Dan Snow's History Hit - The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England. In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found.Paul Fischer, film producer and author, has unearthed one of the Victorian age’s great unsolved mysteries. Paul joins Dan on the podcast to discuss Le Prince’s career, the story behind the first motion picture, and the lawsuit to determine who, in the eyes of the law, was the inventor.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Talk about the history of cinema, day moving pictures. It's a strange thing. It's quite contested who shot the first moving picture. Thomas Edison claimed that he did, obviously. He kind of made moving pictures in a kind of peep show device called the kinetoscope. It was in 1894 that people could queue up and watch a series of still photographs were rapidly moved through a single lens.

The French, of course, they claim it as well. Obviously, you'd expect them to. Auguste and Louis Lumière. It's said they invented moving pictures in December 1895. They have the first ever commercial showing of a moving picture in the Grand Café in Paris. But the truth is, in fact, it was someone in Britain. It was actually a Frenchman living in Britain, in Leeds, of course, West Yorkshire, where all the best things happen. Louis le Prince shot the first motion picture a year before Thomas Edison's

invention went on display. And yet, weeks before he unveiled it to the public, he boarded the train and disappeared, was never, ever seen again. It's one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Victorian age. It means that him and his technology have largely been forgotten. Well, until now, because we've got the very brilliant Paul Fisher. He's a film producer, he's a writer, and he is resurrecting Louis Le Prince. He's restoring his reputation to what it should be, the man who invented motion pictures. This is a fascinating podcast for all of you true crime fans.

You're going to love it. And make sure you go and buy the book to find out exactly who did get rid of Louis Le Prince. If you want to watch TV shows or listen to other podcasts about the 19th century, the place to do that, I'm afraid, is History Hit TV. It's really the only place you can do that. There are no aliens there. There are no porn,

P-A-W-N stars there. Nope. In fact, there's no porn stars of any description there. Come to think of it. There's this great history for proper history fans. Please follow the link

in the description of this podcast. Click it with your finger. Go and check it out. Two weeks free if you sign up today. But in the meantime, folks, here is Paul Fisher

talking about Louis the Prince. Enjoy. Paul, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. The history of moving pictures. It's a tricky one, right? There's no kind of eureka moment. Where are we on firsts and who's doing what when? There's a lot of debate. One thing that's interesting, I grew up in France, where it's kind of accepted there was a Eureka moment that the Lumiere brothers invented film, and it all came with one of them having a migraine one evening, being unable to go to sleep, and then it just came to him as in a vision. And that's kind of the accepted history of the invention of film in France. And they don't talk about Thomas Edison coming before that

because they sort of draw this line that film is projection. Whereas Thomas Edison, of course, made films you could watch through a little peep show device. And then you unpack everything about all the different pioneers who tried to come up with film before these guys. And you stumble on someone called Louis Le Prince, who the book is about, that I was fascinated by because I'd never heard of him until later in life. And I don't want to get geeky on the tech, but basically still images are around for a while,

and film is just a way of stitching them together and kind of making them move, right? Exactly. Still images are around for a while. Exactly. Still images are around for a while, animated moving images are around for a while, and people are trying to figure out how to stitch together several photographs enough that if you play them again quickly, one after the other, it looks like it's moving. And so tell me about the man who you think deserves more attention in this story. Right. So his name, Louis Le Prince, he was French, but worked mostly in Leeds in Yorkshire. And what was fascinating to me about Le Prince is the oldest surviving motion picture that still exists that you can watch fragments of is his, that exists. His cameras and projectors exist. And he held patents that were approved and stood and exist. And he made that first oldest surviving motion picture three years before Edison came out with anything. And seven years before the Lumiere brothers held their first screening.

And even though there's all this physical evidence that he did all this, history books have sort of erased him. And they've erased him in part because before he could make the invention public, he got on a train in France and vanished with no warning, never to be seen or heard from again. Love it. Such a great mystery. So what the heck's going on? Tell me more about, I guess, first of all, tell me about his invention. What was his approach to making images move?

His approach, which is really interesting, he made the first camera that really is recognizable as a modern film camera. You could take the camera he made, and it's obviously cruder and bigger and heavier. But mechanically, it works very much the way a film camera would today. together, 11 or 12 a second, and replay them quickly in front of a light to be projected, then it will look to the eye as if it's continuous movement. And one of his struggles, one of the struggles everybody had at that time, is photographs were still taken on glass plates or paper film, which were really good mediums for a still photograph. If it took a couple of seconds to take a picture, it would be very clear. No one was moving.

