of history. His
body was never found. Nobody ever discovered what happened, including
(02:37):
his family, who threw quite a lot of resources of
hiring private detectives to make it work. Nothing emerged. Welcome
to Flashback, a podcast from Ozzie about some of history's
most incredible unintended consequences. After he moved into Augustine La
Prince's old house, Chris Rawlins spent the next decades of
(02:59):
his life trying to figure out what happened to La
Prince and how close he was indeed becoming the father
of modern cinema. And what he learned is a remarkable story,
one with consequences for everything from Thomas Edison to the
founding of Hollywood In sunny California, it would be an arresting,
(03:21):
even haunting series of images even if it weren't so historic.
Four adults paraded around in circles in a sunlit garden,
as if waiting for the horn to blow in some
children's game. The clip lasts only two seconds, but there
in the suburbs of Leeds, England in October, you see
the fruits of what is likely the first motion picture
(03:42):
ever recorded. The cameraman behind that garden footage and the
inventor of the technology that captured it was not Thomas
Edison or even the Lumier brothers. It was the man
who had beaten them all to the punch, Augustine la Prince.
He set up his family on a Sunday and got
them all out on the garden of Joseph Whitler's house
(04:03):
to do a little dance. Quickly was the Prince's brother
in law. The scene was recorded at twelve frames per second,
not quite the sixteen frames per second that's required for
the film to appear seamless to the human eye, so
they're jumpy, they don't quite get to the persistence of vision.
The following year, La Prince shot another early film that
still exists, overlooking Leeds Bridge. There is still an old
(04:27):
warehouse building that looks down at the bridge from from
the right, which is the place he had his camera
in the summer of to film traffic going over Leeds Bridge,
and you can see people walking to and fro and
well only too given there was only thirty frames and
(04:48):
and I think it's a wagon being taken across by horses.
It's kind of incredible watching something that was filmed more
than one and thirty years ago. And for those who
want to watch the clips, I will include links to
them in my lecture notes this week at the flashback
home page on AUSI dot com. Augustine la Prince was
(05:10):
born in France in eighteen forty one. He was tall, dark,
I'm handsome. His father was a min army officer and
friends with Daga. That's Louis de Guerre, the father of photography.
As a young man, La Prince studied painting and chemistry
in Paris, where he also met a woman from northern
England named Lizzie Whitley. The two married and La Prince
(05:33):
took a job as the manager of a cyclo rama.
Cyclorama was that sort of huge circus tent on the
perimeter of which, if you like, was painted a battle,
say the Battle of Atlanta or the Battle of Gettysburg.
The cycle rama was kind of the imax of the
nineteenth century. There was a big platform the viewers would
(05:53):
stand on in the center so that they could look
at the panoramic image around them. So if there were
soldiers strug in a particular part of the battle or
a boat was needed. Half of that boat would be
real in three dimensions and the other half would be painted,
which made it seem as if that too, was of
three dimensions, and that the transition from three dimensionality to
(06:16):
two dimensionality was as imperceptible as possible. It was a
surreal experience at the time, but la Prince thought he
could do even better. His dream was to make a
version of a moving cycle rama in color. He said,
he put it, that is, to bring it to life,
to make it move. All the potential of this trick
(06:39):
of the eye that made it seem as if it
was real. He wanted to take a step further into
motion and into animotion. In the eighties, La Prince began
to tinker with photography and eventually motion pictures, but he
was far from the only inventor in the world trying
to harness the power of the moving image. There was
a race going on and somewhat of a ruthless well.
(07:00):
Inventions and patents were a big deal in those days.
Secrecy was encouraged. It was often felt that there might
be spies there to get their secrets. La Prince took
incredible precautions at his workshop and leads to keep his
innovative work confidential. The anxious chain smoking inventor had shutters
installed on the windows, extra bolts placed on the doors.
(07:24):
He was paranoid if you like that somebody would get
hold of his invention and beaten to it. There was
one rival inventor, in particular that La Prince was eager
to keep his progress a secret from Thomas Edison. So
Edison really ran a conglomerate in Orange, New Jersey. It
was an invention factory. This is Peter de Cherney, a
(07:44):
professor of cinema and Media Setties at the University of
Pennsylvania and author of Hollywood's Copyright Wars. He had people
in some rooms working on new chemicals and other rooms
working on new technologies. He ran multiple media businesses. Yeah,
I mean you have to go to kind of like
a Microsoft or Google or Amazon today to think about
a company that's working in so many different fields. At
(08:06):
the same time. Edison also had great information. He knew
most of what his competitors like La Prince were doing,
and often visited other countries to gather intelligence himself. But
when Edison and his team first got truly interested in
filmmaking in the late eighteen eighties, they were going in
a very different direction from La Prince. Edison actually was
working on something called kinetograph and kinetas scope um and
(08:29):
it was almost a kind of a peep show viewer.
In October, Edison filed a preliminary claim with the U. S.
Patent Office, announcing his plans to create a device that
would do quote for the ie what the phonograph does
for the ear. He thought people wanted to watch movies
uh one at a time, um on on a device
(08:50):
just of watching them alone, and he was actually kind
of caught off guard when movie theaters uh and and
projection ended up being more popular. Meanwhile, Augustine La Prince
was working on his own motion picture projection at the
same time Edison was filing his rather vague claims with
(09:10):
the U. S. Patent Office. La Prince had built what
he called a receiver, a single lens motion picture camera
that weighed about forty pounds in which a light sensitized
strip of paper was advanced between a lens and a
shutter by cranking a handle along one side. It was
the camera he would use to take the amazing footage
and leads, and by La Prince was preparing to share
(09:33):
his invention with the world, something he planned to do
in style in New York. Chris rawlins he and his
family had rented the Jumel Mansion um and the Javel
Mansion was a beautiful colonial style house. George Washington's alleged
to have lived the etcetera, etcetera. So has that kind
of deep connection with American history. And to ensure his
(09:57):
own place in history against competitors like Edison, La Prince
planned to patent his invention during his time in America.
