Who invented the motion picture camera. Most people might think Thomas Edison or the Lumiere brothers. And if you're really into this kind of history, you'll also know the name William Friese GREENE. All of these inventors and more were tinkering, building and experimenting with motion pictures around the same time. But as to who came first? That topic is controversial. The oldest known existing movie could be the Roundhay garden scene shot by Louis Le Prince in 1888.
And this film appears to be proof that little Prince's camera came first. So why is he not mentioned in the same breath as someone like Thomas Edison? Well, that's because just before exhibiting his camera in September of 1890, Louis Le Prince vanished. His family suspected foul play from none other than Mr. Thomas Edison. This is a study of strange. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Michael May. And today I'm doing my first ever mini.
So I've been flirting with the idea of a mini said since the beginning of the podcast as a way to kind of do shorter, simpler stories when, you know, things get busy in life. So today it's my first experiment with a mini episode. There's no guest. It's just me tucking into a microphone all by myself.
So let me know what you think about this episode and if you enjoyed this content, if you enjoy the show, take a second to click that plus button, the follow button, the subscribe button, whichever application you're on, will have a way to do it that goes a long way to supporting and helping the show in so many different ways. In tonight's topic, I will add Louis Le Prince.
I was originally going to combine this with the Agatha Christie episode, but I was having too much fun with Agatha Christie last week and I thought she deserved her own episode. So, yes, today we will be talking about Le Prince. This is a common story. You've heard it. You've probably seen it on podcast or read articles of books about it. It's a great, great mystery to dive into.
I am going to go into all the theories, none of which are unique for my show today, but I do have a not a strong opinion, but I do have an opinion on the matter that I'm excited to share. Let's get into it. Louis Le Prince, as I mentioned in the introduction, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
In 1890. He was on his way from France to London, where he was going to depart for America to both patent his invention a single lens motion picture camera and tour the camera to exhibit it and showcase it for the public. But he never arrived. He disappeared from a train from Dijon, France, to Paris. His body never found.
Thomas Edison soon claimed that his camera was the first motion picture camera Someone History has not treated so kindly as years have gone on Mr. Thomas Edison for good reason. Now, there are a lot of theories about Louis Prince and his disappearance that we're going to get to. But first, who was Louis Le Prince? Le Prince was born on August 28th, 1841, in Metz, France. He was an inventor.
And today we consider him an early pioneer of cinematography and recognized as one of the fathers of motion pictures. But because his invention was forgotten for decades, we weren't aware of that until modern times allegedly as a boy. Louis Le Prince spent time in Louis Tigers studio. Daguerre, one of the early inventors and pioneers of photography. You can check back to one of my early episodes about spirit photography, where we talk about daguerreotypes.
Le Prince moved to Leeds, England, in the 1860s, where he worked. He got married. And he was always showing an interest in photography and even developed a method to apply color photographs onto objects. Always interested in the idea of motion in photography. And the early 1880s, he designed a camera with 16 lenses. He patented this invention as a motion picture camera, but there's doubt that it ever worked or that the images could have been projected.
See, each lens would have taken a picture of a subject at a slightly different angle, and then theoretically, when it's projected, you would view the the subject or the object moving because the pictures were taken in a sequence. It's an interesting idea, but it didn't catch on for a lot of very good reasons. Then in 1888, Le Prince built what he called the single lens type camera. And this is closer to what we think of as early motion picture cameras.
It was hand-cranked and used a spool of film, which was a paper based film. It wasn't celluloid like you might think. They called this sensitized paper. Some accounts claim that the camera filmed at around 12 frames per second, but it's likely it was closer to 5 to 7 frames per second. And on October 14th, 1888, Le Prince filmed what is commonly thought of as the oldest known footage from a motion picture camera, the Roundhay garden scene.
Now, this film features Le Prince's family members, including his son Adolphe, and his mother in law, Sarah Witley. And they were filmed walking around the back garden and laughing. The film is only about 2 seconds long. Despite its brevity, the Roundhay garden scene is a significant piece of film history as it showcases the Prince's innovative use of his single lens type camera to create moving pictures.
This film was shot years before Thomas Edison began filming and exhibiting his work by about four years, and it predates the Lumiere brothers from their first public screening of a motion picture by about five years. So Le Prince is ahead of his time. The round Garden scene was not publicly screened during Prince's lifetime, however, but the original film strip has survived and is now held in the National Science and Media Museum in the United Kingdom.
