Thinking Sideways: Louis Le Prince

talk about another cool mystery. Yeah. This week we're going to talk about Louis La Prince who mysteriously vanished. Let me start off without few biographical details about Louis La Prince. Um. He was born in France in one moved to Leeds, England in eighteen sixty six, taking taking a job working for a college friend in a brass foundry. I think he was an engineer. Um. He eventually married, moved to the US for a while, and began experimenting with motion pictures.

He was trying to build himself a movie camera. He produced a sixteen lens camera which was kind of so so. Essentially, what it did is it took sixteen sequential photographs, but didn't quite work out so great because every photograph was taken from a slightly different vantage point, so it gave kind of a jerky result. If you're trying to picture it almost looked like to figure out how to lens configuration is it's almost like the buttons on a double

breasted suit. Yes, yeah, that's exactly I mean. Or you can go and look up pictures of it on the internet, because we have pictures of the machine. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't a really accurate machine. No, that didn't. But yeah, so he he began because he didn't like the results on that when he got a patent on it. Anyway, but started, Yeah, I started working on a single lens camera and it eventually produced a prototype and also a prototype projector. And he actually is credited with making the

world's first moving pictures. Yeah. That was in Leeds where he made those films in England. Yeah, Leeds, England. Yeah, he tested his prototypes for moving to the US. Yeah, okay, well no, I think this is after he came back from the US and back to Leeds and that's where he made his first films, which was and by the way, those films can be found online. They're incredibly short. Is to second, like the running what's the running horse one? That's that's not this guy? Right? Yeah? Yeah, So do

you want to talk about that stuff? About that stuff before we talked about as this mysterious disappearance. You know, let's let's talk about let's just go through the story and then we'll talk about the technology and then we can go from there. And that's probably the better way, so we don't break it up too much. Okay, all right.

Generally Thomas Edison and the Louiser brothers, who are French guys, they get all the credit for the invention of the movies, but Louis Le Prince actually was the first out of the gate. He produces prototype several years I think before Edison produced his. After he had a good functioning single lens prototype and projector, he made plans to go to New York to put on a public demonstration. Uh. And so that would have been eighteen nine when that happened.

So that was a year ahead of when Thomas Edison applied for his parents. Wasn't that kind of a trend in Thomas Edison's career? Was? Yeah, we're talking about that. Okay we are yeah, yeah, how can we not? Yeah? So okay, now we get talked about his disappearance. Yeah, okay. In September eighteen, Louis la Prince went to Dijon to visit his brother Albert. Yeah. Well yeah, he used to be great. Poupon to change Yeah yeah, dejon actually in French means dijon. I don't know if you knew that.

Can we stop the mustard joke? Okay. On September six, eight nineties, brother Albert took him to the Dijon railway station and put him on a train to Paris, where Louis was supposed to meet up with friends to continue the journey to his journey to the UK and then on to America for the demonstration. Louis le Prince had his prototypes with him as well as his luggage. Long story short. When the train arrived in Paris, Louis Le

Prince was not on the train and a mystery was born. Also, his long age and his prototypes were gone to None of the passengers reported seeing anything strange happening. Nobody saw somebody getting beaten or somebody getting drug off, or you know, they did, They say they noticed a dude with like really big bags. Everybody had really big luggage in those days. Yeah, it appears that nobody really noticed him. Was actually an in and of itself as a little strange because he

was actually a big guy. He was like six three or four, you know, he was. He was a pretty big guy. French police search to train. Then they searched the train line all the way back from Paris to Dijon, which is, by the way, quite a trip, that's quite a lot along a big swath of territory to search. They found no sign of Louis le Prince, and his disappearance is a mystery to this day. Can I ask a quick question, how soon did they search the train?

I've never been able to find details. I have not either. Yeah, this you know, this happened, like you know, obviously more than years ago. So details are a little sketchy. Well, it depends on the telling. Though. Sometimes it almost makes it sound as if the train arrived and police immediately swarmed over the train. There's no way, but that's when you do the reading. Some of the stuff you come

across gives that impression. But I don't Trains don't normally stay at the station first exactly, Paris is the end of the line, though maybe maybe it would have stayed there for a little bit. But the thing about it is is I'm not sure exactly when anybody raised the alarm about him. It might have been one of these things. Maybe it's even there's been some distortion introduced to the whole thing, and maybe railroad employees eventually searched the train,

maybe the police did it. It might have been days afterwards. Even it could have been one of those things where it's like maybe somebody murdered him and stuffed his body and some little nook. Yeah. But alternately, it could have been one of those things where, you know, his friends were waiting to pick him up, they didn't see him. The conductor said, you know, okay, we're all board, and somebody said, oh no, wait, wait wait, my friend was supposed to get off here. Can you just go check

make sure he's not asleep? You know, they said, yeah, they were discovered that he was not there, and they said uh, and you know, they thought, oh yeah, and so or something. They went, yeah, and they went through the train and all that stuff, And so I don't

know how thorough the search was. But but yeah, and again it's time before cell phones, so it's not exactly like you just yeah, hey, where are you and he doesn't respond and you go, oh no. But also you know, he can't just say, oh, I missed the train, I'll be on the next one, which is so you could just make the assumption of he missed the train, he'll be on the next one. Yeah. So anyway, that's our mystery.