That was fine. But the second you tried to put those through a big, rumbling, moving camera, you had shattered glass, broken mechanisms, ripped paper, stuff catching fire. And so the real challenge at the beginning with motion pictures was to try and figure out some kind of basis system

on which you could put all these photographs to move so quickly. And of course, that's how people ended up with celluloid. And so for several years, it seems people like Le Prince were very close to being able to do this, but they were missing the base medium. And someone like Le Prince was interesting because he, I think of all those pioneers, kind of had a vision for what this thing would be instead of just thinking about it as a product. And was this one of these amazing stories about invention?

Is there a sort of milieu, are they stealing and copying and begging and sharing? Or are these researches going on in quite a siloed way? It's a bit of both, to be honest, because these researchers were very separate from one another and they were operating mostly without knowing how far others had got or what they were working on specifically. But there was a system for announcing patents and there were scientific papers like La Nature in France that were internationally published where people would speak about what they were working on. So Le Prince worked in secret, but he would have been aware that Edward Muybridge, who

was an English photographer, had managed to take instantaneous pictures, meaning pictures that happened in a moment and not several seconds. He would have been aware that a French scientist called Juliette Anne Marais had invented a gun, like a rifle. And in the kind of casing where the same kind of mechanisms, bullets, would be in a six shooter type thing, he had put little glass plates that could spin and not quite take moving pictures, but come close. And so there was kind of awareness if you paid attention of what other people were doing. And this is where Thomas Edison comes in and is very interesting because Thomas Edison at this time, most famous inventor in the world, arguably the most famous person in America,

backed by huge financial wealth. He's got a laboratory with dozens of people working for him. And Edison's mechanism was to read everything about everything. If anybody had come up with something or was thinking of coming up with something, Edison had a huge library and a whole staff to clip those things, make him aware, so he could decide whether he wanted to pursue something inspired by that, pursue something similar, or file something, and this is slightly technical, file something called a caveat, which in the US patent system is essentially a pre-patent that says, I'm thinking of inventing this. I haven't started the work yet, but I call shotgun. And he really took advantage

of that to essentially kind of claim every idea he heard of, just in case he might want to use it. I've got a lot of sympathy there, because when I was about 15, I thought about inventing the World Wide Web. And I thought, wouldn't it be great? And if I had a caveat, wowee, none of us would be here today, let's be honest. Exactly. You'd have other things to do. And that's the wild thing. For a few years, that was the law where you could go, I don't know how this works. I haven't spent a minute working on it, but I've thought about it. And what that would mean is that if somebody actually came up with that invention, filed a patent, the patent office would come back to you who had filed

the caveat thing and say, you now have a year to figure this out. And if you do, then we give it to you. And if you don't, then you've forfeited the right. And Edison would file hundreds of these every year to cover everything. And then because he was Edison and he had money, even if a normal person wouldn't have been able to make a case to pursue that caveat, he had the lawyers to kind of beat everybody into submission. But meanwhile, the West Yorkshire posse was advancing. Tell me about the first film ever made. The first film ever made, people call it the Roundhay Garden scene now, because it was taken really in the backyard of Le Prince's in-laws' house in Roundhay outside of Leeds. And it's

fascinating because it's really a home movie. A lot of people at the time making films were kind of trying to come up with something that was either scientifically surprising or technologically impressive. And Le Prince had this idea that the most human connection you could get with a film would be a little bit like a photo album. And he kind of foresaw that everybody would have, you know, the way we had Super 8 tapes at home or all our films on our camera roll. And so the first film he made was filming his in-laws and a family friend and his son just walking around in a circle in Roundhay. And only a few seconds survive, but it can be dated really easily because one of the people in that film died in October 1888. So we know it was taken before October 1888. And when there was a court case

later on about who made the first film, that became one of those key linchpin moments because Edison's lawyers tried to suggest that film hadn't been made in 1888. And then they had to deal with how a person who was no longer alive was in it. But that was the first successful test really that Le Prince took. And on the same day, he filmed his son playing the Melodion, which I think suggested he wanted to synchronize sound to that film or have a live band playing with that film. So he had a kind of far-reaching idea of what he thought this technology could be. It can have synchronized sound.

