Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Louis Le Prince, the Missing Inventor of Motion Pictures About this episode On September 16, 1890, Louis Le Prince vanished. He was never seen or heard from again. While that is the most well-known thing about him, he had a whole life before that which involved some very intriguing things.
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2:45 Speaker 02 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:56 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh, this is a person that has been on my list for a very long time. And then it kind of shot to the top of the list after we did the Edward Muybridge episode. He's going to come up a little bit today. And then recently, I was a guest at Indiana Comic Convention, and I was chatting with my friend and friend of the show, Brian Young, and he was all, ooh, you should do an episode on Louis Le Prince. And I was like, I know.
3:29 Speaker 02 He had just been reading about him and was really into the conspiracy of it all. So here is the thing. I'm going to Sunset Boulevard you a little bit. On September 16th of 1890, Louis Le Prince vanished. He was never seen or heard from again. The many events that led to that moment have also led to a great deal of speculation about what exactly happened.
3:56 Speaker 02 And that is kind of the most well-known thing about him. It has certainly been discussed a lot in film circles. That's where I first learned about him when I was in college, getting my theater and film studies degree. But he had a whole life before that, some of which had nothing to do with film and was very, very interesting and filled with other intriguing things. So we are going to talk about, of course, his work in cinematography that was very groundbreaking and his disappearance. But that's going to be like the last third of the episode because there's plenty to talk about in his life before that. Another thing to talk about is names. So Le Prince was named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. He was French.
4:40 Speaker 02 He didn't go by Louis in his day to day life. He signed his name as Augustin in most places, including patent applications and in letters to his wife. And some people he was close to, like in his wife's family, called him Gus, taking the Gus out of Augustin. But there are a lot of history pieces about him that use his first name. I also noticed that there seems to be a family rule that your first name is not the name you're using. Their children were often named multiple names and it was like the middle name was always what they went by.
5:12 Speaker 02 But this is a case where he is written about so much as Louis Le Prince or Louis Le Prince, that we're going to make an exception of our usual policy where we would normally default calling someone the name they chose to go by. But even in this case, when I would be reading books about him, some biographers do use Augustin and it felt almost like jarring to me. So we're gonna go by Louis. The other thing is that, as I said, he was French. His last name would have been pronounced Le Prince in France, but because he lived in England and New York in a lot of his lifetime and certainly in his mature years, like as an adult throughout his career, a lot of
5:54 Speaker 02 people, including many historians, just use the more anglicized Le Prince. And we will probably do the same thing. Same thing happened to me. I was watching a video and one curator at a museum said Le Prince. And I was like, who are they talking about? It's that odd. If you're familiar with this story. So we will be calling him Louis Le Prince. If you want the more French version, just say it in your head. It'd be great.
6:21 Speaker 02 Louis Le Prince was born on August 28, 1841, in Metz, France, which is in the northeast of the country, near the border with Germany and Luxembourg. His father was Louis Abraham Emboise Le Prince, military captain, and his mother was Elizabeth Marie Antoinette Boulebert. During his earliest years, Le Prince was maybe getting a unique education through exposure to a family friend. That was Louis de Guerre. De Guerre was friends with Le Prince's father, and while the inventor of photography and the young Le Prince only overlapped by 10 years before De Guerre died, he is often cited as an influence on Le Prince.
7:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's unclear how much of this is like convenient lore versus how it actually played out. But Louis Le Prince is said to have often visited De Guerre in his studio when he was still a child, although we really don't know with any certainty if the photography pioneer ever imparted any of his knowledge to the young man. There is a de Guerre-type of the Le Prince family from the late 1840s that may or may not have been made by De Guerre himself. It may have also been made by one of his assistants. After his elementary education, Louis went to school away from his family in Bourges, France. That's about 320 miles or 515 kilometers southwest of Metz, near the center of the
7:46 Speaker 02 country. After that, he moved on to Paris and the Lycée Saint Louis to get an undergraduate degree in science. Then he moved on to advanced study in physics and chemistry in Germany. He was also interested in art, and he studied painting and dabbled in photography. After his graduate studies, Le Prince met a man named John Robinson Whitley, and that meeting, it is fair to say, changed the course of his life. Whitley was the son of Joseph and Sarah Whitley. Joseph was a brass founder, meaning someone who cast items in brass, and he had opened his own brass foundry in Leeds, England in 1844. John, who was Joseph and Sarah's oldest
8:28 Speaker 02 son, was sent to Germany to study as part of the preparation for him to continue to expand the family business. And both John and Louis attended Leipzig University for a time, but that was not where they actually met. It wasn't until they were both in Paris after finishing their education in Germany that they were connected after Whitley received a letter from one of their former professors suggesting that they meet. Like, hey, do you know Louis Le Prince? I think you guys would really get along. And he was right, because once they did meet up, Whitley and Le Prince became very good friends. John invited Le Prince to come to Leeds for a visit in 1866.