This is a pretty short intro to this one. We're going to descend right into the theory actually talk about we need to explain kind of what he's doing here based on the time frame, because this if you haven't ever done any research into the history of photography, this makes no sense in terms of how cameras worked. I mean, I don't know if you guys have had to do that. Okay, you're giving me looks like, well, I don't know what you're asking if you've had to do any research on

the history of photography. Okay, yeah, I haven't. Artist in this room. I took classes, so I know that I know that they invented the cell phone, and then they and then they invented the camera and go in and then they invented the selfie and then they invented the internet.

Okay somewhere in there. Yeah, that's what I know. Well, so I know that this is part of Louise's history, is that he was his family friends with Because if you've ever heard, you may have heard of the phrase a Dagara type, and that's a type of photographic image. That means a Daguera type is a very it's a very simple way of making a photo. You basically take polished silver a plate and you put chemicals on it. They're light sensitive. You expose it like you would a film,

you know, photographic film. It's the same principle, but it's chemicals on a plate, and then you process it and then you put a sheeted glass over because what has been exposed, Um, I can't remember whether it's what's been exposed stays dark or if what hasn't been an exposed washes away. One of the two, it leaves an image, and that's a Dagara type, and you'll see him. There's all these old tin photos of like Confederate soldiers and stuff like that that's there. They're a version of that.

But he Liew of the Prince, was family friends. That that was a buddy of his dad. So I spent a lot of time hanging out with him and learned a lot and got him I'm sure that got him started off. Yeah, so he so he knew about games from that. And then the other guy that you brought was Moybridge. And people will know Moybridge that they probably won't know. His work is if you've ever seen I think it's a horse galloping is the name of it. But it is a series of images that they put

in a spirograph that they caught. Not a spirograph when it's a cylinder with images on the inside and you can spin it and it makes it look like the images moving. It's a very early crude version of actual movies. It's actually it's it's actually the earliest gift, yeah, because it repeats well yeah, And that's what Devil was talking about, is he took these images of a horse that was running, but he didn't actually make a movie. It was like it was stop motion photography, is what it was. He had.

There was a bet to figure out if a horse's feet ever all four left the ground at once, so to be able to figure this out, and needed a photograph, so he had I think it was sixteen or twenty eight, something like that, sixteen cameras in a row. Threads run across the course that pulled the shutter, so as the horse crossed it and snapped the thread, it would take photo. And then he assembled those and that's how you get

the actual first movie. If the horse had gone galloping down the course and all the cameras had toppled over, maybe that happened the first time out. He's like, should not have used rope. But the point is is that uh La Prince wasn't the first one to invent this kind of technology. People have been working on this, while Boybridge is the first one who proved that you could make a moving image. And then from there everybody else. This was the age of you know, the gentleman inventor.

Everybody was making these things the renaissance, Yes, the renaissance man. But that's that's how this whole technology worked. And that's what his sixteen lens camera was was the equivalent of in one box with Moybridge had done with sixteen individual cameras. Yeah, and of course he was shooting on papers, so it wasn't as good. He's the one who figured out how to use celluloid. Yeah, he did, and to make an

image he started. Yeah, he would take sheets of celluloid and cut it in strips and stuff like that, and which is why the movies are so short. Well, yeah, I know. The interesting thing about this too is that eventually Thomas Edison basically owned the movie industry and it was all run out of Mental Park, New Jersey, and he formed a formed a company. I can't remember what the company was called, but they essentially set the rules

for filmmaking and the theaters. They one of the things that they insisted on was that no movie be longer than twenty minutes, because they were of the opinion that the attention span of the American public was too short for anything. That I would kind of agree with that. Yeah, it's amazing we've gotten away with the length we've gone. Yeah, but he's got that. But but he had a kind of a stranglehold everybody had. Everybody had to pay him royalties because he sewed up the whole thing with those

patents and everything. And so that's why Hollywood got created. It is because of Thomas Edison. Because all these people from the East Coast were fed up with him, you know, setting the rules, making it, making them pay royalties whenever they wanted to show a film in the theater, and and telling them how long their movies could be etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So they moved That's California, which is in nine, which is as far away from Edison as they could possibly get, and the reigning the reigning court out there was a ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and so the Ninth Circuit was not particularly sympathetic to monopolies such as what Edison had going. Oh he was trying. He tried to set a monopolies constantly. Oh yeah, I mean, we're going to talk about it. But he was a complete and total a whole everything that I've I mean, he did great things,