He just had a few more items to take care
of in Leeds and at home in France first, and
he was due to get back to New York from
Leeds in October nine, and they were then going to
(10:19):
do the projection, and hurray, hurrah, the movies would have
been born and the Prince would have got the credit,
and the rest would have been history. Except La Prince
never made it to New York or into his rightful
place in history. But what happened next is a mystery
worthy of the film industry that La Prince almost helped create.
That's next on flashback. Do you have an interesting tale
(10:44):
about unintended consequences from history or your own life. Please
share with us by emailing flashback at AUSI dot com.
That's flashback at oz y dot com. We all need
a break from the constant psyche to learn something new,
to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses Plus streaming service
(11:06):
is an excellent resource to expand our knowledge on a
variety of subjects or pick up a new hobby. I've
been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while researching this season
of flashback. Lectures like Playball, the Rise of Baseball is
America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe
have helped me connect the dots on several stories from history.
(11:26):
Right now, they're giving our listeners a special limited time
offer the free month of unlimited access to their entire library.
Sign up now through our special U r L go
to the Great Courses Plus dot com slash as. That's
the Great Courses Plus dot com slash o z Y
the Great Courses Plus dot Com slash as. In the
(11:54):
fall of eight ninety, Augustine La Prince was on the
verge of making history in New York. The first he
had some fan business to attend to in France. He
went to Dijon, where his brother was living. We're never
quite sure why, but the various issues of money that
emerged in my research, his debts, his anxiety about money,
(12:15):
the fact that his mother had recently died and the
will hadn't yet been settled. La Prince was likely counting
on some family money to help keep his own struggling
operation afloat, but he did not get the relief he sought.
La Prince boarded the two forty two afternoon train for
Paris on Tuesday, September six. His brother saw him off
(12:37):
at the platform. Inside his luggage he carried his original
films and patent plans, waiting to meet La Prince in Paris,
where Richard Wilson, a good friend, along with his family.
The Wilson family waiting for the Prince to arrive off
that train in September six, waited and waited, and he
simply did not show um and he was never seen again.
(13:01):
Both French and English detectives conducted an extensive search and investigation,
but no clues, no luggage, and no La Prince were
ever found. Investigators speculated he might have been mugged and
killed in Paris after leaving the station, something not uncommon
among lone travelers of the day. Others saw a more
far reaching conspiracy. So what happened? Well, although the smoking
(13:26):
gun is lovely, when I sold this book to various
publishers in eighteen nine, it was a smoking gun, of
course that got them. And if I could pin something
on Edison, boy would that be a big one. Edison
certainly wound up being the primary beneficiary of La Prince's disappearance.
The American inventor felt his first patent for a working
movie camera and viewer called the Kinetoscope about a year
(13:49):
after La Prince vanished. But motion pictures did not move
in the direction that Edison had expected. They moved the
way La Prince had anticipated, toward the projection of images.
So Edison had a pivot Peter Deturney again, And actually
he quickly abandoned the device, the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph that
he developed, and he quickly bought someone else's device to
(14:11):
two recent engineering graduate students and just patented it with
his or really renamed it with his own his own name,
called it Edison's Vitoscope. The vitoscope was an early film
projector and it helped put Edison on the motion picture map. Still,
despite his efforts to acquire and adopt others inventions and
claimed them as his own, Edison had little success at
(14:31):
first in his efforts at colonizing the motion pictures space
the way he had other areas of innovation. So he
had three patents on films, and ultimately he claimed in
some lawsuits that all film equipment and films themselves owed
something to his genius. But eventually every film, every all
of the three patents were overturned in court. One judge
(14:51):
went so far say that Edison was not a pioneer
in any sense of the term. Edison might not have
been a true film pioneer, but the so called Wizard
of Menlo Park was a shrewd businessman, and to silent
films grew more popular in America, he took steps to
control their production process, from creation to distribution to projection.
In nineteen o eight, he assembled the heads of his
(15:13):
rival film companies and proposed they joined forces in a
venture called the Motion Picture Patents Company, or mp PC.
The mp PC would hold collectively owned film production patents
and would issue licenses to any film producer, exhibitor, or
distributor who tried to get in on the young motion
pictures business. One of the reasons he did this was
(15:34):
that he took his small patents and pooled them with
other companies that had patents. They really did succeed briefly
in controlling the whole industry. He was a bid for control. However,
that would wind up backfiring and catapulting the motion picture
business in a very different direction. West. We've forgotten this now,
(15:54):
but Fort Lee, New Jersey, was actually the first U
S movie capital. It was right across us the bridge
from New York, and it was a great place to
shoot Westerns, which were were popular wine New Jersey. That's
where Thomas Edison was based. Towering over a thirty five
acre state park is a tribute to New Jersey's legendary inventor,
Thomas Edison. You can still visit the Thomas Edison Center
(16:17):
at Menlo Park and see the massive lightbulb perched high
above the landscape. The Edison Pioneers, which included those who
worked with the inventor, were determined to honor his legacy
and his associates with this one hundred thirty one ft tower. Today,
Edison is remembered primarily for his creations, but he knew
that invention involved much more than creativity. Chris Rollins. For
(16:41):
many years, Edison himself had known the importance of of
getting the patent on something. He'd suffered at the hands
of people who tried to break his patterns and infringe
his patents. Um many times it was part of the
cost of doing business. He is alleged to have said,
I put this quote. Everyone steals an industry and commerce.