9:08 Speaker 02 Leeds is in the county of Yorkshire, roughly 200 miles north of London and about 45 miles northeast of Manchester. Le Prince was happy to accept John Whitley's invitation, in part because while the two men had been in Paris after finishing school, John had introduced Louis to John's sister, Sarah Elizabeth, who went by Lizzie. Lizzie was 20 at the time. She was in Paris studying art, and she and the 25-year-old Louis hit it off immediately. They were a good match. They were both incredibly smart, and they shared interest in art. They spent a lot of time together over the course of a few months in Paris, and at one point even took a long drive out to the country so that Louis could introduce Lizzie to his mother.
9:53 Speaker 02 That was a trip that apparently enchanted Lizzie. Yeah, she loved everything about French country life. John Whitley, though, did have his own agenda in inviting Louis to Leeds. He was hoping that Le Prince would like it there and that he would become part of their family business. Whitley had recognized immediately that Louis possessed this really unique and very beneficial skill set. He was, as Tracy just said, super smart. He was multilingual. He had technical drawing training. He understood the science and chemistry that could benefit a foundry, and his math skills were also really, really strong. Kind of an amazing package. And when Whitley proffered an offer of employment, Louis took it immediately.
10:37 Speaker 02 In 1867, Le Prince traveled to the Exposition Universelle in Paris as a member of the Whitley Foundry team. It's not clear whether he had made the permanent move to Leeds yet at this time, or he may have taken advantage of the trip back to France to kind of wrap things up ahead of a more permanent relocation. The exposition ran for six months, and Louis was there for most of it. That would have given him time to handle anything that he might have needed to wrap up while he was in France. The Whitley Foundry won a silver medal at the exposition, and once the expo was finished, Le Prince was living in Leeds. And just as John and Lizzie had both grown to love Louis,
11:20 Speaker 02 so too did their father, Joseph. At times, according to Lizzie, it seemed that Joseph and John might actually have some adversarial friction over their close friendships with Louis, like they each wanted to be closer to him. The father and son clearly had some friction of their own. They would have a bigger conflict later on. But in the late 1860s, they both gladly welcomed Louis into their family, and on July 1st of 1869, Louis and Lizzie were married. As a newly married couple, Lizzie and Louis moved into the neighborhood of Chapel Town. There were more big changes. Louis became a partner in the Whitley Foundry, and the couple learned they were expecting a child not long after the wedding.
12:04 Speaker 02 A daughter, who is sometimes referred to as Marie Gabriella and sometimes as Mariella, was born in early 1870. Coming up, we're going to talk about the military conflict that had a significant impact on Louis Le Prince's life. But first, we will pause for a sponsor break.
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14:31 Speaker 02 We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep, but what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association. And iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
15:13 Speaker 02 Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Help vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
15:34 Speaker 02 Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
16:18 Speaker 02 proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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17:34 Speaker 02 In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War impacted Louis's life significantly, even though he was not living in France at the time. That, of course, is a whole multinational conflict, but the short version so that we can give you context is that France, which was led by Napoleon III at the time, was getting deeply uneasy about the power amassing in the coalition of German states that was coming together under Otto von Bismarck, who was the Prime Minister of Prussia. Bismarck and Napoleon III had ongoing friction, and that culminated eventually in France declaring war on Prussia in July of 1870. This was perceived as not a wise move, and there was not a lot of support for France in Europe
18:19 Speaker 02 on this one, and Napoleon's military was almost instantly in over their heads. The Prussian military had superior mobilization, and they were able on several occasions to surprise the French. Meanwhile, France was trying to fight using pretty old-school tactics of military engagement, rather than the more guerrilla-style tactics that Prussia is credited with employing, so that just did not go well. At the Battle of Sedan in the first days of September 1870, Napoleon III surrendered and he was taken prisoner. This did not, though, result in a treaty, and Paris was in the sights of the German states coalition. Meanwhile, back in Leeds, in addition to reading news reports about the conflict,
19:04 Speaker 02 Louis was also receiving letters from his brother Albert. As it became apparent that Paris was likely to be engulfed in the war, Louis made the decision to race to the French capital to try to get his mother out before things became dangerous for her. He was also hoping to get Albert's wife Gabrielle and their baby out. Louis got caught up in a riot while he was in Paris. Biographer Paul Fisher makes this sound very much like he accidentally stumbled into this conflict from a side street as things were escalating in his 2022 book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures. There are also news articles from the time that really made clear that Louis was not
19:46 Speaker 02 at all involved in this event that he became a part of. Because Napoleon III had surrendered, the power vacuum that he left behind was seized as an opportunity for France to become a republic once again. So at this point, France is fighting internally because some people wanted that and others did not, and they were fighting against the forces of Prussia and the coalition behind it. And so when Le Prince arrived at this scene of this riot, he was arrested along with the agitators, and this set off a kind of wild series of events. Authorities suspected Le Prince was a Prussian spy. When he didn't arrive, when his mother expected him, he was reported as a missing person.