but he was also a dirty businessman. Oh yeah, very much. So yeah, yeah, and yeah, and then the whole story of him and Tesla is kind of interesting. It so Lawrence a lot of reading. If you've never done that, you need to. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah yeah. But that was a big there was a big war, you know, over the whole thing between direct current and alternating current, you know. Oh yeah, and Tesla invented alternating current. Alternately,

you can watch the Bob's Burgers episode topsy. Yeah, could you imagine how screwed up our infrastructure would be if we had direct current? It would be different. It would be terrible. Be better, no, direct curric better. You are quoting at You're quoting a cartoon. I'm not saying it'd be no, I'm personally saying it'd be better. I'm not quoting power plants every five miles or ten miles because that's all you can transmit electricity. Yeah, oh yeah, that'd

be a great. Yeah, just right at the arcs right, you just have an arcing in between things. Just have tesla coils every perfect Yeah, we can just generate power in our own homes. I have no sor. I'm working on a small nuclear reactor myself. Back to Louis the Prince. Um, we're gonna talk about theories as to how and why he disappeared. Okay, first theory up, Thomas Edison did it? I believe it. Yeah I don't actually yeah no, Actually, the like the Prince's widow, believe that Edison was responsible

for a little foul play. I could see why though, Yeah, well he had he actually did have an interest in this whole thing. He applied for his first moving picture patent a year later in after the disappearance, After the disappearance, Yeah, in France, the louis Are brothers staged their first moving picture show in Paris. In so it does appear that these people, especially Edison, really benefited from Louis the Prince's disappearance.

And now, um, let me ask about the patent thing, because I never I could never find conclusive answers to this. As you read that the Prince applied for a patent for the single lens camera in the United States and it was denied, and then two years later Edison applies for it and gets it without a hitch, and they denied. According to the readings that I've seen, it was denied because it infringed on another patent. Yeah. But but but Edison's design infringed on the same path. Correct. But but

is there truth to that or do you know? I couldn't find out if that was true or not. I have not been able to fit to find that out for a certain book. Didn't Edison? Didn't? Edisone work in the patent office for a while. No, that's Einstein. Yeah, yeah, but famous guy. Wrong, famous guy. You sort of wonder when it comes to Edison though, if you maybe didn't have a didn't have a like a mole in the

patent office. Yeah, patents like mad though, that's the thing he filed so through what's the what was the name of the place that he had Edison mean Menlo Park, Menlo Park, thank you? Through Menlo Park. He filed for bunches and bunches and bunches of patents. So I I almost wonder if his patent went through because somebody went another Edison patents stay up go. Yeah, that could be or I think it could be too, because it might be one of those deleos where you kind of got

to like bribe somebody. Yeah yeah, I mean that was this was a time where that was not uncommon. Yeah country. Yeah. So anyway, Edison gets his patent and louis La Prince does not. But I was I was saying Edison really benefited from the Prince's disappearance, and the family felt like Edison and Louisier's were taking credit for louis La Prince's invention,

but apparently they couldn't sue. I read in one place that only Louis la Prince could take legal action into American law about anything we're regarding patent infringement, and so the family could have taken legal action if Louis was dead, but he wasn't legally considered dead. He took like seven years and then he was declared I think he was declared legally dead in eighteen seven. Yeah, it's too late.

I mean they're often running and so yeah, uh so on the way, years went by, and this is fairly recently, like we're talking, like you know, probably ten or so years ago. A guy named Alexis Bedford was a grad student at New York University, and he was doing research into the history of motion pictures. And he was in the archives in the New York Public Library researching Thomas Edison's work, and he found this warn leather book, which turned out to be one of Edison's notebooks, which I

assume he had lots of. Yeah, And in this book he he found a note dated September eight nine in Edison's handwriting, which read quote Eric called me today from Dijon. It has been done, Princess, no more. This is good news. But I flinched when he told me murder is not my thing. I'm an inventor and my inventions for moving images can move forward unquote. So Alexis Bedford took that journal back to New York University UH and gave it to a story in their named Robert E. Meyer for authentication.

And this guy Meyer examined the journal that included handwriting comparisons and some sort of computer tomography scan or a cat scan UH, and he decided the journal was real. The note dated September eighteen ninety was in Edison's handwriting, so it was a real deal. It was a smoking gun, Thomas A. Edison crime king. At this point there was another a similar mysterious disappearance of another inventor who Addison Edison. Yeah, this was a while later. Yeah, in nineteen thirteen. Rudolph

Diesel disappeared in September nineteen thirteen. He boarded the Steamer Dresden in Antwerp, Belgium, down for the UK, and that was September September UH and the day of he uh disappeared. Apparently the next day he was supposed to show up at breakfast and he didn't, so they wouldn't check his cabin. The bunk had not been slept in. He was nowhere to be found. They searched the ship, couldn't find him.

