( Getty: Bettmann)ĭespite Elizabeth's suspicions, Fischer doubts that Edison was responsible for Le Prince's disappearance. Thomas Edison experimenting with his motion picture machine in 1905. 'As Elizabeth is reading it, it sounds exactly like what Louis was working on - and was about to make a fortune from,' Fischer says. Then, not long after his disappearance, New York newspapers published an article declaring that Thomas Edison had invented a motion picture camera. 'At some point between boarding the train in the south of France and the train arriving in Paris, Le Prince disappears, never to be heard of again,' Fischer says.īecause of the geography and lack of technology, it was weeks before anybody realised that he'd gone missing. In September 1890, after spending a weekend in Dijon with his relatives, he then boarded a train back to Paris, where he planned to meet up with some friends before sailing to New York.

A disappearanceīefore leaving, Le Prince returned to France to visit his brother and sort out a family inheritance. And he told everyone that he was going to move to New York.

'So there are letters, and correspondence and diaries, where and his collaborators, and Joseph, his father-in-law, say 'He's done it, he's figured it out',' Fischer says.Įager for the masses to witness this new invention, Le Prince asked his wife to rent a mansion in New York to use as a venue to publicly show his films for the first time. So Le Prince finally had a way to effectively capture and project his film.īefore that, he had to project his film on glass plates or paper, which were at risk of catching fire or breaking. 'And it has, in many ways, that thing that makes film so magical, which is that it's very vivid and realistic, but undeniably ghostly.'Īround the same time, George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak, began marketing flexible roll film. 'It's Le Prince's in-laws, a family friend and his son doing silly walks in the garden of their family home in Yorkshire,' Fischer says. Shot by Le Prince in October 1888, this short film is the oldest surviving motion picture in the world.

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