Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince

Louis Le Prince was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion-picture camera, possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film. He has been credited as the "Father of Cinematography", but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing largely to the events surrounding his 1890 disappearance. Le Prince was born in Metz, France in 1841 and had the fortune during his youth of regularly visiting a studio belonging to a friend of his father—the photographic inventor Jacques Daguerre. After studying chemistry and physics at university, Le Prince moved to England at the invitation of John Whitley, before establishing the Leeds Technical School of Art where he specialised in tinting and firing of photographic images. During the 1880s, Le Prince became fascinated with the early cinematic technologies which were then being developed. In 1886 he created a 16-lens camera and applied for an American patent on 2 November of that year, receiving this at the beginning of 1888; on 16 November 1888, he received a British patent for his invention. The Le Prince Single-lens Cine Camera, currently on display in our Animation Gallery, is believed to be the equipment used to film the famous Roundhay Garden and Leeds Bridge scenes. It proved to be one of the most groundbreaking inventions of early cinema. While the contraption, which utilises paper-backed stripping film, may appear primitive by today’s standards, evidence that the equipment was successful in projecting moving images means that Louis Le Prince’s movies pre-date those of Edison and the Lumières by over half a decade. Le Prince planned to exhibit his work in New York in September 1890, but he mysteriously disappeared on 16 September while travelling by train from Dijon to Paris. His body and luggage were never found, and no one witnessed him boarding or leaving the train. His disappearance remains unsolved to this day, and various theories have been proposed, such as suicide, murder by rival inventors, or abduction by foreign agents. Le Prince's widow and son tried to continue his work and defend his legacy, but they faced legal challenges from Edison, who claimed to have invented the motion-picture camera. They also struggled to find the original films and cameras that Le Prince had left in France. Eventually, they lost the patent wars and Le Prince's name was largely forgotten by the public. However, in recent years, Le Prince has been recognised as a pioneer of cinema and a visionary inventor who made a significant contribution to the history of moving images. His surviving films have been preserved and restored by various institutions, and his life and work have been celebrated in documentaries, books, and exhibitions.