And they looked at his journal and the last entry, which was September twenty nine, was nothing more than a cross. And the cross looks suspiciously just like one that Edison would have drawn. Was Edison on the ship? Edison was not on the ship, but you don't know that his agents weren't. So for anybody who hasn't picked up on it yet, though, Joe, why why is this guy important? Diesel? Rudolph Diesel. He invented the diesel engine. Yeah, yeah, and that obviously is you know, the diesel engine is a

real big deal. Yeah, that's an okay deal. It's kind of a big deal. Yeah, drives like half the world. Yeah, it's since Yeah, ships and trucks and trains and how am I God, Yeah, there's diesels all over the place. Yeah. Eleven days after Rudolph Diesel disappeared, to ship ran across a body in the general area. And they didn't really actually feel like dragging the body on board their ships. I don't know why, but they did get into it,

and they especially lowered a boat went over rifle. The pockets took some personal effects, and in the end it turned out the personal effects were diesels. I bet there's some superstition that goes on there. There might be. I don't really want to bring a dead body onto a ship. Well, yeah, this is eleven days later, so the body was probably kind of ripe. Yeah. And also it's totally possible that they didn't know by then, Right, what where was he going on the ship? He was going from Antwerp to

the UK. Oh, so they after a visit to the U S. Right, got it, Yeah, so he was going to US. It's possible they would have not known yet that somebody was missing. But well, yeah, they just saw a body. They want they want to get some identifying things off of it, you know, and then they just let it go. So Diesel died in So Diesel died. So said, you had another guy with a connection to

Thomas Edison, you know, mysteriously dies Yeah, so Thomas Edison. Uh, Well, anyway, that the whole story about the journal from the New York Public Library, it kind of has a stink of BS all over it. I think, I don't know what you guys think. Well, based on the legwork you did, I'm gonna agree. Yeah. Well, yeah, I called New York University. They've never heard of this historian named Robert E. Meyer,

and uh, I asked him. I said, well, what if he used to work for you, but it doesn't anymore, And they said, well, you know, if you worked for us, if he was on our faculty, he would have published stuff. And so if you do an Internet search, that stuff will turn up. And it didn't not. And I had done those searches and none of that stuff turned up. This guy, as far as I could tell him, never existed,

which means likely this journal ever existed. Yeah, exactly. But well and frankly it's it doesn't really pass the smell test. If it did, who does that? Yeah, oh yeah, murdered somebody I know really Uh. And as for as for Rudolph Diesel, I don't think Addison actually had any interest in developing a diesel engine. Apparently that was one of one of Diesel's disappointments as he tried to tried to spark some interest for that in America and apparently because

of diesel engine is more efficient. Uh. He thought, well, who could not want this? Right, but also didn't I mean, the diesel engine was already a thing right when Diesel died. No, gasoline powered engines were a thing, but not Diesel, because Diesel invented the diesel That's what I mean. By the time Diesel died, Yeah, he he had invented hadn't been widespread, but he had invented it all. He probably already had the patent for it, I presume, since it's called the

diesel engine. Here's the weird thing about patents is they're not They're not international there by country typically, which is the screwious system in the world. Well, it seems it was enough that he I mean, it's named after Diesel. I mean, so it seems like even if Edison had been interested in it before Diesel had already made a name for himself. Everybody already knew, Hey, this guy is the thing, the one who did this. Yeah, but that

never stopped I mean Edison. If Edison was truly interested in the engine, he could have patented it in the United States, because he did things like that, where he would get the patent, somebody else would fight him and say they own the patent. He would then say, oh, let's be business partners. He'd bring him in as a business partner, then biohim out, and then that person disappeared from history. And Edison was the guy who made the invention,

so he did a lot of ininky things. But I want to actually want to say that even though I don't think that this journal existed, I think that the way that you read it and you interpret it may be incorrect, and it may have just been if it really existed, an innocent note because if you read, okay, so this is four days after the Prince disappeared, right, okay, So it says and I went back to it, and it says Eric called me today from Dijon. It has been done, Princes no more. So it has been done.

