He Filmed the First Movie, Then Vanished From a Train Before He Could Show It

This is about two seconds of film. Four people walking in a circle on a lawn in Leeds, England, in October 1888.

It is often called the oldest surviving motion picture in the world. It was filmed seven years before the famous Lumière brothers showed their films in Paris. Years before Thomas Edison's moving pictures went public.

The man behind the camera was named Louis Le Prince.

In 1890, he was about to sail to New York to show the world what he had invented. He boarded a train in France to Paris.

He never got off. No body. No luggage. No trace.

And history mostly forgot his name.

Who was Louis Le Prince?

Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince was born on August 28, 1841, in Metz, France. His father was an officer in the French army. According to family stories, as a boy he spent time in the studio of Louis Daguerre, one of the inventors of photography.

He grew up to be a man of many talents. He studied painting in Paris. He studied chemistry at Leipzig University in Germany. He was tall, well over six feet, with a dark beard.

In 1866, he moved to Leeds, in the north of England, to work for a company run by the family of a friend. A few years later, in 1869, he married his friend's sister, Lizzie Whitley, a talented artist. They had six children.

Le Prince and Lizzie started an art school in Leeds. They became known for a technique for fixing color photographs onto metal and pottery. They even got commissions for portraits of Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone.

But what Le Prince really wanted to do was make pictures move.

Making pictures move

In the 1880s, inventors in several countries were racing toward the same goal. Moving pictures.

The idea was not new. Toys that made drawings appear to move had been around for decades. In 1878, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge had used a row of cameras to photograph a galloping horse, one frame at a time, to settle a question about whether all four of its hooves left the ground at once. They did.

But nobody had yet built a single practical machine that could record real life in motion, and then play it back on a screen for an audience. Whoever did that first would change the world, and very likely make a fortune.

Le Prince spent several years working in the United States. There, he designed a camera with sixteen lenses that would take sixteen pictures one after the other. It worked, after a fashion. But because each lens saw the scene from a slightly different angle, the images jumped when you played them back.

He patented it in the United States. The patent was granted on January 10, 1888.

In May 1887, he moved back to Leeds and kept working. In a workshop at 160 Woodhouse Lane, he built something better. A camera with a single lens, that could take picture after picture, very quickly, on a long strip of sensitive paper film.

October 14, 1888

On October 14, 1888, Le Prince set up his single-lens camera in the garden of Oakwood Grange, his wife's family home in the Roundhay area of Leeds.

He filmed four people walking around the lawn. His son Adolphe. His father-in-law, Joseph Whitley. A family friend, Harriet Hartley. And his mother-in-law, Sarah Whitley, walking backward, her long skirt swaying.

The clip lasts about two seconds. It is grainy and flickering. But it moves. It is one of the earliest surviving pieces of motion picture film in history.

And there is a sad detail. Ten days later, Sarah Whitley, the older woman walking backward on the lawn, died.

Le Prince filmed more. His son Adolphe playing an accordion on the front steps. And, from a shop window, the traffic and people crossing Leeds Bridge, horses and carts and pedestrians, a few seconds of an ordinary Victorian street in motion.

He also worked on projectors, machines to show his films on a screen. With a mechanic named James Longley, he built several versions. None were shown to the public.

The plan

By 1890, Le Prince was ready to go public.

He had become a citizen of both France and the United States. His wife, Lizzie, had gone to New York ahead of him. She was preparing a public demonstration of his invention at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, a historic house in Manhattan.

If it had happened, Louis Le Prince might be remembered today as the father of the movies.

But first, he had some business in France. And he wanted to visit his brother in Dijon.

September 16, 1890

In September 1890, Le Prince visited his brother in Dijon, in eastern France.

On September 16, his brother took him to the Dijon train station. Le Prince boarded a train for Paris. He had his luggage with him. He had taken a later train than he had first planned.

His brother was the last person known to have seen him.

When the train arrived in Paris, friends were expecting him. He was not there.

Nobody on the train remembered seeing him get off. His luggage was not found. There was no body on the tracks. No report of a disturbance.

French police searched. Scotland Yard became involved. The family hired their own investigators. Nobody found anything.

Louis Le Prince had disappeared somewhere on a train between Dijon and Paris.

The patent war

Le Prince's family was left in a terrible position.

Lizzie was in New York with no husband, waiting for an exhibition that would never happen. Without Le Prince, there was no one to promote or defend his inventions.

Meanwhile, the race for moving pictures went on without him. Thomas Edison's company developed its own motion picture devices and went on to dominate the early American film industry.

In 1898, Edison's company went to court against another film company, the American Mutoscope Company, in a case known as Equity 6928, claiming Edison had invented motion pictures. The defense called Le Prince's son Adolphe as a witness, to show that his father had made moving pictures first. Film taken with Le Prince's cameras was presented.

The court first ruled for Edison. A year later, that ruling was overturned. But Edison reissued his patents and kept control of much of the American film industry for years.

And a few years after he testified, Adolphe Le Prince was found shot dead while out on Fire Island, New York. He was in his late twenties. His death was ruled a suicide.

The photograph

For more than a hundred years, there were no new clues.

Then, in 2003, a researcher looking through old archives of the Paris police found a photograph. It showed a drowned man pulled from the River Seine in 1890.

The man strongly resembled Louis Le Prince.

It is not proof. Some have argued the body in the record was too short to be him, since Le Prince was very tall. But it is the closest thing to physical evidence that has ever turned up.

The theories

So what happened to Louis Le Prince? There are four main ideas.

The first is murder, connected to his invention. His family, especially his wife Lizzie, believed he had been killed to stop him from claiming credit for motion pictures. Some family members suspected Edison's side. There is no evidence linking Edison or anyone connected to him to Le Prince's disappearance, and many historians consider this unlikely. But it is easy to see why the family believed it.

The second is suicide. Some researchers, including Christopher Rawlence, who wrote a book about the case called The Missing Reel, have suggested Le Prince may have been under financial pressure, and that his experiments were costing more than he could afford. If so, he might have taken his own life. The drowned man in the Seine would fit that theory.

The third is that he disappeared on purpose. A French film historian suggested in the 1960s that Le Prince may have chosen to vanish, for money or family reasons, and start a new life somewhere else.

The fourth is that he never boarded the train at all. Another French historian argued that Le Prince was killed before he left Dijon. But that would mean his brother, the last person to see him, was mistaken or not telling the truth, and there is no evidence of that.

There was also a claim, decades later, that Le Prince had lived on in America and died in Chicago in 1898. There is no evidence for it.

What we still don't know

Today, Leeds remembers him. A plaque marks his old workshop. The University of Leeds named a film center after him. Museums show reconstructions of his films.

But to most of the world, the history of the movies still begins with other names.

Louis Le Prince filmed people walking in a garden in 1888. He built a camera and projectors. He was weeks away from showing his invention to the world. Then he got on a train, and he was never seen again.

Did someone stop him? Did he stop himself? Or did he simply walk away from it all?

What do you think happened on that train from Dijon?