Louis Aime Auguste Le Prince (right hand side) and his father-in-law, Joseph Whitley
Louis Le Prince Disappearance
In 1891, Thomas Edison, a prolific inventor, who held over a thousand patents in his name in the United States alone, was granted a patent for the motion picture camera or 'Kinetograph'. However, had it not been for the mysterious disappearance of a French gentleman called Louis Aime Auguste Le Prince, Edison most likely would not have been able to add the Kinetograph to his list of inventions.
Louis Le Prince, an extraordinarily multi-talented man, was born in Metz, France on 28th August 1841. His father was a friend of Jaques Daguerre who was a pioneer in the art and science of photography and Louis was able to spend time in his studio. Louis went on to study art in Paris and followed with post-graduate work in chemistry at Leipzig University. It was at Leipzig that he met John Whitley who invited him to join his father's firm of brass founders, Whitley Partners of Hunslet, Leeds. Louis moved to Leeds in 1866. In 1869 he married Elizabeth (Lizzie) Whitley, his boss' daughter. Lizzie was also a talented artist and they established the Leeds Technical School of Art in 1871 and were well-known for applying colour photography onto metal and pottery.
In 1881, Louis Le Prince went to live in New York with his wife and son, Adolphe, initially as an agent for the Whitley Partners but electing to stay there when the contract ended. During this time he continued to experiment with various aspects of photography, specifically with the production of moving pictures. He built the prototype of a movie camera and patented this invention. It was a sixteen lens camera. He used a building in Woodhouse Lane as his workshop.
Louis' workshop on Woodhouse Lane is pictured at left. It was demolished in the 1980s.
In 1887 Louis returned to Leeds and built a single lens camera which was first used on 14th October 1888 in the garden of his in-laws' house, Roundhay Cottage on Oakwood Grange Lane. It is now famously known as The Roundhay Garden Scene which shows his mother-in-law, Sarah, her companion Annie Hartley, his father-in-law, Joseph, and son, Adolphe, 'dancing' in circles. It lasted 2.5 seconds! Another film shows Adolphe playing an accordion on the steps. According to Adolphe his father filmed traffic moving across Leeds Bridge some time after the Roundhay Garden Scene. We know that the Roundhay Scene is the site of the first moving picture as Sarah Whitley died on 24th October 1888.
In 1890 Louis travelled from England to visit his brother in Dijon, France. He was to return on 16th September via Paris to England and then on to New York where his wife and son were living. The family had planned to promote the new single lens camera. Louis' brother was the last person to see Louis as he was about to board the train from Dijon to Paris. Louis did not arrive in Paris and neither he nor his luggage were ever seen again. A search along the railway line turned up nothing. There has been much speculation as to the cause of his disappearance, these theories vary from suicide to fratricide to murder related to the race for patents.
To add to the mystery, a photograph was found of an unidentified 1890 drowning victim in Paris. The picture does resemble Louis Le Prince but nothing has been proven. Louis was officially declared dead in 1897. (Could forensic science help solve this question?)
Louis Le Prince, an extraordinarily multi-talented man, was born in Metz, France on 28th August 1841. His father was a friend of Jaques Daguerre who was a pioneer in the art and science of photography and Louis was able to spend time in his studio. Louis went on to study art in Paris and followed with post-graduate work in chemistry at Leipzig University. It was at Leipzig that he met John Whitley who invited him to join his father's firm of brass founders, Whitley Partners of Hunslet, Leeds. Louis moved to Leeds in 1866. In 1869 he married Elizabeth (Lizzie) Whitley, his boss' daughter. Lizzie was also a talented artist and they established the Leeds Technical School of Art in 1871 and were well-known for applying colour photography onto metal and pottery.
In 1881, Louis Le Prince went to live in New York with his wife and son, Adolphe, initially as an agent for the Whitley Partners but electing to stay there when the contract ended. During this time he continued to experiment with various aspects of photography, specifically with the production of moving pictures. He built the prototype of a movie camera and patented this invention. It was a sixteen lens camera. He used a building in Woodhouse Lane as his workshop.
Louis' workshop on Woodhouse Lane is pictured at left. It was demolished in the 1980s.
In 1887 Louis returned to Leeds and built a single lens camera which was first used on 14th October 1888 in the garden of his in-laws' house, Roundhay Cottage on Oakwood Grange Lane. It is now famously known as The Roundhay Garden Scene which shows his mother-in-law, Sarah, her companion Annie Hartley, his father-in-law, Joseph, and son, Adolphe, 'dancing' in circles. It lasted 2.5 seconds! Another film shows Adolphe playing an accordion on the steps. According to Adolphe his father filmed traffic moving across Leeds Bridge some time after the Roundhay Garden Scene. We know that the Roundhay Scene is the site of the first moving picture as Sarah Whitley died on 24th October 1888.