Could mean something about the fight is done. Maybe got that, and you know the good news is this is good news. But I flinched. Murder is not my thing, like he's o God, he died, Like killing a man is not my thing, Like it's crazy that he died. You can read into it a completely different way. It still implicates him because La Prince was never seen or heard from again, nor was his stuff, So at the very least that implies that Edison knew that La Prince is dead. No,

it doesn't. It does. The guy said he was murdered. I mean, the guy doesn't know squad. The guy that calls him four days later, it's probably in the local papers, local inventor or you know, French inventor disappears, man hunt underplay. I don't think what you're saying. So this guy calls and says, hey, La Prince disappeared. Somebody killed it. He's gone. Yeah,

but still, yeah, I could see that. But but here's the deal is Louis la Prince at this point has been missing a grand total of four days, and so there's no reason to assume he's been murdered. Yeah. I mean I got the Christie disappeared for how many days and people said she had been murdered right away. Yeah, anyway, I just I think that whole thing was just made up. I completely agree. But I also see how it wouldn't

be as um necessarily. I see what you're saying. It's like, it's like he didn't have a part in the murder. He just heard he was murder. It's like, yeah, cool that that frees up. Yeah, it wasn't being the evil monster that we've called him. This whole time. A little bit though, because he said it was good news. Yeah, a little Yeah, he wasn't. He wasn't a nice guy. That it doesn't matter. I don't think anyway, I don't think.

Back back to Diesel, I just gotta say, interest in the diesel engine at that time was just kind of minimal because we were Americans and we weren't really interested in the war efficient engine. Yeah. Also, Rudolph Diesel was having financial and health problems, and it's kind of it's kind of assumed at this point in time that he

committed suicide. But of course, at that time there were some conspiracy theories about the whole thing, one of which involved the German Secrets Service, who rubbed him out, supposedly because they were developing their U boats using diesel engines and they didn't want Rudolph Diesel sharing his secrets with the British and the Americans. And that is a year before the outbreak of World War One? Is that correct? It is when World War One started? Yeah, okay, I

can see why that theory would be out there for him. Yeah. And another theory was that business rivals did him in uh get Another theory that was in the papers about less than the year after his death said that he had he had faked his death and was living in Canada under a new name. Did you add this part? Yeah, I made up the new name. But his new name was Friedrich Gasoline. Uh yeah, so yeah, I was I was kind of hoping that that was what was in

the newspapers at the time. Yeah, so Frederick Gasoline is living in Canada anyway. So whether Edison actually stole Louis the Prince's ideas, I can't really say. It might be a case of parallel developments, so they just both kind

of had the same idea, which is entirely possible. Or maybe Edison had a source down the patent office who gave him information and drawings on patent applications, and so Louis the Prince applies gets turned down and then that stuff turned winds up in in Edison's mailbox days later, and so you can get to work on his single lens camera. Yeah. I think I think that for Edison

it was just lucky timing. Yeah, it probably mean. I think it's not as though it happened in a vacuum either, right, I mean, you can be the very clear progression from each step to each step, So it makes sense that they would have come to the theme similar conclusions. But what I mean is that if if la Prince hadn't disappeared, he probably would have been able to show it worked and get his patents, and then Edison wouldn't have had the stranglehold on the whole thing. Yeah, but it was

it was just all he might have been America. Still, it was you know, it was perfect timing for him. It's like, hey, well I kind of had some stuff going on. Let's just oh well, let's just see what I can make out of based on what we know about this guy's stuff, and bang, you know, back reverse engineering it. Yeah, it could have been Okay, enough, I have enough of Edison, I'm thinkings and probably didn't do it. Yeah, next there. This is a popular one to suicide, UM

has claimed. According to Louis la Prince's great nephew whose name I don't know, what he said, apparently he was on the verge of bankruptcy and that so he decided to commit suicide and decided to do it in one of those wonderful perfect ways that creates a mystery arranging for his body and his luggage to never be found. That's weird. Well I don't find it. I find it convincing. Now, Yeah, because really that never that doesn't happen. It doesn't that

can happen. If I was going to commit suicide, I'd probably do it that way, but in some perfect mysterious way. Yeah. But the thing about it is is he had this cool prototype that he was going to take to New York to show off, and um, he had a lot to live for, I think because it could have turned out that that thing could have taken the world by fire and he could have gotten very rich. Probably would have,

probably would have. And if you take the New York and it turns out it's to flop, well then you kill yourself. Sure what if I mean, okay, so just to play you know, the flip side of the coin here for a second. What if it turns out that his cooling prototype didn't actually work as well? White? Right? I mean, it worked for a little bit and then he found some fatal flaw in it or it broke, and so he was on his way, but he was thinking, there's literally no way I can fix this. I don't

know what's wrong with it. The Cavin Boy dropped it and or you know, there's literally no way to I can't figure out how to make it more than two seconds. You know, people are obviously going to want to record more than just two seconds. Well, I can't figure out how to make it more than two seconds. I'm a failure. Oh god, how am I going to debut this in New York? I have to kill myself before anybody finds out about my failure to take my stuff with me. Yeah.

