"The Method of and Apparatus for Producing Animated Pictures of Natural Scenery and Life."
Le Prince's 1888 patent
French-born Louis Augustin Le Prince (1842-1890) is fittingly remembered as the star of a mystery akin to a tragic silent movie. A photographer trained by Daguerre himself, as well as a chemist and artist, he worked secretively on pioneering moving-image experiments before disappearing just before revealing his findings. Many feel that Edison and the Lumiere brothers wrongly displaced him as the inventors of motion pictures. Some even suggest that he was killed by rivals in this fiercely competitive race.
In the 1880s, Le Prince was one of several people working on Kinematographs—early machines for capturing and showing moving images. In 1888, he patented a sixteen-lens Kinematograph that probably never worked properly. He also produced a single-lens device incorporating Eastman paper film and, in the fall of 1888, used it to film horses on Leeds Bridge, England.
After probably improving his projection by replacing glass slides with the amazing new celluloid film, Le Prince felt ready to tell the world. His wife rented a mansion in New York for the debut. Her husband boarded a train at Dijon on September 16, 1890, bound for a French vacation before the unveiling, and no trace of him has been found since.
Edison's early cameras and projectors were soon making a splash and the science of movie equipment gathered momentum. Le Prince's family became embroiled in a court case that finally ruled that Edison was not the single inventor of moving images. One leading scholar concludes that Le Prince is well placed to take such credit but wonders whether his fatal error was being too slow to reveal all.