(17:05):
I've stolen a lot myself. The thing is to know
how to steal, and Edison did. Now. Knowing how to
steal involves having an army of lawyers who are gonna
pursue everything down to the last iota to try and
prove that point. Peter de Journey he had a team
of lawyers who were constantly fighting battles for him, and
(17:29):
we're part of his business strategy. He often could just
outspend the competition in court, and for a while the
strategy worked. He really thought he was going to be
able to keep things static and not and triumph over
the competition. Um. And he'd done that in other industries.
He had done that in the phonograph industry for example.
As a result, competing against Edison in the film business
(17:49):
as a so called independent in the early years of
the twentieth century was quite an undertaking. If you weren't
part of the Motion Picture Patent Company, or the Trust
as it was called, you had to go to Europe
to buy film stock, and you had to make the
films yourself on equipment that was made by someone who
wasn't part of the Trust, also probably from Europe, and
(18:10):
then you had to find theaters who were willing to
be independent theaters and be locked out of the Trust.
It didn't take long, however, for the independent film producers
to strike back, so the Independence incorporated just a few
days after the Motion Picture of Patents Company. They didn't
want to be part of this conglomerate network that exacted
a huge fee and basically told them how to make
(18:31):
films and how the system was going to work. But
Edison's Trust started to zealously enforce their patent portfolio. In
the years ahead, they lodged nearly three hundred legal complaints
against Universal Pictures alone. The Independence fought Edison's Trust in court,
and more importantly, they did something else innovate. But the
Independence realized that there was a rising middle class audience
(18:52):
for films, and they wanted to see theatrical adaptations, not
adaptations of novels. Feature films were more likely to be
able to adapt these works, uh And also they started
to take theater stars and and featured them in movies.
The independent filmmakers also began to look for new, less
hostile surroundings a safe distance from Edison's base on the
(19:13):
East Coast. The independence slowly moved westward and eventually ended
up in Los Angeles. It was a natural fit. L
A was appealing for a bunch of reasons. It was
a non union town, so labor was cheaper, and it
certainly didn't hurt that federal courts they were less inclined
to enforce patent rights. But mostly they ended up in
Los Angeles because there's very terrain in um In a
(19:34):
very short distance. You could be in the mountains one day,
in the desert the next day on the beach another day,
and you could shoot all your all your long with
good sun conditions. By the way, sunshine was huge for
early movies. Before the era powerful kleague lights and more
sophisticated film it was hard to get enough light to
shoot indoors. Edison's studio actually famously had a roof that
(19:56):
opened and then could turn the entire building turn three
and sixty degrees to at the sun. But it was
still in New Jersey and the future of film was elsewhere.
Edison's henchman pursued the independence in California for a while,
but ultimately had to stop. In nineteen fifteen, the Motion
Picture Pads Company was declared in a legal monopoly by
the Supreme Court. But actually that didn't matter that much
(20:18):
by even a few years earlier. By thirteen or so,
the Motion Picture of Patents Company was already kind of
losing out because they refused to innovate. In other words,
Edison's repressive legal regime wound up stifling more than just
the competition. Ultimately, that system backfired for Edison. Trust members
reaped so many benefits from the status quo, they had
little incentive to innovate and what was a rapidly evolving industry,
(20:41):
and so ultimately they were surpassed by the independence. It's
a lesson that still resonates today. By creating this um,
this oligopoly, by really controlling the industry, there was no
incentive to change and and to innovate and to move
with the audience. And so they fought resistance, and they
were very quickly supplanted it by other companies who were
(21:01):
trying to do something new and who are paying more
attention to what audiences wanted. And as often is the
case in history, yesterday's rebels and innovators become today's industry giants.
In a way. What's interesting is the independence who were
the the underdogs, ended up creating Paramount and Fox and
Universal and all the studios who are still really central
(21:24):
to um to the media industry. Indeed, by twelve only
seven film producers accounted for almost of the worldwide market share.
But what became of the inventor whose mysterious disappearance helps
start this chain reaction of events in the first place,
(21:45):
Augustine la Prince's sudden disappearance in devastated his family. His wife,
Lizzie could not accept that he might have vanished for
any reason other than foul play, and she set about
trying to prove her late husband's role in early cinema.
Lizzie the Prince went on for the rest of her
life trying to get the story told and trying to
(22:06):
publish missing chapters in this story of the history of
moving pictures. There was a story of intrigue and suspicion,
but no apparent foul play. But of course nothing emerged
that could conclusively say that Edison had any part in
the Prince's disappearance. This shouldn't be said to whitewash um
(22:28):
the principles or the lack of Edison brought to pursuing
his patents, but to implement in him in disappearance and
murder is the wrong trick here. I think in Rawlins's view,
there was a more simple explanation suicide. There's huge shame attached,
(22:49):
huge blame if you like, or guilties experienced in those
years by financial instability, by doing the wrong thing with money,
and you would have felt that that brought shame to
his family. More recently, a key new piece of evidence
surface to support this theory. I was very interested a
few years back to hear that a photograph of a
(23:12):
man taken from the River sn in October showed an
image that to my mind was indisputably the Prince. If
you put it in photoshop and shift the angle of
the corpse shown from a high acute angle and put
it into like. Looking at it directly, if you like,
(23:32):
you can't doubt that it's the Prince. But the photograph
raised its own questions, and it's been worked out that
the clothes that the corpse has on are a pauper's clothes.
They're not the clothes of a rich man or an
enlightened bourgeois person. So the question is why. And the
person looking into this suggested that he might have sold
(23:56):
his clothes and simply got those clothing substitution, because he
was simply that skint. So why would someone like La Prince,
on the verge of a history making demonstration, sell his
clothes and eventually kill himself. My view is that he failed.