In 1890 Louis travelled from England to visit his brother in Dijon, France. He was to return on 16th September via Paris to England and then on to New York where his wife and son were living. The family had planned to promote the new single lens camera. Louis' brother was the last person to see Louis as he was about to board the train from Dijon to Paris. Louis did not arrive in Paris and neither he nor his luggage were ever seen again. A search along the railway line turned up nothing. There has been much speculation as to the cause of his disappearance, these theories vary from suicide to fratricide to murder related to the race for patents.
To add to the mystery, a photograph was found of an unidentified 1890 drowning victim in Paris. The picture does resemble Louis Le Prince but nothing has been proven. Louis was officially declared dead in 1897. (Could forensic science help solve this question?)
The 1890 victim of drowning who resembles Louis Le Prince.
Roundhay Cottage's name was changed to Oakwood Grange. Sir Edwin Airie and his family lived there but it was demolished in 1972.
Louis Le Prince's link to Roundhay St. John's
Louis Le Prince's in-laws were buried at the church of Roundhay St. John, about a mile from their home. Louis designed the tile work which is set into the wall behind the grave.
Louis Le Prince's in-laws were buried at the church of Roundhay St. John, about a mile from their home. Louis designed the tile work which is set into the wall behind the grave.
Please see below for videos of the Roundhay Garden Scene, The Accordion Player and Leeds Bridge
The Roundhay Garden Scene
www.google.co.uk/search?kgmid=/g/11bytf1mnn&hl=en-GB&kgs=c2c83a15003c33d6&q=The+First+Film+2015&shndl=0&source=sh/x/kp&entrypoint=sh/x/kp#hl=en-GB&q=Roundhay+Garden+Scene&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLVT9c3NEyqLEkzzM3LU-LUz9U3MDFJT0_R4vXNL8tMDc5MSS1PrCwGANXOL1krAAAA&spf=184
OR just by Googling The Roundhay Garden Scene
The Accordian Player
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMS17xI7dlg
Leeds Bridge
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWOLLv70W-I
The First Film
www.imdb.com/rg/em_share/title_web/title/tt2883264/?ref=ext_shr_eml_tt
The First Film, facebook
.facebook.com/thefirstfilm/?_rdr
Irfan Shah, who researched and helped produce the 'First Film', has a website which provides further information on Louis Le Prince. The link to the website is below:
unbound.com/books/the-shadow-traps/updates
'The First Film', which was directed by David Nicholas Wilkinson, was shown on the BBC in 2015. It is available to either purchase or loan, as a download version, in the USA via Amazon. The purchase price was $10.00. It is an excellent and informative film. The crew did visit the church and David added us to his credits at the end.
Rich Lamb has written a most informative precis of the 'First Film' below.
Rich Lamb has written a most informative precis of the 'First Film' below.
Story of Louis Le Prince courtesy of Rich Lamb.
Most of you will be aware of this guy. He didn't get the chance to put Leeds on the map as the first Hollywood. It's kinda ironic that this is a story that Hollywood movies are based. Louis Le Prince, who shot the world's first film in Leeds.
Who made the first film? The Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison are usually credited with pioneering the moving image. However a new documentary argues that the first film was actually shot in Leeds in 1888 - but that its maker disappeared before he could claim his place in cinema history.
When film producer and distributor David Wilkinson visits Hollywood or New York or Cannes, he tells his movie business contacts that he comes from the city "where film was invented".
His puzzled acquaintances figure that he does not have an American accent, so cannot come from the birthplace of Thomas Edison, and is clearly not from France, the land of the Lumieres.
He then informs them he is, in fact, from Leeds, England.
During his 33 years in the film business, Wilkinson says only a few people have known what he was talking about, and why Leeds can claim to be the birthplace of film.
The claim dates back more than 125 years, to 14 October 1888, when a family gathered in the garden in the Leeds suburb of Roundhay.
Among the group was Louis Le Prince, who had with him a curious mahogany box. He asked the others in attendance - his son, parents-in-law and a friend - to stand in front of the box and walk in a circle.
The box was Le Prince's camera, and we can still watch the very short, silent film it captured. The film was made several years before Edison and the Lumieres came onto the scene.
Now, fed up with getting disbelieving looks when telling people Leeds was the birthplace of film, Wilkinson has made a documentary titled The First Film, which sets out the case for Le Prince as the father of the moving image.
"There is a very strong argument for that, absolutely," says Toni Booth, associate curator at the National Media Museum in Bradford, where Le Prince's historic camera and footage are kept.
"If you look at the mechanism that camera is using, it's a very similar mechanism to all the subsequent moving image cameras that came after that," she says.
"It is a single roll of film moving from one spool to another through a shutter and taking sequential images, which then were designed to be projected to reproduce that movement.