20:30 Speaker 02 She contacted the paper Le Temps and noted that a description of a man arrested at the riot sounded like Louis. This led to an English journalist initiating an investigation, and that led to Louis being released on August 22nd. Yeah, it was suddenly reported like, hey, we all think Louis Le Prince is here somewhere being held. And he was for about a week. Once he was released, Louis got his mother and his sister-in-law and his baby niece back to Leeds and to safety. But his arrest and what he had seen while he was in France had left a really significant impression on him. And he had become aware of just how dangerous things were in Paris and what his countrymen
21:13 Speaker 02 were enduring to try to defend France. So, once his family was settled in safely with Lizzie, Louis returned to France to fight against the Prussians. He was stationed in Paris. And that fight went very, very poorly.
21:30 Speaker 02 After an initial period where it was kind of a standoff as Paris was fortifying and the enemy forces were kind of just hanging outside the city, a few efforts were made by France to get the jump on the German states, including using balloons. This would be a great episode at some point. I don't know when. Didn't work great. The French efforts were not successful and the transition that then happened through the fall and into winter led to disease and hunger as their supplies ran out. So when the French troops that were at this point trapped in Paris because they were surrounded, were finally forced to initiate a ground battle out of desperation, they lost thousands of lives.
22:13 Speaker 02 Throughout all of this, there was really not much information available to people in England. So the Le Prince family didn't know what was happening or if they would ever see Louis again. Back in Paris, Le Prince assisted a military surgeon pulling fallen men from battle for transport and then later burying the bodies of both men who were killed in the conflict and those who died from disease. After the new French government surrendered at the end of January 1871, Louis was able to return home, but the trauma of this experience is said to have changed his demeanor significantly. The transition back to work and whatever passed for normal life at that point for
22:55 Speaker 02 him, came at a time when the Whitley Foundry where he was working was also going through a huge change because his friend and brother-in-law, John, was taking over the business from his father, Joseph. And John wanted to make a lot of big changes to the business in an effort to expand and to keep pace with the state of the Industrial Revolution. John Whitley really wanted to take advantage of the growing connectivity of Europe as the railway expanded and he wanted to create new products that would appeal to countries outside of England that they could now reach thanks to those railroads. And this plan offered Louis an opportunity to kind of become a workaholic and focus all of his attention on his technical draftsman work. This has been
23:40 Speaker 02 Interpreted by a number of biographers as possibly being a way that he was kind of working through his war trauma. There's been some suspicion that he had, he would probably be diagnosed with something like PTSD today, but we don't know for sure. But the problem was that John Whitley had made some egregious errors. He had overestimated the Whitley Company's potential market. And in producing products that were not proven, he carried the company into very significant debt and ultimately into bankruptcy. This led to a huge family conflict among the Whitleys and John and his father Joseph stopped speaking to one another. John moved away to Paris, but he and Le Prince remained close friends.
24:25 Speaker 02 As the company was falling into disarray over the course of several years, Louis and Lizzie were expanding their family. They welcomed their first son, Louis Adolph, who went by Adolph in 1872. Two more children were born in 1874 and 1875, their daughter, Henriette, I mean, and another son, Joseph Augustine. So three new babies as the family's livelihood was really in a financial freefall. Louis had invested in Whitley and that money was not going to come back to him. No, when he had become a partner, he had bought into the firm and that was a bad investment. But Lizzie and Louis recognized what was happening. And before the firm did
25:07 Speaker 02 declare bankruptcy and shut down, Louis had already tendered his resignation. The couple were very much a team and they both applied to get their teaching licenses and took the arts and sciences examination in South Kensington to become certified as teachers. And they did this not because they were planning to just go out and seek teaching jobs, but they were planning to open their own school and they did. The Leeds Technical School of Art, and that opened at the beginning of 1875. This was a private school that they ran out of their home at 33 Park Square and it was really quite successful. Even so, the Le Princes did end up taking some side teaching jobs to supplement their incomes.