He talked to his family about having color that he might hand paint every frame. You could use it at home to film your family and retain memories of what it was like to be around them. And he took a few more tests after that one, all around Leeds, which is where he lived and worked. And for the next year, it seems he started taking steps to go to New York and have a big premiere and unveil this thing. And he worked with a few artisans in a workshop on Woodhouse Lane. And one of my skeptical kind of instincts when I came to this was maybe people are assuming he

was ready when he disappeared, because it makes for a great story. But maybe he wasn't. Maybe the camera didn't work. Maybe he didn't have the money. But in the record, his wife is renting this big villa in New York. He's booking tickets to go back to America. He's telling his associates, build a nice, beautiful mahogany version of this prototype that we can show people. He's making real plans. He meets someone at the opera in Paris to demonstrate the machine ostensibly to see if they might be interested in using it. And then he returns to France to visit his brother as a kind of last visit before going to America and just gets on the train and with no warning is gone. Doesn't get back to Paris. No one hears from him again.

And the 19th century being the 19th century, it's six to eight weeks before anybody realizes something's even wrong, which is really fascinating because it's essentially a cold case the second it comes up. Listen to Dan Snow's history hits. I'm talking about the birth of cinema and murder. More coming up.

Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon? One more chance for man. Without the bra. One giant leap for mankind. You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit,

Patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. And you've tried to solve this mystery. I have. Was there foul play here? I think there was. Really? And his family think there was. Wow.

His family were convinced Thomas Edison had got rid of him. And I dug into that a little bit. And it's one of those red herrings you can dismiss quite quickly for a variety of reasons. But there was someone else who had an interest in getting rid of him. And I'm very convinced of what I dug up. And of course, what's interesting about these things and about history and these cases is this happened 130 years ago. You're kind of dying for a smoking gun, right? You go to archives and you just pray there's going to be a confession letter in the back

of a notebook somewhere. And that just doesn't happen. But Le Prince had spent a lot of money on this research and these inventions, and he owed some people money, and other people owed him money. And he had made promises, and there were larger issues in the family with other people in the family who had taken their own gambles that hadn't paid off. And so I think quite strongly there was foul play,

but much closer to home than what his widow convinced herself of, which was essentially this idea Thomas Edison was a Lex Luthor figure who'd had the competition gunned down and eliminated. What were you going on? How do you solve a cold case? Well, I had to learn it on the fly, right? I'd never done it before. And so there's a lot of going back to the original stuff and trying, particularly in public records, to figure out people's circumstances at the time. And so there was one part of it, which is reading correspondence and reading notebooks

and trying to figure out people's mindsets and whether they may have said or done anything about this. That's part A. And then there's part B, which is going through the actual circumstances of the crime. So for instance, in this case, my first thing was, all right, Le Prince got on a train in Dijon, near the south of France, and he went back to Paris. And at some point on this journey, he disappeared. Myself and some researchers, we're going to go through the newspapers and

records we can find of every stop along the way for any kind of evidence of a body has been found, someone's been dug up, something odd has happened in the week after that event, including the day. And we're going to see if anybody turned up in Paris, if anybody turned up at the morgue, if anybody filed a report. And, you know, Le Prince's brother, who he'd visited with, said he put notices in the newspapers calling for any information on Louis. So we're going to dig through all the newspapers and try and find these notices. And we're going to try and corroborate what everybody is saying. And really, the idea was to treat it a bit as if it wasn't a cold case. And it had happened now in the first place. So what evidence do we have?

What witnesses do we have? I had to research how the train worked. Can you go from one carriage to the next? Can you open the doors while the train is moving? And try and draw up a list of suspects and theories. And then that's when I started digging into the stuff I spoke about at the start, which is kind of investigating your possible suspects themselves. Who might have had a motive? Who might have had contradictions in their stories? Who might have said something that is disproven by the record? And I learned how to read on Sherlock Holmes books. And this is one of those stories that happened when Sherlock Holmes appeared in the papers and people are kind

of inventing this idea of detecting. And I kind of realized doing this that I was doing a kind of Holmesian thing of I'm just eliminating the impossible until I get to the improbable. And however improbable it is, if it's the only thing standing, then it might be the truth. And that led me somewhere interesting that Le Prince's descendants, Le Prince's family, don't necessarily agree with and feel quite sensitive about, but in an open-minded kind of way, because it was quite close to home in the end. Ooh, okay. Trying to be tantalizing.