"As a piece of moving image recording live action - yes I would say he was the first one to do that," she adds.
Le Prince was born in Metz, north-east France. He studied chemistry and physics at university, then worked as a photographer and painter before being offered a job at John Whitley's engineering firm in Leeds.
Three years after moving to the city, he married Elizabeth Whitley, his boss's daughter. At the same time, photography was beginning to take hold, and Le Prince started experimenting with the idea of moving photographs.
By the 1880s, he was one of many inventors trying to master the technology for what would become film.
Others included William Friese Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe in Britain, Eadweard Muybridge in the US, Etienne-Jules Marey in France, and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany.
"You will find people making cases for particular individuals," Toni Booth says. "There is still some debate, and I think it comes down to definition. The definition of film and the definition of cinema."
What is the difference, for example, between a series of still photographs taken in quick succession and a bona fide film?
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge arranged 12 cameras in a row to photograph a racehorse in motion. He later copied the photos on a rotating disc and invented a device to make it look to a viewer as if the horse was moving.
"He's getting a feeling of movement, but he's not really capturing the movement like film cameras do," David Wilkinson says.
Le Prince's first camera had 16 lenses, which took what Wilkinson also dismisses as "sequential photographs". Wilkinson defines film as being shot from a single point of view - as with Le Prince's next invention, the single-lens camera.
As well as the Roundhay Garden Scene, Le Prince used the single-lens camera to film short sequence of people and carriages on Leeds Bridge, and his son Adolphe playing the accordion.
He successfully captured the action, but Le Prince's invention was of little use if no-one could watch the films afterwards.
He experimented with projection techniques and was due to hold his first public screening in New York in 1890.
But he never got there. While visiting his brother Albert in France with two friends, the Wilsons, Le Prince was said to have boarded a train from Dijon to Paris in September 1890. He was never seen again.
The mysterious ending
There are many theories for his disappearance. His widow Lizzie believed Edison had him killed to get his rival out of the way.
Others think Le Prince committed suicide because he was on the verge of bankruptcy, or disappeared and started a new life, or that his brother Albert killed him in a row over their mother's will. Some have even suggested his family ordered him to move away because they discovered he was gay.
"If he hadn't disappeared then it [his film] would have been shown in New York," David Wilkinson says. "I am absolutely convinced that he would have raised money from a very distinguished audience so then he could start manufacturing on quite a big scale." He would have done what Edison and then the Lumieres did, but before them. He would have been known," Wilkinson adds. But as it was, the Lumieres and Edison succeeded in playing films for a paying public and Le Prince was written out of history. "He technically succeeded but he didn't commercially, publicly succeed," Toni Booth says. "Had things been different, he may be considered alongside Edison and Lumiere, indeed even above them. It's distinctly possible - but we'll just never know."
What happened to Louis Le Prince?
Laurie Snyder, Le Prince's great-great-granddaughter said, "My family has several theories. Some believe that Edison had something to do with it, others believe that he engineered his own disappearance. My personal theory is pretty mundane. Since Louis took a later train, the Wilsons, who were to meet him in Paris, went ahead and left for England when Louis didn't disembark when they expected him to. According to Lizzie's memoirs, the train Louis took would have arrived in Paris at about 23:00. Being so late, he probably hailed a hansom 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 Seine, hit him over the head and threw him in the Seine. There were two articles from this time that suggest that thieves were targeting lone travellers and Le Prince was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I simply can't believe that a man who loved his family as much as he did, as evidenced by his letters, would either commit suicide or disappear on his own".
The idea that his brother murdered him is ludicrous. He came from a very close, loving family, as evidenced from Lizzie's memoirs. Edison, although he was certainly ruthless, probably had better things to do than to order a hit on a competitor.
Finally, the theory that his family ordered his disappearance due his being a homosexual is crazy since the family spent a lot of time and money trying to find him.
Most of you will be aware of this guy. He didn't get the chance to put Leeds on the map as the first Hollywood. It's kinda ironic that this is a story that Hollywood movies are based. Louis Le Prince, who shot the world's first film in Leeds.
Who made the first film? The Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison are usually credited with pioneering the moving image. However a new documentary argues that the first film was actually shot in Leeds in 1888 - but that its maker disappeared before he could claim his place in cinema history.
When film producer and distributor David Wilkinson visits Hollywood or New York or Cannes, he tells his movie business contacts that he comes from the city "where film was invented".
His puzzled acquaintances figure that he does not have an American accent, so cannot come from the birthplace of Thomas Edison, and is clearly not from France, the land of the Lumieres.
He then informs them he is, in fact, from Leeds, England.
During his 33 years in the film business, Wilkinson says only a few people have known what he was talking about, and why Leeds can claim to be the birthplace of film.
The claim dates back more than 125 years, to 14 October 1888, when a family gathered in the garden in the Leeds suburb of Roundhay.