He was aware of his failure to have everybody depended
on his success, but not to be able to be
(24:17):
absolutely straight about what he had or hadn't achieved was
too much for him. A gust and La Prince was
on the right track with his motion picture camera, and
he was ahead of the competition, even Thomas Edison. He
was on the verge of history, and he might well
have made history had he not run out of money,
but he fell short. I don't think the Prince was
(24:37):
quite there. I think the story is incredible. I think
our culture is in love with failure. They also ran
because we all feel we're a little bit also rans
and when there's a mystery likeness attached to it, um,
then we want to latch onto it. We want to
tell it to the world, including through the medium. La
Prince almost pioneered film. It's I think lit up the
(25:02):
imaginations of subsequent would be filmmakers, including myself. For the
many decades since, I still get calls from people who
stumble on the store and think this would make such
a good film script. But says Rolins, La Prince's story
does not quite have the requisite Hollywood ending. The fact
that this makes such a brilliant Hollywood style story UM
(25:25):
is irresistible to too many people who have tried to
bring it into reality. But it doesn't quite have the
take that would turn it into a must have. As
far as the movie produces a concerned I don't think so.
What did we learn today? In this final episode of
(25:46):
season one of Flashback First, Thomas Edison's true genius might
have been his ability to recognize and capitalize on the
good ideas of others. Two invention is perspiration and one
percent a fleet of good lawyers. And third, although the
weather might not be as nice as in southern California,
(26:06):
if you want to visit the true birth of filmmaking,
you should pack your bags for New Jersey or better yet, leads. Finally,
this season of Flashback on Unintended Consequences has shown us
the many ways that life and history turn out differently
than we might intend or expect. The past can teach
(26:30):
us a lot. It tells us that things change, sometimes
on a dime and sometimes on a time scale of centuries.
The past teaches us that so much of the world
around us is contingent, that things don't have to be
the way that they are now and almost warrant. There's
something both unnerving about that fact and empowering. Used wisely,
(26:50):
the past is a key to help us unlock the
potential of the future, and the more we learn about
history in the past, the more we can learn to
make better decisions about the things we can control and
live with the things we know we can't. A big
thanks for listening this season, and please stay tuned to
this feed for some fun bonus episodes and for season two.
(27:13):
Next season we will be exploring some of what we
call history's legends of the fail tales of epic failures, disasters,
and miscalculations that we can still all learn from today.
Flashback is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell, senior
(27:34):
writer and executive producer at Ozzie. It was produced by
Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Yori Dogizia, and Shannon Williamson. Chris
Hoff engineered our show special thanks to the crew at
I Heart Radio Podcast Networks, especially Sophie Lichtman and Jack O'Brien.
We'd also like to thank the Wider team who helped
make this entire season possible and I Heart Radio Podcast Networks.
(27:56):
We'd like to thank Connald Byrne, Will Pierson, Nathan Atoski,
Mike Cohene, Ray Harkins, Sam Benefeld, Harper, Wayne and Christy Waters.
And at Aussie we'd like to thank Carlos Watson, samir Rao,
nol Kio, James Watkins, ned Colin, Alex Law and Daniel malloy.
Make sure to subscribe to Flashback on the I Heart
(28:17):
Radio app or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Finally,
today's lecture note, Thomas Edison was good friends with another
titan of American industry we covered earlier this season on Flashback,
Henry Ford. Starting in nineteen fourteen, the two aging industrialists
(28:37):
took a series of road trips across the country together.
Apparently neither man could even take a holiday without converting
it into some form of publicity stunt. The press followed
the two pioneers, who were nicknamed the Vagabonds, from stop
to stop and documented them roughing it in the outdoors
by chopping wood themselves and more. It was kind of
like a cross between a celebrity Instagram feed and one
(28:59):
of Amir Putin's bare chested horseback riding photo ops. To
dive deeper, head to AUSI dot com slash flashback. That's
oz Y dot com slash flashback. There you can find
my other lecture notes from today's episode, featuring extended interviews,
links to further reading and more information on unintended consequences
and mysterious disappearances, as well as links to other hidden
(29:22):
stories from history uncovered by me and other reporters at Aussie.
Thanks for listening. We all need a break from the
constant cycle to learn something new, to gain new perspectives.
The Great Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent resource
(29:43):
to expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects or
pick up a new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great
Courses Plus while researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball,
The Rise of Baseball is America's Pastime, History of the
Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the
pots on several stories from history. Right now, they're giving
(30:03):
our listeners a special, limited time offer a free month
of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign up now
through our special U r L go to the Great
Courses Plus dot Com Slash Aussie. That's the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash o z Y the Great Courses
Plus dot Com Slash Assi
We all need a break from the constant cycle to
learn something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses
Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
knowledge on a variety of subjects or pick up a
new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while
researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball, the Rise
of Baseball is America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court,
(00:25):
and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the dots on
several stories from history. Right now, they're giving our listeners
a special limited time offer a free month of unlimited
access to their entire library. Sign up now through our
special U r L go to the Great Courses Plus
dot com slash as. That's the Great Courses Plus dot
(00:45):
com slash o z y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash as. My name is Chris rulans Um. I'm
a writer and filmmaker, so that's what I do, and
really most of my craft over the last thirty forty
(01:06):
years has been in filmmaking. Back in the six Rawlins
took a job with a theater group in Leeds in
Northern England and needed somewhere to live um and this
large um terrorist Victorian terrorist house came possible for us
to buy. Unfortunately, the house was so run down that
(01:29):
it was under threat of demolition, and at that point
the guy selling it to us said, oh, there won't
be able to knock this down. The inventor of the
movie camera once lived here. No, not Thomas Edison. He
lived in New Jersey. And we thought, ho, ho, it
is just just a means for you to get your money,
and he said no. Look these like these rooms are
deliberately long. You can project from the front door of
(01:52):
the house to the back an uninterrupted being. Rawlins bought
the house and it turned out that the seller was right.
