The Missing Reel: Louis Le Prince and the Invention of Film

Introduction: History, Photography, and the Dream of Motion

History as a concept was created within the human mind thousands of years ago. It most likely arose from tales told around flickering campfires — of great deeds performed by fathers and mothers, dangerous beasts conquered, and nourishing plants and fruits discovered and distinguished from poisonous ones. Gradually, even before the invention of writing, these stories were incorporated into ever more complicated sagas that involved not only wondrous accomplishments but details of day-to-day living. These sagas were handed down to succeeding generations, who enlarged them and eventually used them as the bases of various religious practices. Virtually all of the really ancient religions devote extensive portions of their writings to the presentation of racial or ethnic history.

For most of the existence of the human race, history was confined to the spoken or written word. The evidence of activities and races of people who had vanished remained in the ruins of their civilizations, of course, but the details of who they had been and how they had lived were at the whim of those who spoke or wrote of them, or painted imaginative images in oil on canvas. At least, this was true until the nineteenth century, when the dream of capturing an actual fragment of time — of history — in a way that it could be viewed by an endless number of eyes became a reality.

Most of this scientific advance came in Europe. The earliest known reference to photography comes in a letter from a French physician named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce dated July 19, 1822, and the oldest surviving photograph is one taken by Niépce of a street view in 1827. These first efforts may seem crude to us today, but they finally allowed people to catch events as they flashed by and display them to others. The next obvious step was to develop photography to the point that it could do the same for actual motion.

The average person is likely to identify the almost legendary Thomas Edison as the "father" of motion picture photography. And while Edison is still credited with developing the first commercially successful motion picture process (in 1891) and giving the first public demonstration of moving pictures (in May of that year), he was not the first person to photograph and then display the activities of the world around him. Even if we dismiss the claims of prior success by supporters of the Lumière brothers in France — debate continues as to whether they beat Edison to the discovery — one man remains who should be recognized as the true pioneer of the art, though his name is forgotten by all but a very few today.

Christopher Rawlence, author of The Missing Reel, was born in England in 1945 and brought up on a farm. He became interested in art, the theater, and films early in life and studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art before teaching art history at university. While teaching, he became the co-founder of the Red Ladder Theatre, a politically engaged company for which he acted, wrote, and directed. His interests led him further into film, and in 1988 he wrote and directed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a psychological examination of the mind of an artist. Rawlence is married and the father of two daughters.

In spite of his education in the arts, Rawlence was as unaware of the French-born Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince as the average person until 1976, when he toured an old house in the Chapeltown area of North Leeds, England, with an idea toward buying it. The house itself was slowly succumbing to age, and the local city council had begun to consider demolishing it. When this possibility was raised, the man guiding Rawlence and his party through the residence responded that the house was of historical value, since it had once belonged to Augustin Le Prince, the inventor of the motion picture. These first hints inspired Rawlence to dig into the largely overlooked life of Le Prince and eventually resulted in the fascinating, if somewhat chaotic, The Missing Reel.

Le Prince's Early Life and Path to Leeds

Augustin Le Prince was born on August 28, 1841, in Metz. His father was a career officer in the French army — a major of artillery in the service of Louis Philippe at the time of Le Prince's birth. Le Prince's early life was as nomadic as that of any other child of a military man, and between 1855 and 1865 he attended a number of schools in the areas around Bruges and Paris. He often told his later family and friends that this early travel had awakened his imagination to the variety of life experiences available to him.

Le Prince attended the Universities of Bonn and Leipzig to study chemistry, mathematics, and German. In 1866 he became acquainted with John Whitley, the son of Joseph Whitley, an Englishman who was one of the partners in Whitley Partners — a brass founders and manufacturing company dealing in pipes, valves, boilers, and virtually anything else having to do with brass. John was in Paris largely to assess business opportunities there, while Le Prince, who came from a financially comfortable background, had yet to decide upon a career. At that time he was primarily traveling the continent and studying painting and photography.

Le Prince and Whitley quickly became friends, which resulted in Augustin accompanying the young Englishman back to Leeds and securing a position at Whitley Partners as a draughtsman and translator. It was at this point also that he met John's sister, Lizzie Whitley, who would become an important part of his future.

The next several years were busy and eventful for Le Prince. He fell in love with Lizzie Whitley and married her in 1869, and only a year later he felt a call to duty as his native land was embroiled in the Franco-Prussian War, which led him to return to France to enlist in the National Guard. Almost immediately, Le Prince was taken prisoner by French police and imprisoned as an agent provocateur when foreign currency and return tickets to England were found in his pockets. The young man was in great danger of execution when representatives of a local newspaper and the British ambassador, Lord Russell, located him and convinced the authorities that Le Prince was no spy but a patriot who had returned to volunteer in defense of his nation.

Once this was cleared up, Le Prince succeeded in joining the National Guard. He soon saw action and survived the Siege of Paris later in the year.

