In September 1890, Louis Le Prince, a former chemist and draftsman, set out for Paris. However, after this trip, he was never heard from again. Why did this man who did something big for the cinema world just two years before this event suddenly disappear?
It is thought that this situation may have many reasons, such as Le Prince’s debts, the jealousy of the famous inventor Thomas Edison, and Prince’s debt quarrel with his brother. Let’s take a closer look at both the moving photos taken by Le Prince and the conspiracy theories of his sudden disappearance.
Louis Le Prince was born in France in 1841.
His father was an artillery major in the French army who had been awarded the Order of Honor. Le Prince spent time in the photography studio of family friend Louis Daguerre, who taught him photography as a child. As a young man, the talented Le Prince studied art in Paris and chemistry in Leipzig, Germany. Different fields of study played an important role in his work in the following years.
He moved to England in 1866 to work for his friend John Whitley, who founded a brass foundry.
Le Prince soon established a school for the “applied arts” and made everyday objects both functional and beautiful. They began experimenting with photography on metal and pottery, which brought them some notoriety.
In 1881, Le Prince went to the United States as a representative of Whitley Partners, the company he worked for.
He became the director of a group of artists specializing in panoramas exhibited around the country. Around this time, he began to explore the idea of ”moving” photographs. Le Prince’s first experiment resulted in a large camera with at least 16 lenses. Taking tons of photos of moving objects from slightly different angles, this camera captured some sort of motion, but the images were quite shaky.
Returning to England in 1887, Le Prince designed a simpler single-lens camera in a workshop in Leeds.
Inside the camera, which resembles a short wooden box, he used paper negatives and photographed 12 to 20 frames per second. On October 14, 1888, he visited the Whitleys’ home, Oakwood Grange, and shot his first movie with the new camera. It was a simple image of her son Adolphe, Joseph and Sarah Whitley, and her friend Annie Hartley walking in circles in their garden. Only a few seconds long, it was the world’s first “on-film” motion picture.
Satisfied with his new camera, Le Prince started working on a projector to shoot longer and better quality shots in the future. His family later claimed that he successfully moved still images in his workshop. Unfortunately, no one ever saw the results of their hard work.
In 1890, Le Prince decided to return to the United States. Because he wanted to show the people what he had done, as Edison and the Lumière Brothers would do years later.
That September, while his wife and children awaited him in New York, Le Prince gathered his inventions and prepared for the long journey. Le Prince would travel to France to visit family and friends before crossing the Atlantic. On September 16, his brother Albert took him off on the train from Dijon to Paris, and his brother was the last to see him.
But when the train arrived in Paris, Le Prince wasn’t on the train, nor were they in their bags. No strange behavior was reported either at Dijon station or on the train, and no bodies were found along the way. Le Prince had disappeared without a trace.
This is the only known fact about this strange phenomenon to date. However, a lot of theories have been put forward and the most widely accepted ones are:
Le Prince had millions of dollars in debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy. He committed suicide because he felt trapped.
This theory is accepted by some, but some people think that it is impossible for someone who is attached to his family and can move to America or even a city like New York to have debt or to have debts that drive him to suicide. Also, Le Prince was looking forward to showing his inventions to people.
Allegedly, his brother Albert owed Le Prince a lot of money, so his brother killed him.
This conspiracy was brought forward because both the debt incident and the last person to see Le Prince alive was his brother. But there was no hint of animosity or debt between them. In addition, the remaining letters show that Le Prince was very fond of his family and brother.
The patent wars of the 19th century finished Le Prince.
At the beginning of the article, we said Edison’s jealousy. That’s what the patent wars are all about. It was alleged that at that time Edison wanted to completely control the motion picture industry. That’s why Le Prince, who was working in this field, wanted to eliminate it without applying for a new patent.
Many people, even Le Prince’s wife, disapprove of this theory, because at that time there were many people around the world who invented cameras and were involved in motion pictures like Le Prince. Edison had no reason to kill or have Le Prince killed.
We’ll probably never know exactly what happened to Louis Le Prince. But in any case, despite its tragic end, Le Prince made a great and lasting contribution to the history of cinema. He definitely deserves the title of “Father of Cinema”.
- Sources: DailyBeast, The TrueCrime Database
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