A troubled French and turnamed Augustine La Prince had lived
there back in the late nineteenth century. Chris Rawlins, the filmmaker,
had in fact just moved into the house where some
of the first film images ever were shot. But Rawlins
soon discovered there was so much more to the story
(02:14):
of Augustine La Prince than just that. Back in eighteen ninety,
La Prince boarded a train to Paris. He planned next
to sale to New York to share his new motion
picture camera invention. With the world. But La Prince disappeared
from that train and from the pages of history. His
body was never found. Nobody ever discovered what happened, including
(02:37):
his family, who threw quite a lot of resources of
hiring private detectives to make it work. Nothing emerged. Welcome
to Flashback, a podcast from Ozzie about some of history's
most incredible unintended consequences. After he moved into Augustine La
Prince's old house, Chris Rawlins spent the next decades of
(02:59):
his life trying to figure out what happened to La
Prince and how close he was indeed becoming the father
of modern cinema. And what he learned is a remarkable story,
one with consequences for everything from Thomas Edison to the
founding of Hollywood In sunny California, it would be an arresting,
(03:21):
even haunting series of images even if it weren't so historic.
Four adults paraded around in circles in a sunlit garden,
as if waiting for the horn to blow in some
children's game. The clip lasts only two seconds, but there
in the suburbs of Leeds, England in October, you see
the fruits of what is likely the first motion picture
(03:42):
ever recorded. The cameraman behind that garden footage and the
inventor of the technology that captured it was not Thomas
Edison or even the Lumier brothers. It was the man
who had beaten them all to the punch, Augustine la Prince.
He set up his family on a Sunday and got
them all out on the garden of Joseph Whitler's house
(04:03):
to do a little dance. Quickly was the Prince's brother
in law. The scene was recorded at twelve frames per second,
not quite the sixteen frames per second that's required for
the film to appear seamless to the human eye, so
they're jumpy, they don't quite get to the persistence of vision.
The following year, La Prince shot another early film that
still exists, overlooking Leeds Bridge. There is still an old
(04:27):
warehouse building that looks down at the bridge from from
the right, which is the place he had his camera
in the summer of to film traffic going over Leeds Bridge,
and you can see people walking to and fro and
well only too given there was only thirty frames and
(04:48):
and I think it's a wagon being taken across by horses.
It's kind of incredible watching something that was filmed more
than one and thirty years ago. And for those who
want to watch the clips, I will include links to
them in my lecture notes this week at the flashback
home page on AUSI dot com. Augustine la Prince was
(05:10):
born in France in eighteen forty one. He was tall, dark,
I'm handsome. His father was a min army officer and
friends with Daga. That's Louis de Guerre, the father of photography.
As a young man, La Prince studied painting and chemistry
in Paris, where he also met a woman from northern
England named Lizzie Whitley. The two married and La Prince
(05:33):
took a job as the manager of a cyclo rama.
Cyclorama was that sort of huge circus tent on the
perimeter of which, if you like, was painted a battle,
say the Battle of Atlanta or the Battle of Gettysburg.
The cycle rama was kind of the imax of the
nineteenth century. There was a big platform the viewers would
(05:53):
stand on in the center so that they could look
at the panoramic image around them. So if there were
soldiers strug in a particular part of the battle or
a boat was needed. Half of that boat would be
real in three dimensions and the other half would be painted,
which made it seem as if that too, was of
three dimensions, and that the transition from three dimensionality to
(06:16):
two dimensionality was as imperceptible as possible. It was a
surreal experience at the time, but la Prince thought he
could do even better. His dream was to make a
version of a moving cycle rama in color. He said,
he put it, that is, to bring it to life,
to make it move. All the potential of this trick
(06:39):
of the eye that made it seem as if it
was real. He wanted to take a step further into
motion and into animotion. In the eighties, La Prince began
to tinker with photography and eventually motion pictures, but he
was far from the only inventor in the world trying
to harness the power of the moving image. There was
a race going on and somewhat of a ruthless well.
(07:00):
Inventions and patents were a big deal in those days.
Secrecy was encouraged. It was often felt that there might
be spies there to get their secrets. La Prince took
incredible precautions at his workshop and leads to keep his
innovative work confidential. The anxious chain smoking inventor had shutters
installed on the windows, extra bolts placed on the doors.
(07:24):
He was paranoid if you like that somebody would get
hold of his invention and beaten to it. There was
one rival inventor, in particular that La Prince was eager
to keep his progress a secret from Thomas Edison. So
Edison really ran a conglomerate in Orange, New Jersey. It
was an invention factory. This is Peter de Cherney, a
(07:44):
professor of cinema and Media Setties at the University of
Pennsylvania and author of Hollywood's Copyright Wars. He had people
in some rooms working on new chemicals and other rooms
working on new technologies. He ran multiple media businesses. Yeah,
I mean you have to go to kind of like
a Microsoft or Google or Amazon today to think about
a company that's working in so many different fields. At
(08:06):
the same time. Edison also had great information. He knew
most of what his competitors like La Prince were doing,
and often visited other countries to gather intelligence himself. But
when Edison and his team first got truly interested in
filmmaking in the late eighteen eighties, they were going in
a very different direction from La Prince. Edison actually was
working on something called kinetograph and kinetas scope um and
(08:29):
it was almost a kind of a peep show viewer.
In October, Edison filed a preliminary claim with the U. S.