With this, Louis Le Prince had successfully developed a motion picture camera and his patent for the 16 lens camera likely would also cover this single lens type. You know, there are two different inventions, and he needed a new patent and to spread word of this camera if it was ever going to have any success, which is why in 1890, Le Prince was planning to present his invention to the world. This is where it gets strange.
Le Prince boarded a train from Dijon, France, where his brother lived to Paris on September 16th, 1890. He was planning to gather his documents, his camera, his camera parts, all those kind of fun things back in England where they were, and then travel to New York to show off his invention. He was to meet friends. Upon arriving in Paris on the layover there before his trip to London, However, when his train arrived in Paris, Le Prince was nowhere to be found.
Both French police and Scotland Yard carried out a search and investigation for the prince and his luggage. Neither was ever found. It is alleged that his luggage would have held important documentation about his invention that would be necessary to file a patent. Now, there are a few things that are commonly left out of this mystery, and I'm jumping a bit ahead in my notes here, but I think it's important to mention this right away. Le Prince wasn't actually considered missing for some time.
When we hear this story today, we tend to think, oh, they're investigating right away. They're not. They may not have started an investigation for weeks. And this has to do with communication. It's not like there were phone calls going back and forth or post on Instagram, a tick tock that anybody notices right away. If he didn't arrive in Paris to meet his friends, the thought would have been, oh, he missed his train. He'll show up later. Let's go on without it.
There wasn't an immediate worry or concern, and this is the way life was. Also, we don't know actually what was in his luggage. That's an important point. It's likely his valuable documents were stored back in England, not his luggage on the train. So remember that when we talk about some theories coming up, needless to say, there are a lot of theories about what happened to Louis Le Prince.
But I'm going to start with the most damning and dramatic, the theory that Thomas Edison was involved, that he made the prince disappear. There were, at the time rumblings of a patent war between Le Prince and all his rivals because so many people were trying to invent motion picture cameras, including Thomas Edison. In fact, weeks after Le Prince never made his arrival in Paris, Edison filed a preliminary patent application known as a caveat for a motion picture camera.
Now, this is different from earlier preliminary applications that Edison made and is similar to Le Princess. How similar? I'm not well-educated enough in patents and patent law to be certain. The believers in this theory liked to say the word quote unquote, similar to le princes, but rarely go into detail. Upon looking into this a little bit more. Caveats, they actually don't go into a lot of detail. So it might be a leap of faith to fit your own conspiracy.
If you think that Edison's patent that he was filing at the time was a copy or stealing from Le Prince. It's highly unlikely, however. Eight months later, Edison announced his kinetic graph, the camera that then exhibits its film in the kinetic scope, which you've probably heard of. This is acknowledged in some circles as the original motion picture camera and projection exhibition system. This was important to Edison.
In fact, Edison's lawyers fought to establish that a preliminary application filed by Edison, retroactively dated 1888, proved the existence of the kinetic graph at that time, and therefore he, not Le Prince or anyone else had invented motion pictures. Edison wanted to be the first at everything that was his business model, because then he and only he could reap the monetary rewards of those patents. That's that's Thomas Edison's jam, baby. Edison Today we see him for what he was.
He would use money and power in the legal system to fight anyone that had anything that may affect his own patents. Patents, by the way, that were not always invented by him alone, but created by his employees. Now, is this enough to claim that Edison had something to do with the Prince's disappearance? Not in my personal opinion, but I did come across an article from 2008 and it involves a graduate student named Alexis Bedford.
And I'm going to quote here from an article in Science Direct Tor.com. I've always admired Louis Le Prince, stated Bedford, but really not much was known about him because of his sudden disappearance. As Bedford relates it, he was turning over some papers on Thomas Edison's work when he stumbled across a dilapidated, leather bound book. The book would turn out to be one of many notebooks in which Edison was fond of jotting down ideas.
Leafing through it, explained Bedford, I merely thought I'd find perhaps some interesting and as yet unknown processes that Edison had tried in his laboratory. I never thought I would stumble upon this. He had found a small entry dated September 20th, 1890, by Edison's own hand, which read Eric called me today from Dijon. It had been done. Prince is no more. This is good news. But I flinched when he told me Murder is not my thing.
I'm an inventor in my inventions for moving images can now move forward, end quote. I've looked into this claim more and I can't find any proof of this. Can't find any corroborating information. Copies of these notes from this notebook. I can't even find information on who this Bedford Alexis Bedford is. And neither have many others that have researched this online because I've come across many articles from other folks that have followed up on this.
