2024 Author: Adelina Croftoon | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 02:07
On September 16, 1890, Le Prince visited his brother in Dijon, France, and then took a train to return home, but was never able to reach his destination. When the train arrived, it turned out that neither Le Prince nor his luggage was anywhere
French artist and inventor Louis Le Prince was born in Metz, France, in 1841, and during his career he made great strides in developing Moving Pictures, as early films were called.
In 1888, he obtained several important patents for lenses, cameras and cinematographic devices, notably the projector and the 16-lens camera, and in October of that year, his experiments with moving pictures would culminate in filming several historical fragments of film in Leeds. England where he lived at the time.
He photographed the people of Leeds with a new type of single-lens camera that he personally developed, including several of his family members at Roundhay Garden and his son playing the accordion, as well as a local bridge.
Many believe that these were the very first films in history, and thus Le Prince surpassed his rivals in cinematography, Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers for half a decade, although at that time it was they who won all the headlines and fame for innovations in cinema technology, and about Le Prince's press wrote comparatively little.
It was only many years later that fame caught up with him and he received the nickname "Father of Cinematography", but in history Louis Le Prince is probably better known for his strange disappearance without a trace than for the creation of the first films.
Although other inventors were in the spotlight at the time, there was a lot of interest in Le Prince's lenses and cameras, and one day Le Prince planned to organize a public display of his inventions in the United States by staging an exhibition at Morris Jumel, a Manhattan mansion.
The exhibition was planned for September 1890 and, if it really took place, it could well consolidate the legacy of Le Prince as a true innovator of film technology and make him a more prominent name in history books. But Le Prince did not come to this exhibition, he simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
On September 16, 1890, Le Prince visited his brother in Dijon, France, and then took a train to return home, but was never able to reach his destination. When the train arrived, it turned out that neither Le Prince nor his luggage was anywhere.
When the investigation began, it was revealed that Le Prince was last seen by various train employees checking his luggage and then entering his cabin, and after that his fate remains a mystery.
It is known that when the train left the station, Le Prince checked his luggage and then entered his compartment, after which no one saw him leave it for the rest of the route.
When the train arrived in Paris, no one left Le Prince's compartment, so a conductor was sent to his room to wake him up, assuming he was just asleep. However, when the compartment was opened, there was neither Le Prince himself nor his bags and suitcase inside.
None of the neighboring passengers or train employees could remember how Le Prince ever got out of his compartment after the train started. Since the train did not make stops between Dijon and Paris, Le Prince could not somehow get off the train, and the windows of his compartment were closed and locked from the inside.
Louis Le Prince's film "In Roundhay Garden", filmed in 1888
It is also curious that Le Prince's height was 193 cm, which was a lot for that time and such a tall man would undoubtedly attract everyone's attention and would be clearly visible in a crowd of people. But no, no one on the train really saw a very tall man after he went into his compartment.
Police were unable to find indications that Le Prince might have been attacked or even killed in his compartment, there were no traces of blood or signs that there was a fight in the compartment. Therefore, this case became a mystery that continues to be confusing to this day.
Scotland Yard and the Le Prince family thoroughly searched the compartment and train, but no trace of where he had gone was found.
Interestingly, however, his sudden disappearance allowed Thomas Edison to become the first inventor of motion pictures, although Le Prince already had plans to patent this invention long before Edison and he intended to patent this invention in the United States just before his exhibition.
Of course, there are theories as to what could have happened to Le Prince. One idea is that he was killed or kidnapped to stop his pioneering progress in film technology, and that his death or disappearance meant that any patents associated with him would remain in limbo.
Indeed, investigators have marked Thomas Edison as someone who could benefit a lot from Le Prince being out of sight.
There is also a version that Le Prince could have become a target for a large inheritance, since at least one of his close relatives allegedly received a pretty good amount after Le Prince disappeared and was later declared dead.
In particular, there are theories that Le Prince's own brother killed him to get an inheritance, or that it was a blow from the outside, but, again, there is little evidence, and there is no evidence of this specifically.
It is also difficult to understand how this could have been done in a moving train, so that none of the other passengers heard or saw anything, and no traces would remain on the floor and walls of the compartment.
In subsequent years, a NYU alumnus, Alexix Bedford, was scouring the archives of the New York Library when he discovered possible evidence that it was Thomas Edison who ordered the assassination of Le Prince.
Bedford was looking through one of Edison's notebooks when he came across an entry from September 20, 1890, written by Edison himself, in which, rather ominously, said the following:
"Eric called me from Dijon today. It was done. Prince is no more. That's good news, but I flinched when he told me. Murder is not mine. I am an inventor and my inventions of moving images can now develop."
These recordings, after careful analysis, were found to be authentic. Bedford himself commented on his discovery:
“I have always admired Louis Le Prince, but in reality little was known about him due to his sudden disappearance. Leafing through this (notebook), I just thought that I might find some interesting and still unknown processes, which Edison tested in the lab I never thought I'd stumble upon this!
This is a completely different look at these amazing inventors and the time in which they lived. Suddenly we see Thomas Edison in a different light, as someone with a strong interest in dominating the trademark industry. And we see how the patent wars affected these scientists as they sought to bring attention to their inventions."
Did Thomas Edison play a truly sinister role in Le Prince's disappearance? This certainly seems very likely.
Another idea is that Le Prince committed suicide, but there is no evidence of this and there is no obvious way he could have accomplished this, at least on the train. Le Prince also really had no real reason to want to kill himself, as he was expecting several important new patents that were groundbreaking for his time.
Other hypotheses were that Le Prince might have committed suicide because it emerged that he might have been homosexual, or that he left to start a new life somewhere and disappear from public life, perhaps because he was heavily indebted, but there is no evidence of this either.
All that is known is that Louis Le Prince got on this train and never seems to get off it. Finally, in 1897, he was pronounced dead.
In 2004, a case was discovered in the police archives of Paris about a corpse recovered from the Seine River immediately after Louis Le Prince disappeared from the train. This corpse bore a superficial resemblance to the missing inventor, but it was never proven that this corpse really belonged to him.
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