25:49 Speaker 02 A bit of good fortune grew out of their work with the art school when Louis and Lizzie and many of their students brought items they had been working on to display at the Yorkshire Exhibition of Arts and Manufacturers in the late spring of 1875. Louis had been working on creating tiny enamel portraits on porcelain tiles. He had developed a careful firing process for these so that none of the really delicate work would be damaged in the kill. These got the attention of Queen Victoria's son, Prince Alfred, the first Duke of Edinburgh. When he visited the expo, he was given several of the pieces as gifts on the spot, and this led to some commissioned work for the royal family.
26:32 Speaker 02 As a consequence, Louis found his social profile elevated. He was asked to be involved in a number of art societies and charitable organizations, and he also became a Freemason during this time. Building on the success of those miniature portraits, Le Prince started working on finding more ways to embellish porcelain, which led him to start thinking about applying photographs to not just tiles, but also to things like cups and plates. So this is really the beginning of novelty chinaware. If you buy those today, you can thank Louis Le Prince. He figured out how to glaze and fire these so that the image remained super clear, and
27:14 Speaker 02 if there was a color picture involved, that those colors stayed super vibrant. Le Prince continued to work with the idea of photo transfer until he could also replicate images on metal. And he took a number of his finest pieces to the Exposition Universelle in 1878, returning once more to Paris, and that was a very successful outing for him. He won special recognition at the expo. As he was preparing for the expo, Louis and Lizzie welcomed another son, Leon Fernand, who went by Fernand. And then in 1880, they had their last child, another son named Jean. Jean died at the age of two, and the remaining five Le Prince children lived into adulthood.
27:56 Speaker 02 Louis's oldest son, Adolph, started to assist him in the lab at an early age after showing a lot of interest in his father's work. Le Prince didn't allow his kids in the lab because of the chemicals that were stored there, but after Adolph snuck in multiple times and apparently broke some items at one point, Louis decided to teach his son about his work.
28:19 Speaker 02 Apparently he could not keep Adolf out of that room. At the beginning of the 1880s, Louis was once again connected with his old friend and former business partner and still his brother-in-law, John Whitley. Whitley, at this point, had gotten connected to the home decor industry and was working with a flooring and wall covering inventor, who may be a future episode, almost certainly, to develop products for the US market. And he once again made an offer to Le Prince to move to another country, but this time to New York. This might seem sort of random, but Louis and Lizzie were involved already in home decor through their design school, and they had both been teaching courses on it and working on the side as designers for people taking commissions.
29:04 Speaker 02 So it really made a lot of sense, and Louis agreed to go with John on what was basically a scouting visit to the US to see if the market seemed lucrative. And Whitley was banking on the nouveau riche of New York to just want tons of home decor. Because that was the popular style, right? Was a lot of layered things, tchotchkes aplenty, stuff, stuff, stuff. And Louis really fell in love with the city. And when he returned to Leeds after this scouting trip, he and Lizzie discussed the idea of what it would take to relocate the whole family and whether it was worth it. And they made the decision that they were gonna go. So they closed down their school and they headed to New York.
29:46 Speaker 02 That decision was probably informed in part by a significant debt that Louis Le Prince had from the time when the Whitley Foundry had collapsed. He had borrowed 350 pounds and he had not repaid it. Lizzie had discovered this information when a letter arrived at the house while Louis was on the scouting trip demanding repayment. They paid a small amount back before leaving England with the intent that more installments would follow. Yeah, he basically came home to Lizzie being like, hey, were you gonna tell me about this? Their new life in New York was rocky at the start. Lizzie's brother John had really not gotten any better at running a business than he had been when he drove the foundry into the ground.
30:30 Speaker 02 And as his home decor business was tanking, John then decided he wanted Louis to travel across the US with him, a lot of it on horseback, to find attractive land where they could start an artist colony. This was apparently a very grueling trip. Louis actually really enjoyed it. John, on the other hand, did not. And he lost interest in this whole artist colony idea. And by the time they had gotten to the West Coast, he was like, you know what? I'm going to move back to England. But Louis wanted to stay in New York. He really liked being in the US. And he started his own decor business with a different partner. That business was called Le Prince and Pepper. During this time, Lizzie started working at a job that she found incredibly fulfilling.
31:15 Speaker 02 She started teaching at the Washington Heights School for the Deaf and Mute. And she established and ran its art department. This was something she and her husband ended up working on together as his firm didn't have enough work to really keep him busy. So he started teaching art lessons at the school as part of an art therapy program. But he needed an income and his work at the school with Lizzie was a volunteer situation. He did become close friends with Lizzie's boss, Isaac Louis Peet, and that relationship would benefit him in a later endeavor. As he hunted for other opportunities, Louis made the acquaintance of another French gentleman in the city, panorama painter Theophile Poilpault.