Returning to Leeds in 1871, Le Prince felt emotionally sickened by the terrible things he had witnessed during his war experiences, and he was also physically ill due to the malnutrition he had suffered during the Siege. Life with his new family soon restored him physically and psychologically, however, and a daughter, Marie, was born to the young couple later that year, followed by a son, Adolphe, in 1872.

1872 was also the year that another defining event in Le Prince's life took place, even though it did not directly involve him at the time. Eadweard Muybridge (born Muggeridge, 1830–1904) was an English photographer with a strong interest in human and animal locomotion. In response to a famous wager, Muybridge was enlisted to either prove or disprove the idea that all four hooves of a galloping horse would leave the earth at the same instant. He undertook this effort by setting up a number of cameras at regular intervals beside a track, each connected to a thin wire that would trigger its shutter as the racing horse broke through it. In this way, Muybridge settled the bet, and he also discovered that viewing these photographs in sequence "fooled" the eye into perceiving motion. Building on this, he developed a rotating cylinder and light source that allowed a primitive form of projection onto a blank surface. Though this "zoopraxiscope" was not a true form of moving pictures, it was clearly a forerunner of the art, and Le Prince took notice.

Children continued to be born into the Le Prince family, and Augustin and Lizzie developed their artistic energies during this period, showing an exhibit of paintings and ceramics at the 1875 Yorkshire Exhibition. That same year, Le Prince left Whitley Partners, which was in the process of liquidation. In 1876, he and Lizzie founded the Leeds Technical School of Art.

Experiments, Patents, and the First Films

From 1877 to 1885, the Le Prince family engaged in several business ventures both in England and in the United States, where they had emigrated in 1882. During this time Augustin began to take increasing notice of Muybridge's rudimentary projection system. The incandescent lamp was perfected by the Edison company during these years, as was Eastman's paper roll-film — two hugely important steps in the evolution of true motion pictures. In 1885, Le Prince began his own experiments in the area of film.

While in Paris to tend to his sick mother in 1887, Le Prince constructed a sixteen-lens camera, soon followed by a small sixteen-lens projector and a stereoscopic viewing device. The following year he succeeded in building a much larger sixteen-lens projector and began to apply for — and receive — patents for his new motion picture device.

In October of 1888, while the talk of London was dominated by the horrific murders being carried out by the Western world's first "superstar" serial killer, Jack the Ripper, Le Prince shot two pieces of film now recognized as the first of their kind ever made. The first showed the garden of Le Prince's father-in-law, Joseph Whitley, in Leeds, and the second recorded the everyday activities taking place at Leeds Bridge. Fragments of both films survive, and the Roundhay Garden Scene is today recognized as the oldest surviving motion picture.

It may seem unusual, but the new technology of motion pictures did not immediately explode into the public consciousness. Le Prince's monumental scientific advance went completely unnoticed outside of his own family circle. Even the now-famous exhibitions staged by the Lumière brothers and Edison some two years later were not greeted with great enthusiasm. "Revolutions" in public opinion and acceptance often take longer to build steam than those in government.

Still, Le Prince could feel the breath of other inventors on his neck. In July of 1889, Edison assigned his top engineers the task of developing his own ideas for motion pictures, and William Friese-Greene applied for his own motion picture patent in Britain. Le Prince owned a small number of patents already, but the chaotic state of the patent system at that time left him unsure whether he would be able to capitalize on his own ingenuity and hard work, or whether the financial rewards and recognition would instead go to some more aggressive self-promoter who might swallow the Le Prince discoveries into another company.

Le Prince worked hard throughout 1889 to perfect his apparatus and ensure that it would be ready for a public unveiling. In place of the old, fragile paper roll-film, he acquired celluloid sheets and adapted them into rolls, hoping to improve the clarity of his product. These turned out to be disappointing, however, and he was forced to return to a glass and gelatin system as a film base. He encountered difficulties with the three-lens projector he had been developing, but in spite of this he was able to put on a successful demonstration for the Secretary of the Opéra National in Paris in June of 1890.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Le Prince

Le Prince was energized by this positive display. He knew that he needed much more publicity and investment from interested backers to continue developing his system, so he arranged a train journey that would take him from Dijon to Paris and from there, eventually, to New York City, where he planned a triumphant public presentation a full half year before Edison's May 22, 1891 display in New Jersey.

This is where The Missing Reel attains both poignancy and a chilling sense of mystery. On September 16, 1890, Le Prince was seen off at the train to Paris by his brother Albert. He had missed the morning departure and was forced to take the afternoon run. Le Prince was in good spirits, and as the whistle sounded to alert passengers to the imminent departure, he leaned out of a window for a few final words of farewell. And then he was gone — forever.

To this day, no one knows what happened to Augustin Le Prince. No one aboard the train ever admitted to seeing him leave it, and no trace of his body was ever found. A thorough search began in October, but it produced no clues as to the manner of his disappearance or the reason for it.