Patent Office, announcing his plans to create a device that
would do quote for the ie what the phonograph does
for the ear. He thought people wanted to watch movies
uh one at a time, um on on a device
(08:50):
just of watching them alone, and he was actually kind
of caught off guard when movie theaters uh and and
projection ended up being more popular. Meanwhile, Augustine La Prince
was working on his own motion picture projection at the
same time Edison was filing his rather vague claims with
(09:10):
the U. S. Patent Office. La Prince had built what
he called a receiver, a single lens motion picture camera
that weighed about forty pounds in which a light sensitized
strip of paper was advanced between a lens and a
shutter by cranking a handle along one side. It was
the camera he would use to take the amazing footage
and leads, and by La Prince was preparing to share
(09:33):
his invention with the world, something he planned to do
in style in New York. Chris rawlins he and his
family had rented the Jumel Mansion um and the Javel
Mansion was a beautiful colonial style house. George Washington's alleged
to have lived the etcetera, etcetera. So has that kind
of deep connection with American history. And to ensure his
(09:57):
own place in history against competitors like Edison, La Prince
planned to patent his invention during his time in America.
He just had a few more items to take care
of in Leeds and at home in France first, and
he was due to get back to New York from
Leeds in October nine, and they were then going to
(10:19):
do the projection, and hurray, hurrah, the movies would have
been born and the Prince would have got the credit,
and the rest would have been history. Except La Prince
never made it to New York or into his rightful
place in history. But what happened next is a mystery
worthy of the film industry that La Prince almost helped create.
That's next on flashback. Do you have an interesting tale
(10:44):
about unintended consequences from history or your own life. Please
share with us by emailing flashback at AUSI dot com.
That's flashback at oz y dot com. We all need
a break from the constant psyche to learn something new,
to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses Plus streaming service
(11:06):
is an excellent resource to expand our knowledge on a
variety of subjects or pick up a new hobby. I've
been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while researching this season
of flashback. Lectures like Playball, the Rise of Baseball is
America's pastime, History of the Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe
have helped me connect the dots on several stories from history.
(11:26):
Right now, they're giving our listeners a special limited time
offer the free month of unlimited access to their entire library.
Sign up now through our special U r L go
to the Great Courses Plus dot com slash as. That's
the Great Courses Plus dot com slash o z Y
the Great Courses Plus dot Com slash as. In the
(11:54):
fall of eight ninety, Augustine La Prince was on the
verge of making history in New York. The first he
had some fan business to attend to in France. He
went to Dijon, where his brother was living. We're never
quite sure why, but the various issues of money that
emerged in my research, his debts, his anxiety about money,
(12:15):
the fact that his mother had recently died and the
will hadn't yet been settled. La Prince was likely counting
on some family money to help keep his own struggling
operation afloat, but he did not get the relief he sought.
La Prince boarded the two forty two afternoon train for
Paris on Tuesday, September six. His brother saw him off
(12:37):
at the platform. Inside his luggage he carried his original
films and patent plans, waiting to meet La Prince in Paris,
where Richard Wilson, a good friend, along with his family.
The Wilson family waiting for the Prince to arrive off
that train in September six, waited and waited, and he
simply did not show um and he was never seen again.
(13:01):
Both French and English detectives conducted an extensive search and investigation,
but no clues, no luggage, and no La Prince were
ever found. Investigators speculated he might have been mugged and
killed in Paris after leaving the station, something not uncommon
among lone travelers of the day. Others saw a more
far reaching conspiracy. So what happened? Well, although the smoking
(13:26):
gun is lovely, when I sold this book to various
publishers in eighteen nine, it was a smoking gun, of
course that got them. And if I could pin something
on Edison, boy would that be a big one. Edison
certainly wound up being the primary beneficiary of La Prince's disappearance.
The American inventor felt his first patent for a working
movie camera and viewer called the Kinetoscope about a year
(13:49):
after La Prince vanished. But motion pictures did not move
in the direction that Edison had expected. They moved the
way La Prince had anticipated, toward the projection of images.
So Edison had a pivot Peter Deturney again, And actually
he quickly abandoned the device, the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph that
he developed, and he quickly bought someone else's device to
(14:11):
two recent engineering graduate students and just patented it with
his or really renamed it with his own his own name,
called it Edison's Vitoscope. The vitoscope was an early film
projector and it helped put Edison on the motion picture map. Still,
despite his efforts to acquire and adopt others inventions and
claimed them as his own, Edison had little success at
(14:31):
first in his efforts at colonizing the motion pictures space
the way he had other areas of innovation. So he
had three patents on films, and ultimately he claimed in
some lawsuits that all film equipment and films themselves owed
something to his genius. But eventually every film, every all
of the three patents were overturned in court. One judge
(14:51):
went so far say that Edison was not a pioneer
in any sense of the term. Edison might not have
been a true film pioneer, but the so called Wizard
of Menlo Park was a shrewd businessman, and to silent
films grew more popular in America, he took steps to
control their production process, from creation to distribution to projection.
In nineteen o eight, he assembled the heads of his
(15:13):
rival film companies and proposed they joined forces in a
venture called the Motion Picture Patents Company, or mp PC.