31:59 Speaker 02 Like Le Prince, Poilpault had an art background, and he had also served in the Franco-Prussian War. So the two men probably had a lot in common. We've discussed the popularity of panoramas during the late 19th century on the show before. And Poilpault was very good at it. He had more work than he could keep up with. So he hired Louis to help him, both as an artist and kind of as a business manager. And this partnership really got Le Prince back on his feet financially. He did one very big project for Poilpault that got a lot of critical acclaim and brought in a lot of cash. But he didn't stay with Poilpault for long, even though he was invited to, because Louis Le Prince had become fascinated with the idea of moving pictures.
32:44 Speaker 02 It was something that had been on his mind even before meeting the panoramist. And working in panorama had actually only stoked that fire. In just a minute, we will finally get to the motion picture part of Le Prince's life. But first, we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.
33:06 Speaker 02 We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
33:49 Speaker 02 Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:10 Speaker 02 Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
34:55 Speaker 02 only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
35:09 Speaker 05 Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.
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37:17 Speaker 06 Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Seitz proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
37:51 Speaker 02 Louis La Prince's interest in moving pictures seems pretty natural when you consider his already established lifelong interest in art and photography and new ways to reproduce images. At the same time that La Prince was working on fixative methods to create unique porcelain, prior podcast subject Edward Muybridge was developing his method for capturing the movement of a galloping horse by using an array of still cameras and snapping them in sequence as the horse ran by. That was kind of the dawn of cinema, but Muybridge's zoopraxiscope was just a single rotating glass plate. He couldn't really capture anything more than a few seconds of movement.
38:32 Speaker 02 The next step forward for motion picture was the invention of the chronophotograph. This was the work of a French scientist Etienne Jules Marais, who may be a future episode. And it was something that Marais, who was a physiologist, worked on to advance his own understanding of body mechanics through movement. This was an interesting-looking device. It was literally a shotgun-style mechanism with a circular magazine on it that contained photosensitive silver bromide gelatin plates. It captured 12 images per second and then put every image on the same plate. It was also very cool, but not a way to capture motion for replay.
39:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you look at a photograph of this, it's literally a gun with this weird big barrel on it. People actually call it a camera gun sometimes. And then, enter an Episcopal priest named Hannibal Goodwin. So Goodwin was interested in photography as a hobby, and he developed the first film that was flexible and could be rolled up. Like Murray, he was solving a problem for his own unrelated work. He wanted to make photographs of biblical scenes that he could use in Sunday School lessons. But the existing ways to capture images were heavy and cumbersome, and he thought that if he could come up with a lighter setup
39:54 Speaker 02 or an easier setup, it would just make his whole project infinitely easier and better. The Kodak camera that was available at the time solved some of the problem, but you then had to send the entire camera back to Kodak to their factory to have your images processed. And Goodwin didn't like that either. So he invented a new film that he could process himself. This new film was the first celluloid. It was made using nitrocellulose, that's cellulose that has been exposed to nitric acid and sulfuric acid, and nitrobenzol, more commonly known today as nitrobenzene. That is a highly toxic yellow liquid with an oily texture, and this was often described as a sharp almond aroma.
40:39 Speaker 02 Nitrocellulose is highly flammable. So in combining these two things and then diluting them with alcohol, Goodwin was doing something really risky in terms of just chemical exposure, although he probably was not at all aware of just how risky. When Goodwin poured his toxic mixture onto glass and let the moisture evaporate from it, the remaining film could capture images after it was coated with emulsion. And it could be cut in strips and rolled into film. Goodwin and Kodak applied for roll film patents at the same time, which resulted in a court battle that was not settled for years. Goodwin's estate finally got a large payout from Kodak in the early 1900s, which was several years after Goodwin died.
41:23 Speaker 02 So all of this was going on at the same time that Louis La Prince was getting really excited about film. And this takes us back to that friendship we mentioned earlier with Lizzie's boss. So the school had a workshop and Pete let La Prince use it as he tried to build on the work of these other inventors to unify their ideas into a device that could finally capture movement on film to be replayed later. But exactly how La Prince went about this is very unclear because he did not make any notes of his process. What we know about it actually comes from statements that were given later after the
42:03 Speaker 02 fact by people who La Prince hired to make or assist with various components. But we know that in 1886, with the help of several different mechanics and machinists, La Prince developed a 16-lens camera. He applied for a US patent on this device on November 2nd. His patent was for both the camera and the procedure for using it, including projection from the same apparatus. It was titled "Method of an Apparatus for Producing Animated Pictures of Natural Scenery and Life." Here is how La Prince described his device. Quote, "In order to carry out my method, I provide an apparatus consisting of a receiver
42:43 Speaker 02 or photo camera and a deliverer or stereopticon adapted to throw the transparent pictures obtained by same order and time in which they were taken, as will be hereinafter fully described and claimed. The transparent pictures thrown in quick succession on a finely-ground plate glass or other suitable material will produce on the eye of the spectator the same effect or impression as the objects themselves when in motion in front of the camera receiver."