Among the group was Louis Le Prince, who had with him a curious mahogany box. He asked the others in attendance - his son, parents-in-law and a friend - to stand in front of the box and walk in a circle.
The box was Le Prince's camera, and we can still watch the very short, silent film it captured. The film was made several years before Edison and the Lumieres came onto the scene.
Now, fed up with getting disbelieving looks when telling people Leeds was the birthplace of film, Wilkinson has made a documentary titled The First Film, which sets out the case for Le Prince as the father of the moving image.
"There is a very strong argument for that, absolutely," says Toni Booth, associate curator at the National Media Museum in Bradford, where Le Prince's historic camera and footage are kept.
"If you look at the mechanism that camera is using, it's a very similar mechanism to all the subsequent moving image cameras that came after that," she says.
"It is a single roll of film moving from one spool to another through a shutter and taking sequential images, which then were designed to be projected to reproduce that movement.
"As a piece of moving image recording live action - yes I would say he was the first one to do that," she adds.
Le Prince was born in Metz, north-east France. He studied chemistry and physics at university, then worked as a photographer and painter before being offered a job at John Whitley's engineering firm in Leeds.
Three years after moving to the city, he married Elizabeth Whitley, his boss's daughter. At the same time, photography was beginning to take hold, and Le Prince started experimenting with the idea of moving photographs.
By the 1880s, he was one of many inventors trying to master the technology for what would become film.
Others included William Friese Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe in Britain, Eadweard Muybridge in the US, Etienne-Jules Marey in France, and the Skladanowsky brothers in Germany.
"You will find people making cases for particular individuals," Toni Booth says. "There is still some debate, and I think it comes down to definition. The definition of film and the definition of cinema."
What is the difference, for example, between a series of still photographs taken in quick succession and a bona fide film?
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge arranged 12 cameras in a row to photograph a racehorse in motion. He later copied the photos on a rotating disc and invented a device to make it look to a viewer as if the horse was moving.
"He's getting a feeling of movement, but he's not really capturing the movement like film cameras do," David Wilkinson says.
Le Prince's first camera had 16 lenses, which took what Wilkinson also dismisses as "sequential photographs". Wilkinson defines film as being shot from a single point of view - as with Le Prince's next invention, the single-lens camera.
As well as the Roundhay Garden Scene, Le Prince used the single-lens camera to film short sequence of people and carriages on Leeds Bridge, and his son Adolphe playing the accordion.
He successfully captured the action, but Le Prince's invention was of little use if no-one could watch the films afterwards.
He experimented with projection techniques and was due to hold his first public screening in New York in 1890.
But he never got there. While visiting his brother Albert in France with two friends, the Wilsons, Le Prince was said to have boarded a train from Dijon to Paris in September 1890. He was never seen again.
The mysterious ending
There are many theories for his disappearance. His widow Lizzie believed Edison had him killed to get his rival out of the way.
Others think Le Prince committed suicide because he was on the verge of bankruptcy, or disappeared and started a new life, or that his brother Albert killed him in a row over their mother's will. Some have even suggested his family ordered him to move away because they discovered he was gay.
"If he hadn't disappeared then it [his film] would have been shown in New York," David Wilkinson says. "I am absolutely convinced that he would have raised money from a very distinguished audience so then he could start manufacturing on quite a big scale." He would have done what Edison and then the Lumieres did, but before them. He would have been known," Wilkinson adds. But as it was, the Lumieres and Edison succeeded in playing films for a paying public and Le Prince was written out of history. "He technically succeeded but he didn't commercially, publicly succeed," Toni Booth says. "Had things been different, he may be considered alongside Edison and Lumiere, indeed even above them. It's distinctly possible - but we'll just never know."
What happened to Louis Le Prince?
Laurie Snyder, Le Prince's great-great-granddaughter said, "My family has several theories. Some believe that Edison had something to do with it, others believe that he engineered his own disappearance. My personal theory is pretty mundane. Since Louis took a later train, the Wilsons, who were to meet him in Paris, went ahead and left for England when Louis didn't disembark when they expected him to. According to Lizzie's memoirs, the train Louis took would have arrived in Paris at about 23:00. Being so late, he probably hailed a hansom 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 Seine, hit him over the head and threw him in the Seine. There were two articles from this time that suggest that thieves were targeting lone travellers and Le Prince was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I simply can't believe that a man who loved his family as much as he did, as evidenced by his letters, would either commit suicide or disappear on his own".
The idea that his brother murdered him is ludicrous. He came from a very close, loving family, as evidenced from Lizzie's memoirs. Edison, although he was certainly ruthless, probably had better things to do than to order a hit on a competitor.
Finally, the theory that his family ordered his disappearance due his being a homosexual is crazy since the family spent a lot of time and money trying to find him.