The mp PC would hold collectively owned film production patents
and would issue licenses to any film producer, exhibitor, or
distributor who tried to get in on the young motion
pictures business. One of the reasons he did this was
(15:34):
that he took his small patents and pooled them with
other companies that had patents. They really did succeed briefly
in controlling the whole industry. He was a bid for control. However,
that would wind up backfiring and catapulting the motion picture
business in a very different direction. West. We've forgotten this now,
(15:54):
but Fort Lee, New Jersey, was actually the first U
S movie capital. It was right across us the bridge
from New York, and it was a great place to
shoot Westerns, which were were popular wine New Jersey. That's
where Thomas Edison was based. Towering over a thirty five
acre state park is a tribute to New Jersey's legendary inventor,
Thomas Edison. You can still visit the Thomas Edison Center
(16:17):
at Menlo Park and see the massive lightbulb perched high
above the landscape. The Edison Pioneers, which included those who
worked with the inventor, were determined to honor his legacy
and his associates with this one hundred thirty one ft tower. Today,
Edison is remembered primarily for his creations, but he knew
that invention involved much more than creativity. Chris Rollins. For
(16:41):
many years, Edison himself had known the importance of of
getting the patent on something. He'd suffered at the hands
of people who tried to break his patterns and infringe
his patents. Um many times it was part of the
cost of doing business. He is alleged to have said,
I put this quote. Everyone steals an industry and commerce.
(17:05):
I've stolen a lot myself. The thing is to know
how to steal, and Edison did. Now. Knowing how to
steal involves having an army of lawyers who are gonna
pursue everything down to the last iota to try and
prove that point. Peter de Journey he had a team
of lawyers who were constantly fighting battles for him, and
(17:29):
we're part of his business strategy. He often could just
outspend the competition in court, and for a while the
strategy worked. He really thought he was going to be
able to keep things static and not and triumph over
the competition. Um. And he'd done that in other industries.
He had done that in the phonograph industry for example.
As a result, competing against Edison in the film business
(17:49):
as a so called independent in the early years of
the twentieth century was quite an undertaking. If you weren't
part of the Motion Picture Patent Company, or the Trust
as it was called, you had to go to Europe
to buy film stock, and you had to make the
films yourself on equipment that was made by someone who
wasn't part of the Trust, also probably from Europe, and
(18:10):
then you had to find theaters who were willing to
be independent theaters and be locked out of the Trust.
It didn't take long, however, for the independent film producers
to strike back, so the Independence incorporated just a few
days after the Motion Picture of Patents Company. They didn't
want to be part of this conglomerate network that exacted
a huge fee and basically told them how to make
(18:31):
films and how the system was going to work. But
Edison's Trust started to zealously enforce their patent portfolio. In
the years ahead, they lodged nearly three hundred legal complaints
against Universal Pictures alone. The Independence fought Edison's Trust in court,
and more importantly, they did something else innovate. But the
Independence realized that there was a rising middle class audience
(18:52):
for films, and they wanted to see theatrical adaptations, not
adaptations of novels. Feature films were more likely to be
able to adapt these works, uh And also they started
to take theater stars and and featured them in movies.
The independent filmmakers also began to look for new, less
hostile surroundings a safe distance from Edison's base on the
(19:13):
East Coast. The independence slowly moved westward and eventually ended
up in Los Angeles. It was a natural fit. L
A was appealing for a bunch of reasons. It was
a non union town, so labor was cheaper, and it
certainly didn't hurt that federal courts they were less inclined
to enforce patent rights. But mostly they ended up in
Los Angeles because there's very terrain in um In a
(19:34):
very short distance. You could be in the mountains one day,
in the desert the next day on the beach another day,
and you could shoot all your all your long with
good sun conditions. By the way, sunshine was huge for
early movies. Before the era powerful kleague lights and more
sophisticated film it was hard to get enough light to
shoot indoors. Edison's studio actually famously had a roof that
(19:56):
opened and then could turn the entire building turn three
and sixty degrees to at the sun. But it was
still in New Jersey and the future of film was elsewhere.
Edison's henchman pursued the independence in California for a while,
but ultimately had to stop. In nineteen fifteen, the Motion
Picture Pads Company was declared in a legal monopoly by
the Supreme Court. But actually that didn't matter that much
(20:18):
by even a few years earlier. By thirteen or so,
the Motion Picture of Patents Company was already kind of
losing out because they refused to innovate. In other words,
Edison's repressive legal regime wound up stifling more than just
the competition. Ultimately, that system backfired for Edison. Trust members
reaped so many benefits from the status quo, they had
little incentive to innovate and what was a rapidly evolving industry,
(20:41):
and so ultimately they were surpassed by the independence. It's
a lesson that still resonates today. By creating this um,
this oligopoly, by really controlling the industry, there was no
incentive to change and and to innovate and to move
with the audience. And so they fought resistance, and they
were very quickly supplanted it by other companies who were
(21:01):
trying to do something new and who are paying more
attention to what audiences wanted. And as often is the
case in history, yesterday's rebels and innovators become today's industry giants.
In a way. What's interesting is the independence who were
the the underdogs, ended up creating Paramount and Fox and
Universal and all the studios who are still really central
(21:24):
to um to the media industry. Indeed, by twelve only
seven film producers accounted for almost of the worldwide market share.
But what became of the inventor whose mysterious disappearance helps
start this chain reaction of events in the first place,
(21:45):
Augustine la Prince's sudden disappearance in devastated his family. His wife,
Lizzie could not accept that he might have vanished for
any reason other than foul play, and she set about
trying to prove her late husband's role in early cinema.
Lizzie the Prince went on for the rest of her
life trying to get the story told and trying to
(22:06):
publish missing chapters in this story of the history of
moving pictures. There was a story of intrigue and suspicion,
but no apparent foul play. But of course nothing emerged
that could conclusively say that Edison had any part in
the Prince's disappearance. This shouldn't be said to whitewash um
(22:28):
the principles or the lack of Edison brought to pursuing
his patents, but to implement in him in disappearance and
murder is the wrong trick here. I think in Rawlins's view,
there was a more simple explanation suicide. There's huge shame attached,
(22:49):
huge blame if you like, or guilties experienced in those
years by financial instability, by doing the wrong thing with money,
and you would have felt that that brought shame to
his family. More recently, a key new piece of evidence
surface to support this theory. I was very interested a
few years back to hear that a photograph of a
(23:12):
man taken from the River sn in October showed an
image that to my mind was indisputably the Prince. If
you put it in photoshop and shift the angle of
the corpse shown from a high acute angle and put
it into like. Looking at it directly, if you like,
(23:32):
you can't doubt that it's the Prince. But the photograph
raised its own questions, and it's been worked out that
the clothes that the corpse has on are a pauper's clothes.