43:14 Speaker 02 He received approval for the patent in early 1888. That was a long time for it to clear, and that's because there were problems. The Patent Office noted that he was really patenting two different devices, a camera and a projector. And the Patent Office also thought that his camera might be too similar to other patents that had been filed, including Edward Muybridge's. Le Prince got a lawyer involved, and a lot of back and forth ensued with the Patent Office, including Le Prince going in person to the Patent Office to discover that there were some misunderstandings about the workings of his invention, specifically that it was one apparatus that did both the filming and the projecting, not two different things
43:57 Speaker 02 under one patent application. But eventually, things were resolved, and he received his patents. But that combination patent might have been more of a problem than it was worth, because Le Prince had a really hard time getting the projection element to work, so much so that he had to cancel public demonstrations that were planned to showcase it. There were people in his inner circle who later claimed to have seen it work, though. Yeah, one of his daughters in particular claimed that she had snuck in his workshop and had seen it functioning. But others, other people he knew also said the same thing, that they had seen it. But in that time, I mean, it was a year and change before that patent came through,
44:39 Speaker 02 Le Prince actually moved back to Europe, sort of, temporarily. He had been offered use of the old Whitley Foundry workshop in Leeds by his in-laws, and his mother was also quite ill in Paris. So in early 1887, he and his oldest son, Adolph, crossed the Atlantic. And then he went on to Paris to be with his mother in May. Lizzie stayed in New York with the rest of their children, because Le Prince had not wanted to relocate all of them just for what he thought was a temporary work travel. While he was there in Paris, he reconnected with the panoramas, Poilpau, who was back there, and he also worked with some machinists locally to continue refining his camera.
45:22 Speaker 02 His mother, Elizabeth, died on May 28th, and he kept working on his camera while grieving and then eventually moved back to Leeds to continue his work back with his in-laws. One of the problems with the existing apparatus was that while 16 lenses captured movement well, the incremental shifts in angles created weird distortions when the picture was projected. He eventually ditched the 16-lens design and pared it down to a single lens. But like his initial work, we just don't know much about why specifically he changed it so drastically. What we know is mostly from what he shared in letters to Lizzie. He noted that having to plan each little detail was astonishing, and it
46:07 Speaker 02 took so much time to get parts. And he worried that he'd be held up through Christmas. It was actually well past that. Once he had the US patent and refined his machine in January of 1888, Le Prince immediately filed for patents in Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, and Italy. Yeah, he was not messing around with patents. And then later that year, in October, Le Prince captured what is believed today to be the world's first film. It is known as Round Hay Garden Scene, and that's a reference to the garden at his in-law's house. We've talked about early film efforts on the show before, and this one is as unassuming and
46:49 Speaker 02 consequently sort of charming as any other. If he just four people in a garden in Leeds, it is Le Prince's son Adolf, his in-laws, Joseph and Sarah Whitley, and a family friend named Annie Hartley. It was shot on paper roll film made by Kodak, and it's only a few seconds long. And it shows all four people in motion. One is walking, one is stepping backwards, the other two are dancing. And in recent years, there have been additional frames of films that he made that have been discovered. But Round Hay Garden Scene really remains kind of the most well-known and the one that is believed to have been the first. Once Le Prince had perfected the camera, he wanted to do the same for the projector part of the device.
47:34 Speaker 02 And that ran right into 1889. The solution ended up being celluloid. Prior to that, he'd been using emulsion coated paper, but the superior flexibility of celluloid would have solved some of the problems that he was having with threading and continuity. He was so convinced that he had perfected his camera that he sent Adolph back to New York in the autumn of 1889 with instructions to have Lizzie start looking for venues where they could demonstrate the new version of the machine. She purchased the historic and rumored to be haunted Morris Jamel Mansion in Washington Heights and started to renovate it as their home and the showcase for her husband's work. Louis did continue to tinker with his invention,
48:18 Speaker 02 even after he had sent Adolph home, though, because he kept writing to Lizzie that he had new problems popping up that had to be solved with it. And as he updated the apparatus, he was pretty careful to file addendums to his various patents. And those addendums, in some cases, offer clues to just how similar his work was to the motion picture machines that eventually came to be, including one that describes transparency strips with holes punched along the edges that fitted onto teeth on guide rollers. Finally, in early 1890, Le Prince was satisfied with the apparatus, enough so that he demonstrated it to the secretary of the Paris Opera, Ferdinand Mobson, who documented this meeting.