Well, you're being very tantalizing. People can read the book. But you say the descendants don't agree. How convinced are you with the evidence that you found? I'm very convinced because there's stuff in that case that I can't explain and that I can't justify in any way other than the conclusion I came to. And I am interested to see if it feels that way to others. You know, I've got friends and family who've read the book, some of which kind of agree with me and kind of

feel like, okay, this is very conclusive. And it's also, in my mind, the way I kind of write it at the end of the book, it's the kind of case that if I was watching a Netflix documentary, if I was reading about something today happening in a trial, would convince me. And it's one of the things that's interesting about this and about all these Victorian mysteries kind of things, it's really easy to romanticize them. It's really easy to want something that might've happened in a Conan Doyle novel, or there might be Thomas Edison actually was a murderer, or there might be headline grabbing in that way. And there's a lot of myth around the prince around his

disappearance and his work and what might've happened. And it was really interesting to me that underneath all of this, underneath all the myth and the story about film, which is really about myth-making, the stuff that actually does happen in life is much kind of grubbier and sadder and more tragic and tends to always be that way. Yeah, it's not always the distant Lex Luthor-like billionaire who's the bad guy, I guess.

Exactly. Wow, I guess. Exactly. Wow, that is fascinating stuff. What effect did him dying have on his career? If you know what I mean, like, were his patents, his inventions continued by other people, recognized? Well, so at least at the time, if someone went missing, it would take seven years before they were declared dead, unless a body was found and you had evidence of their death. And within that seven years, their property, including their intellectual property, would be frozen. So what I meant practically is for seven years,

his wife and kids couldn't enforce or use his patents. And within that seven years, Thomas Edison comes out with his kinetoscope, invents the movies. If you're American, a few years later, the Lumiere brothers come out with the cinematograph, invent the movies. If you're French, and within the next couple of years after that, a whole bunch of people with very recognizable names, Gaumont, Pathe, all these businessmen make a fortune off of motion pictures and are celebrated and are hailed as geniuses of the age. And Le Prince's family are sitting at home and don't even have the chance to contest it and lose because they can't touch these patents until 1897. And so in that window,

history gets written, newspaper columns get printed, and Le Prince gets totally forgotten. And almost in the court of public opinion, it becomes impossible then to make the case that, oh, hey, my dad actually came up with this in his shed and came before the colossus Thomas Edison. that becomes a really odd case to make. Well, why didn't you speak up for seven years? Well, I couldn't because he disappeared. Well, that's very convenient. And so his family get progressively more depressed and angry. And I think this period plays a huge role in his widow, Lizzie, focusing on Edison as the villain and the face of this great, big, nebulous, fateful injustice.

What happens in the end is Thomas Edison gets to the point in this industry where he thinks, he convinces himself he has invented the movies, not just the camera, not just the mechanics, but the whole medium. And so anybody making films in any way owes him a license fee, has to ask permission, has to kiss the ring. And so Thomas Edison decides to sue every independent producer who's making films for breach of patent, of his patent, which he got from a caveat filed years and years before, backdated, everything to suit him.

And one of the bigger independent production companies at the time called American Biograph, when Edison sues them, they dig through the records and they find that there's a man called Louis Le Prince who has this patent for a motion picture camera that seems like it works just fine and was filed long before Edison filed anything. And they figure, okay, if we can prove that this guy did it first, then Edison can't own the medium because somebody got there before him. prove that this guy did it first, then Edison can't own the medium because somebody got there before him. And so the lawyers for this company go to Lizzie LePrince and say, we're being sued and we want to prove that your husband came first. Can you help us? And this is a few months before

she's able to go down to the mayor's office and sign a piece of paper saying my husband is dead. And this is the only chance they have to fight Thomas Edison, right? He's got J.P. Morgan funded lawyers. He's got the press on his side. The Le Princes have very little money because Louis sunk all the money into this invention and then vanished along with any chance of making any income. So they take this chance to go into this court case and try and restore Le Prince's legacy. And the second sort of small tragedy of the story is that they couldn't see that they were being used by both sides, if that makes sense. And so they get chewed up and spat out in a way and discouraged even further and lose their day in court, their literal day in court, through naivete more than anything else.

And so the prince really, from then on, kind of disappeared from the record. It's a really odd thing. The patents are there. His family still have these film strips and these cameras in a storage warehouse. But to all intents and purposes, it's as if he's never done this. And there were people in Leeds trying to keep his memory alive, and there was kind of a subscription to set the plaque on his workshop, and his family donated his equipment to the Science Museum in London.

But really no one heard any more about him on a large scale until 100 years later. What an amazing story. Thanks so much. Where can people find out more about it? The book is called The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures. It's with Faber and it can be ported anywhere now. Independent bookshops ideally help them out, but they're everywhere and it's out April 7th in the UK. Great, man. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did

feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.