I got a feeling because you know, if you're if you're a guy like like him, you've got to go to a lot of iterations and failures and and modifications. You know. I think he was probably if that had happened, he probably would have postponed the showing. And he had done before. I'm just saying, I'm just wasn't like this

was his first rodeo. Yeah. Yeah, and uh. And the other reason I don't like to suicide theory because he was almost bankrupt, is that his mom had died recently, Lee and he was actually going to inherit some money. So he killed himself because his mom died. Maybe that's it. He was depressed. He was really depressed about his mom dying. Yeah, well, so much for that there. How do you guys feel about suicide? Yeah, I don't. I don't think so. Our

next series that he was murdered for money. Uh. Did I happen to mention that Louis the Prince was getting an inheritance? Yeah? I think I did. Yeah. Yeah. The number that I've heard is that his mother left about a hundred and forty dollars to her children, which in today's dollars is about three point seven million dollars. Yeah. So the theory this, the theory on this and this one is that Louise's brother decided to increase his own

share by killing him. And after all, his Louis the Prince's brother was actually the only person who saw Louis the Prince get on that train, and that's true, so maybe he never got on the train to begin with. How many children were there? You know, I've not been able to find that out. I don't know. I mean, is it like three or seventeen? Do you have a general on those days? I think it's a smaller number.

In those days people had like yeah, yeah, yeah, so it was probably four or five something like that at the most. That's still a sizeable sum of money. Yeah, and see why his brother would knock him off for that. Yeah, yeah, No, it's just that that was real money back in those days. It's still real money. I don't know about you. I was labor rendering, you know, I was thinking we were all kind of in the same boat about three point seven billion dollars being a lot of money. No, I'm

saying I had dollars. It's not it's not real money. Oh, that's still real money to me. Yeah. Sorry, yeah, sorry. Over there, that one point six billion dollar payout in Powerball, I kind of spoiled me. I get get interested in a jack produ that's less than a billion dollars now, yeah. Yeah. And so I don't know about this theory that his

brother murdered him. You know, if Louis the Prince hadn't no doubt he was down there in Dijon talking to his brother and showing him his cool prototype and displaying this amazing thing that's going to take the world by storm. If I would his brother, I'll be thinking, Wow, holy crap, my brother might get stinking rich off of this, and maybe he's gonna spread the wealth around a little bit. Yeah. So you know, there's that that kind of so that

kind of contradicts a suicide thing for me. Plus I've heard that the samon was actually close and they weren't the kind of go around stabbing stabbing each other in the back and stuff like that. But you know, it's it's also a situation where an accident could have happened. I mean, if the brother is the only one that that is the link to him getting on the train, then that's the link that I would question the most. He's out of his property, he falls down and hits

his head on a rock. His brother is covered in blood from it and looks bad, looks bad, so he just buries him in his camera in a shallow grave, actually had a deep grave. Shallow graves get dug up by animals, he would have been found well, he would have put the camera on top, so the animals would have you know, taken pictures of themselves. And that was it selfie, the first animal selfie every But you know, I mean, it's it's quite possible that it wasn't an

intentional thing, that it was just an accident. And so Louis went swimming in the lake and he sort of didn't come back. He was but he was big, wasn't he. I mean, he was guy. It's not easy feat to have, you know. It could have been he died like not it died in an embarrassing way, like you know, auto erotic a situation, or maybe maybe maybe he you know, like shot up with smack and overdosed. You know, something like that is embarrassing and like you're making jokes about it.

But there there could be things that were considered an embarrassment to the family in the way that he died and they decided to hide that. That's that's so far the most plausible of all of the things that we've talked about. But here's why I don't think that happened is because he um, he had a couple of really valuable prototypes right there. So when your brother dies and he just had to cover it up, if could just say something like, well, he left, but he left these

with us. He wanted us to ship them onto him in New York because he didn't want to be wigged down. Because you're not going to throw those things away. Those things are valuable. Joe, you're the evil genius. That's why you think of these things could be the people who clubbed their family member with the brick. Never think about that stuff. That's not an accident. It is when you

wink wink clubbed him with it. It's it's totally next. Well, I mean there's times when it's times when you've got a sock and you've got a brick in and you just sort of swinging it around and sometimes you accidentally connect with somebody. I'm gonna start just skyping into the because that makes me very uncomfortable. I mean, come on, you guys, how accidents happened? Yeah? Alright, so yeah, so murder. I'm not really keen on that theory. What do you guys like guys like that or not? No, I don't

think I don't think. Okay, next the same with this one. I don't think it's out there now. I don't think so. But his family this one says he disappeared voluntarily because his family were not really voluntarily, but his family basically told him to get lost and disappeared because he was gay. That there's somebody out there puts out. This series says he disappeared lived out the rest of his life in Chicago. I don't know why Chicago. I guess because there's a

thriving gay gay community there. It was one of the places that he probably didn't know anyone. Okay, that would be a good reason. Well yeah, that so he had been probably like he didn't know who in Japan either, so like that would have made sense. Yeah, yeah, uh. Anyway, it's financial problems, but also he was gay and so the family wanted him gone because he was an embarrassment. And there was a reporter who put this story out,

Leo Salas, who I assumes French. Uh. He says that little Prince died in Chicago, in which tells me that somebody should check the death records in Chicago and be on the lookout for French Sunday names like Louis La King, Louis La Queen. Um. But I gotta say that evidence that Louis Le Prince was gay it is really kind of thin. Yeah, I shouldn't say then it's non existent. Yeah yeah, yeah, I know. Okay, so much for that theory.