49:03 Speaker 02 It seemed as though things were starting to click into place. Le Prince, who had been in a fragile financial situation for years at that point, seemed poised to turn things around with the product of his work. He was going to visit his brother, then make his way home to New York in September. He traveled to Brittany with a couple he knew from Leeds and then on to Dijon alone. The brothers were still settling the estate of their late mother and Le Prince, who was going to get a lot of money from his mother's family fortune, hoped to wrap that up and get back home to his family. He had been away for several years at this point. He made plans to meet his friends back in Leeds,
49:45 Speaker 02 then travel together with them to Liverpool to board the ship for New York. But he missed that meeting. His friends went on, thinking he had just extended his stay with his brother. Lizzie waited in New York for her husband to return. When he failed to appear for weeks after his planned arrival, Lizzie contacted Albert by transatlantic cable, asking for information. Albert responded, saying that Louis had missed his first train, but that then he had accompanied his brother to the train station and put him on the afternoon train to Paris on September 16th, and that that train had left the station at 2:37 PM. And that was all Albert knew. And no one ever saw Louis again.
50:29 Speaker 02 No body was ever recovered, and his camera and projector apparatus vanished with him. He was finally declared dead seven years after his disappearance. The family searched for Le Prince in every imaginable way in the years that followed, and it really took a toll. His father-in-law, Joseph Whitley, had a mental breakdown and died in 1891. His son Adolf died in 1901 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and it's unknown if this was an accidental discharge or a suicide. Lizzie not only spent a great deal of time and money trying to find her husband, she also fought to get his work recognized as happening before that of Thomas Edison,
51:12 Speaker 02 but with little success. Yeah, there's a lot of characterizations of her reading in the paper the morning that Thomas Edison's film work was announced, and feeling very uneasy and weird about the whole thing. What happened to Le Prince has been the source of speculation for more than 130 years. And the theories range from really pretty plausible to less plausible, depending on your point of view, with some verging kind of on conspiracy theory. A very common one is that Louis Le Prince died by suicide in the face of financial ruin. But detractors to that theory point out that he really seemed to be in a very hopeful place. He believed
51:57 Speaker 02 that he had truly cracked open the future of moving pictures, and he was also set to inherit a significant sum of money. So this didn't make a lot of sense. Another theory is that his brother Albert had killed him. Albert had also gone through a lot in the years from 1887 to 1890. His wife had died suddenly, as had their mother, and he too was destitute. That last visit he had with Louis was about their inheritance, of course, from their mother's estate. And people who want to point a finger at Albert say that he was trying to get the whole inheritance. But correspondence from his family to the New York Le Princes all indicated that that visit was very cordial and amicable, and the brothers were very close and on good terms.
52:43 Speaker 02 A popular theory, and one that Lizzie Le Prince seemed to believe, was that Thomas Edison recognized that he had a real competitor in Le Prince and had him killed. Lizzie, who lived until 1925, wrote a memoir, which was never published, but which has been made available to a lot of biographers. This is a handwritten, unedited version of her life and her husband's, and there are some instances where it seems like she might be tying together threads that aren't quite right. For example, she stated that Le Prince was getting celluloid from the Lumiere brothers in 1889, but it's not clear whether they would have had access
53:24 Speaker 02 to reels of it at that time. She makes a case that Le Prince was acting strangely and secretive in New York before he left in 1887, and that he might have been warned about Edison.
53:37 Speaker 02 There's really no substantiation for that, other than that it's pretty well-established that Edison was cutthroat in business and kind of a jerk. Just not, he did not have a reputation for murdering human beings. Yeah. There was, what was at least to me, a somewhat funny development in the Edison theory in the 21st century. So in 2008, the periodical Materials Today, which is a materials science journal, had a writing competition. And one of the entries into that competition was a piece titled "The Disappearance of Louis Le Prince." And it was written by Atrey Gupta.
54:19 Speaker 02 This is a work of fiction, but it seemed to confuse people a little bit, because the setup of the writing is that it is a news article written about a discovery made by a person named Alexis Bedford, who the piece says is a graduate student at the University of New York. And there are fake interview segments with Bedford in this fake article, in which he describes finding a book while looking through an archive collection of Thomas Edison's papers. And in the book, which appears to be a journal, is an entry that seems like it suggests that Edison is confessing to involvement in the murder of Le Prince. Because of its news article style and the very strong writing, it's really well-written.