They're not the clothes of a rich man or an
enlightened bourgeois person. So the question is why. And the
person looking into this suggested that he might have sold
(23:56):
his clothes and simply got those clothing substitution, because he
was simply that skint. So why would someone like La Prince,
on the verge of a history making demonstration, sell his
clothes and eventually kill himself. My view is that he failed.
He was aware of his failure to have everybody depended
on his success, but not to be able to be
(24:17):
absolutely straight about what he had or hadn't achieved was
too much for him. A gust and La Prince was
on the right track with his motion picture camera, and
he was ahead of the competition, even Thomas Edison. He
was on the verge of history, and he might well
have made history had he not run out of money,
but he fell short. I don't think the Prince was
(24:37):
quite there. I think the story is incredible. I think
our culture is in love with failure. They also ran
because we all feel we're a little bit also rans
and when there's a mystery likeness attached to it, um,
then we want to latch onto it. We want to
tell it to the world, including through the medium. La
Prince almost pioneered film. It's I think lit up the
(25:02):
imaginations of subsequent would be filmmakers, including myself. For the
many decades since, I still get calls from people who
stumble on the store and think this would make such
a good film script. But says Rolins, La Prince's story
does not quite have the requisite Hollywood ending. The fact
that this makes such a brilliant Hollywood style story UM
(25:25):
is irresistible to too many people who have tried to
bring it into reality. But it doesn't quite have the
take that would turn it into a must have. As
far as the movie produces a concerned I don't think so.
What did we learn today? In this final episode of
(25:46):
season one of Flashback First, Thomas Edison's true genius might
have been his ability to recognize and capitalize on the
good ideas of others. Two invention is perspiration and one
percent a fleet of good lawyers. And third, although the
weather might not be as nice as in southern California,
(26:06):
if you want to visit the true birth of filmmaking,
you should pack your bags for New Jersey or better yet, leads. Finally,
this season of Flashback on Unintended Consequences has shown us
the many ways that life and history turn out differently
than we might intend or expect. The past can teach
(26:30):
us a lot. It tells us that things change, sometimes
on a dime and sometimes on a time scale of centuries.
The past teaches us that so much of the world
around us is contingent, that things don't have to be
the way that they are now and almost warrant. There's
something both unnerving about that fact and empowering. Used wisely,
(26:50):
the past is a key to help us unlock the
potential of the future, and the more we learn about
history in the past, the more we can learn to
make better decisions about the things we can control and
live with the things we know we can't. A big
thanks for listening this season, and please stay tuned to
this feed for some fun bonus episodes and for season two.
(27:13):
Next season we will be exploring some of what we
call history's legends of the fail tales of epic failures, disasters,
and miscalculations that we can still all learn from today.
Flashback is written and hosted by me Sean Braswell, senior
(27:34):
writer and executive producer at Ozzie. It was produced by
Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Yori Dogizia, and Shannon Williamson. Chris
Hoff engineered our show special thanks to the crew at
I Heart Radio Podcast Networks, especially Sophie Lichtman and Jack O'Brien.
We'd also like to thank the Wider team who helped
make this entire season possible and I Heart Radio Podcast Networks.
(27:56):
We'd like to thank Connald Byrne, Will Pierson, Nathan Atoski,
Mike Cohene, Ray Harkins, Sam Benefeld, Harper, Wayne and Christy Waters.
And at Aussie we'd like to thank Carlos Watson, samir Rao,
nol Kio, James Watkins, ned Colin, Alex Law and Daniel malloy.
Make sure to subscribe to Flashback on the I Heart
(28:17):
Radio app or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Finally,
today's lecture note, Thomas Edison was good friends with another
titan of American industry we covered earlier this season on Flashback,
Henry Ford. Starting in nineteen fourteen, the two aging industrialists
(28:37):
took a series of road trips across the country together.
Apparently neither man could even take a holiday without converting
it into some form of publicity stunt. The press followed
the two pioneers, who were nicknamed the Vagabonds, from stop
to stop and documented them roughing it in the outdoors
by chopping wood themselves and more. It was kind of
like a cross between a celebrity Instagram feed and one
(28:59):
of Amir Putin's bare chested horseback riding photo ops. To
dive deeper, head to AUSI dot com slash flashback. That's
oz Y dot com slash flashback. There you can find
my other lecture notes from today's episode, featuring extended interviews,
links to further reading and more information on unintended consequences
and mysterious disappearances, as well as links to other hidden
(29:22):
stories from history uncovered by me and other reporters at Aussie.
Thanks for listening. We all need a break from the
constant cycle to learn something new, to gain new perspectives.
The Great Courses Plus streaming service is an excellent resource
(29:43):
to expand our knowledge on a variety of subjects or
pick up a new hobby. I've been enjoying the Great
Courses Plus while researching this season of flashback lectures like Playball,
The Rise of Baseball is America's Pastime, History of the
Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe have helped me connect the
pots on several stories from history. Right now, they're giving
(30:03):
our listeners a special, limited time offer a free month
of unlimited access to their entire library. Sign up now
through our special U r L go to the Great
Courses Plus dot Com Slash Aussie. That's the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash o z Y the Great Courses
Plus dot Com Slash Assi
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