Another theory he got off the train somewhere else. It's actually quite a way from Paris to Dijon, and how long have a ride was that? Do you know? Ballpark had a couple of days. No, it wasn't a day. It was not a couple of days, it was hours. Yeah. Um yeah. So's presumably that train stopped in other cities between, because there's plenty of towns in between, right, hard to imagine it wouldn't. So he could have gotten off the trains somewhere else. And maybe he just went off to

start a new life. I might have shacked up with Dorothy Arnold. Uh Or maybe he stepped out onto the platform just to get a breath of fresh air and then the Louis Air Brothers jumped him. I mean, that's awesome. Those guys are vicious. Yeah damn. Then, uh so you're not looking that theory either. Okay, fine, all right, fine, let's move on to our last theory, which is that he was the victim of a random mugging in Paris. Yeah. Yeah.

Louis the Prince's great great granddaughter and whose named Laurie Snyder wrote a little thing in revealing that the friends who were supposed to meet him at the train station in Paris didn't actually meet him at the station. Apparently they were supposed to meet up elsewhere. Uh So the train arrived at a round eleven pm and I looked at an almanac and it was dark at that time

at that day. Well good, I'm glad, thank you for looking that up, because you know, it really the question question, you know, say, well did you check to see if it was dark? Man? Right? I called somebody in Paris and they said, what are you doing? Why are you calling me? They just babbled a bunch of nonsense. Anyway, Yeah, okay, back to so it was dark. His granddaughter Laurie thinks he was probably robbed and killed and his body thrown

in the river. It's according to her, she found two news articles from around that period of the time that said that thieves in Paris were targeting lone travelers, which Louis le Prince was. It's another but I just I guess for me. Again, the two things are, he was a pretty big guy, so again, you don't necessarily target If a train got in at eleven in Paris, there were probably a lot of other, probably a lot of better, smaller, easier targets that were getting off at the same time.

On top of that, his stuff never showed up. Yeah, I know, Well it wouldn't necessarily, is it. The Yeah, yeah, they'd have thrown at the not all of it though. I'm not even just talking about the camera and the projector. I mean he had other stuff with uggage. Yeah, yeah, one would assume that at some point something would have shown up, right, not necessarily, there's there's this thing called a dumpster. Think about it. Okay, So he shows up

him eleven o'clock at night. He shows up and he's got this big camera and projector set up that he's got to carry, and he's got a bag. So it's eleven o'clock. He's tired. He's walking down the street. And it's not like people just you know, run up to their mark and hit him. They follow him briefly. And he's tall, he's tired. He's tall, yeah, but he's tired. He's kind of sluggish. He's run up behind him and club him in the back of the head. And then yeah,

and he could. And he goes down, and you beat the crap out of him, throw him in the sin, take everything home, realize that this box that he had there's nothing valuable in it. But hey, it's cold, I need to light a fire, so I throw the box in the fireplace to heat my house. And then you go through his stuff and you get rid of it like and you know, you fence everything you can. Yeah, it's very plausible, and it's more so than you know, other than the swinging a brick in a suck part.

I think it's totally plausible. Yeah, I think most likely what happened is he um, this is what this is what Laurie says in her art Gloria Snyder, is that he probably caught a cab, which is in those days, of course, would have been a horse drawn carriage. Handsome, handsome,

not a handsome. Yeah, probably kind of handsome, and maybe the driver was less than scrupulous and just took him down somewhere by the sin and and said, hey, by the way, dump and then toss the body, you know, took the wall and all that, throw the body and the ever and the and then just went on his way and went through the stuff later on. So that's that's that's plausible. She also said a few other things in her article. She said that Louis of the Prince

loved his family. He would never leave them by suicide or by disappearing himself and starting away. And and she knows all this from apparently from family records and apparently her great great grandma wants his name. Lizzie. Louise's wife wrote a wrote some sort of memoirs, and she also believes the theory that his brother murdered him for money is ridiculous for the same reason uh and and asked for the gay thing and the family forced him to leave.