55:01 Speaker 02 And the fact that it appeared in a science journal, a lot of people thought this was real, even though Materials Today put a header at the top of the article that read, "Our writing competition winner leads us into the dark and murky past of some well-known inventors of the 20th century." So it, you know how things spread like wildfire online.
55:24 Speaker 02 It led to a lot of new speculation, but it was not a smoking gun. It's fiction. Le Prince's great, great granddaughter Laurie Snyder was interviewed by the BBC in 2015 as part of coverage of a new documentary about Le Prince titled "The First Film" by filmmaker David Wilkinson. Her explanation is the least fantastical. She told the BBC, quote, "My personal theory is pretty mundane. According to Lizzie's memoirs, the train Louis took would have arrived in Paris at about 2,300. Being so late, he probably hailed a handsome cab to take him to his workshop. I think the driver, taking advantage of the hour and the darkness, took him to a remote
56:07 Speaker 02 location near the Seine, hit him over the head and threw him in the Seine." There were two articles from this time that suggest that thieves were targeting lone travelers and Le Prince was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She goes on to note that he deeply loved his family, so she did not believe the suicide theory or the one that he orchestrated his disappearance to dodge creditors. She also dismissed the idea that Albert could have killed him as ludicrous, noting how close and loving the family was. End of Edison, she said, quote, "Although he was certainly ruthless, he probably had better things to do than order a hit on a competitor." While Lizzie fought in vain to have her husband recognized as a pioneer of cinema
56:52 Speaker 02 in her lifetime, in the 20th century, his work has finally gained recognition. In 1930, his workshop in Leeds got a commemorative plaque, and 70 years later, in 2003, the University of Leeds named its Cinematography and Media Center after him. Le Prince's daughter donated the two existing prototypes of his cameras to London's Science and Media Museum. They are part of the permanent collection there. Yeah, and they have great online galleries of those two, if you want to see them. And this is Louis Le Prince, who is very, very fascinating to me. Yeah. You also have listener mail. Yes, of course I do.
57:34 Speaker 02 This one made me laugh and laugh. This is from our listener Jen who writes, "Hello, my favorite podcast host." Hi Jen, thank you. That's so sweet. Jen continues, "I thought you might get a kick out of this story. I'm catching up on podcasts. I don't even remember which episode I was listening to on Thursday last week, where someone sent in pictures of some roosters as a pet tax. Holly told her story about her attack roosters who would hide in the woods and jump out at them. Then on Friday, I went to a farm amusement place with my four-year-old nanny kid, an actual kid, not a goat. While we were eating lunch, this rooster snuck up behind us like a ninja, really close and crowed, scared the living daylights out of both of us. He then stood there and watched us eat. I suspect he thought my tuna salad was chicken salad.
58:18 Speaker 02 Later, I witnessed him and his posse terrorizing a mom with three young children. She had to get staff to shoot them away. I think he might be related to Holly's roosters."
58:30 Speaker 02 Uh, update, I've been writing this email this morning between everything else I'm doing. I'm currently on a mini farm that has chickens. Usually they are in their coop. I did not know they were free-ranging it this morning. I just opened the door to the carport and there were six chickens standing there right on the other side of the door. They flapped their wings and took off. So now I've been scared by chickens twice since listening to the podcast and I don't think that had ever happened before. Thanks, Holly." Jen.
58:58 Speaker 02 She included a picture of one of these roosters. Listen, I can tell you that one, it's probably not related to mine. Mine were a barred rock and a Rhode Island red, and I will never forget them and they were awful and I hated them and I was afraid. Cause I was little, keep in mind. Sure. I was like seven and when a two and a half foot tall angry bird is coming at you with talons, and also they weren't just there to scare. They would literally tear into people if they could. They were awful. But I do love that Jen had benign and funny interactions with roosters, even if they scared.
59:31 Speaker 02 I've been told that some roosters are great and very sweet. I just haven't known any. I'm sure they're out there. I'm ready to meet one. If you would like to write to us and tell us about the benign, but sometimes frightening appearing animals in your life, or anything, really, you don't have to even send us pet pictures or any pictures, just whatever you want. You can do that. That is super easy to do at [email protected] . If you want to read the show notes for today's episode, or any episode, they are all available at missedinhistory.com. Just click into the episode that you want information on and they'll be there in the show notes. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast and you haven't done that yet, it's the easiest thing in the world. You can do that on the
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1:01:14 Speaker 06 Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
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