So this seems like a fraudulent statement, maybe just a fun work of fiction. There may not be sort of nefarious planning going behind it. But until there's proof, we have to assume that the theory of Edison having blueprints killed is just that a theory? Personally, my belief is that Edison was a scumbag, but his modus operandi was lawsuits, corporate espionage and throwing money at problems. We have a lot of history and records of this, not murder. That's just a step too far to assume.
Also, the coordinating factors to pull off at that time, some sort of hit job across the ocean would travel to Europe. Took so long and communication was slow and burdensome that it just seems highly unlikely. Also, Edison is smart enough to not write down that he had someone murdered in a notebook. I'm sorry. Carrying on investigations Never found a witness that saw the prints board the train.
As I mentioned earlier, it was some time before authorities did investigate, so it's not hard to understand it. It's difficult to find a witness. But another theory is that Le Prince never got on the train. And this theory includes le Prince's brother, Albert, who was the only witness that said he saw Le Prince to the train station. And this theory is that Albert had Louis killed for an inheritance. There is no evidence to back this theory up. The family was close.
There's never been a reported bad word between the brothers. Or a fight for inheritance. But yet it's a theory. There's also a slight variation to this theory where it's believed Le Prince was homosexual and the family killed him or sent him away to hide out. But again, this is based on flimsy clickbait type comments and articles over time from individuals who claim proof but have never shown the proof. The background of this theory starts in 1966.
A guy named Jack Dylan wrote in the comparative history of cinema and claimed the prince was a volunteer voluntarily disappeared due to familial conveniences. And then a journalist named Leo Savage quoted something in 1977, after talking with the director of the Dijon Municipal Library that claimed the prince died in Chicago in 1898. Yeah, yeah. He just he moved to Chicago. He moved to the Windy City to hide his homosexuality. But again, where is this note? Where are these documents?
Where is the evidence? You know, I love these stories. They're dramatic and mysterious, but you do have to have proof people. The next theory is suicide. There have been comments from Descendants of Le Princes that claim he was near bankruptcy. Now, from what I found, this may not be true. He had sold a company and for around $700,000 in today's money. So he's no Vanderbilt, but he seems to be well off. So the theory of suicide, like these other theories, is just a lot of comments and talking.
There's not really much to back up, especially when he was so motivated to travel to America to file a patent and exhibit his camera. It just seems highly unlikely that he was also planning to kill himself. The last theory involves a dead body found in a river soon after Le Prince disappeared. A photograph of a drowned man pulled from the scene river in 1890 strongly resemble footprints. And this was discovered in 2003, over 100 years after this happened.
During research in the Paris Police Archives. So that insinuates that maybe Le Prince fell off a train or jumped or killed and dumped and all this. The previous theories I've mentioned kind of tie in to this fact. But the body was too short. People jump to conclusions too fast. Le Prince was actually a very tall dude, over six foot tall. And this body is much shorter. So it is not Livvy Le Prince. To end here tonight, my personal theory is that something completely random happened.
And this is not a new theory. This also comes up in articles and podcast about the subject. But if it is something that's completely random, that is why it is so hard to explain what happened and why the story is still a mystery. And strange to this day. He could have been mugged and killed. He could have gotten off at the wrong train station and then accidentally found himself in the wrong area at the wrong time. He could have had a freak accident. We don't know.
And that is why the mystery lives on. There are some similarities in this case to, let's say, Edgar Allan Poe's death, which is also bizarre and mysterious with all sorts of theories that we cannot prove today. Although I love talking about them and researching the mystery of Louis Le Prince's disappearance remains unsolved to this day. It's unclear what happened to him. Some have called him the father of cinematography as his work laid the groundwork for modern filmmaking.
But the mystery surrounding his disappearance, though it once had his accomplishments from the public for some time, has only added to his legacy as a pioneer of early cinema. That'll do it from the show. I the lesson I learned today recording is that I miss having somebody to talk to. But this is, you know, it's a fun thing. And like I said, up top, I've been flirting with the idea of mini sodas when I'm busy and don't have time to do deep dives on subjects. But I hope you enjoyed it.
Let me know your thoughts. You can send me messages on Instagram and a study of strange or email a study of strange at gmail.com. Please give us a follow a like a rating. Check out our Patreon to support the show and a study of strange dot com. And stay tuned because we're going back to murder and mayhem with America's first documented serial killers, the Harp brothers. Coming up on a study of strangers next episode. Thank you and good night.