She says, the family actually spent a lot of time and money trying to find him after he disappeared, So you know, that doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah, if it was, we're only going to use volunteers, I could see how people could say, well, they didn't really out of pocket, but they did spend money. They did, Yeah, they did. And so obviously if they knew that he had disappeared because he was gay in YadA YadA, then

why would bothers his brother had killed him. Yeah, then they wouldn't have spent the money because they know they're wasting money. Brother accidentally killed him and didn't say anything that could be Yeah, this is why you don't swing socks with bricks in him in the house. Next week, Joe, you hold the sock. I gotta get a brick. Yeah, yeah, I know. I I'm all out of bricks. Yeah, I had the last one that I had. I had to go throw in the river. I'm not gonna tell you why. Yeah, Okay,

where are we at here? So just a little a few afterthoughts here in Thomas Edison brought a lawsuit against the American Mutoscope Company. Edison claimed that he was a soul in ven cinematography, and so he was demanding royalties from Mutoscope. They were I don't know what they were doing making movies or yeah, and they were infringing according to him. Yeah, I know, he owed them money. So

Louis La Prince's son Adolph testified for the defense. Uh, he was not allowed to show the court his father's

cameras unfortunately, and Edison won the lawsuit. You know, was that the family was actually really really upset about that whole thing because they expected to be able to make a case because their idea was, this will get recognition to dad for what dad invented, and instead the defense put him up on the stand, let him do a little bit, and then took him away and they both just badgered, both the defense and the prosecution just badgered the crap out of him. Yeah and so yeah, so

poor the poor guy. He was pretty young at that time too. I think he was only around twenty or so. He was a little bit older than that, but yeah, he was a young guy. Yeah. Uh. Two years later, Adolph was found shot to death on Fire Island in New York, another victim of Thomas Edison. One man crying wave and on the other hand, uh, Adolph was bird hunting, so it could have possibly been a hunting accident. I'm not sure. That's why they have those safety vests today.

Then they had bird vest then, Yeah, so the dogs sparked. Yeah. In two thousand three, I don't know how this happened, Paris police found a photo in their archives of a drowned man who had been dry and right from the sun, and apparently he resembled Louis the Prince. Yeah, it was some John Doe. Then they I don't know why they were going through the archives, but they found and sure they do sometimes. Yeah, so I think that lends a little bit of credence to the mugging theory. I know

what you guys think. Yeah, I would, Yeah, I would give it credence based on that. So we've talked about before. Yeah, so I still don't like, I don't know why. I guess that it's you know, it's that thing where he was such a prominent figure and it doesn't sit well to me to have him meet such a kind of simple Yeah, you know that you lost this beautiful piece of technology that was really the first of its kind just because somebody hit him over the head like a

couple all pence or whatever. You know. It's that's the thing that gets me about that. I know that's another reason I hate criminals really well, it's yeah, and I think it's why I have such a hard time. Even though I think my logical brain says, yeah, he was probably just mugged, the rest of me is like, no, no, it had to have been Edison because it's the only thing that makes sense, because it's the only thing that gives any validity to his inventorship. It's not quite so

random and absurd. You know. I know, I know what you're saying, but but I agree. I think it's probably just Yeah, I don't I don't think that was really Edison's emo. I think Edison's way was just to buy people out, yeah, steal their stuff or buy them out. Well, and he I think that the pinnacle of Edison's dirty tactics were with Tesla, and that's only because Tesla, I think, in Edison's mind betrayed him because he left, yeah, and

pursued what he wanted. And I think that's why he went to the extent to all the things that he did to show that a C was such a bad thing. But I don't think Edison did it. But I still I'm inclined to say that either he was mugged and killed or possibly something happened at his brothers. I still

waver between those two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Again, I'm not liking the brother and dying at the brothers thing, just because you know, those those prototypes were potentially valuable and so anyway, that's why I'm thinking just a random mugging or Thomas Edison. Now he wasn't jerk, you know. He just to prove that a C was bad. He electrocuted dogs and stuff like that. But the elephant and yeah, I know, and though he didn't initially come up with the idea because of his stuff at Menlo Park, the

first electric electric here was created. Yeah, and it was in that same time period, So I mean he did he did all kinds of not good things. And I gotta tell you I don't believe direct current is all that safe either. Really. Oh, no, elect City at large is not. Yeah, yeah, I can really. Let me think about the stories I told you guys. When I tried to replace the outlet in my house, Yeah, that was dumber it. Yeah, use a fork instead of a screwdriver.

I used a screwdriver properly, and I still shocked myself. How you got to be careful with that stuff? You know, I tell you kids, this is my thing. Don't don't. Don't just go shut off the circuit breaker, go shut off the power met into the house. When you start to do that stuff, just go detach the transformer because for the whole block. Actually, no, don't detach it because you you have to climb up and and you might

fall and hurt yourself. Just shoot it a couple of times, use your arrows from your go and just shoot it a couple of times. You'll be fine. Okay. Well, I guess that's it for this week and another compelling mystery. I hope you liked it. Um. You probably want to know how you can get a hold of us and send us emails telling us telling us how awesome we are. Uh so. That email address is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. You can find us on Facebook, like us,

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So I guess that's it for this week. Hey for the thoughts, that's all right, well taught everybody, bie guys