The Rest Is History - 278: France: The Mystery of Le Prince

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

In today's episode, Tom and Dominic explore the origins of the motion-picture camera, a device invented by "gentle giant" Louis Le Prince, who's œuvre spanned from working with pots and pans to photographing Queen Victoria or Gladstone. This history features mysterious disappearances, a jealous American competitor, Lancashire accents, and much more... Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Bonjour mes amis et bienvenue au Rest is History avec moi Dominique Sandroek et mon ami Tom Hollande Tom, that was some beautiful French That was wonderful We are, well we say it every time don't we

we're in the middle of our World Cup marathon I'm actually sick of saying it We are in the middle of our World Cup marathon. I'm actually sick of saying it. We are in the middle of our World Cup marathon. So say something else. We don't know what order they'll be put out in. It could be at the beginning, couldn't it? Yeah. Or it could be at the end.

But who knows? That's the jeopardy. It's the World Cup. We're doing a series of podcasts about the history of the competing countries, choosing sort of slightly offbeat subjects sometimes. And we come to France. Now, Tom, a few weeks ago, we did an absolutely, even if I say so myself,

an absolutely magnificent podcast about French history through film with the French critic Muriel Zaga. And it was brilliant, not because of anything. It was magnifique. It was magnifique. It was super. It was extra.

And that wasn't because of anything you and I contributed at all. It was because she was brilliant. And so if you haven't listened to that, go back and listen to that. If you have listened to that, keep listening, because Tom is going to – Tom, are you going to do the whole podcast in a French accent or not? No, no.

No, I'm not. I'm going to keep it very British, because actually the subject today does have a British angle and, indeed, an American angle. And, indeed, it has a to uh the theme of the podcast that you were talking about which is a film because uh today's subject is um louis amy augustin le prince who i think can legitimately be described as the father of cine film, of moving film, moving camera. Oh, nice. And it's a very interesting and ultimately rather tragic and mysterious story. That's how we like them.

Have you ever heard of Louis Leprince? I'll be honest with you. The only time I've ever heard of him is when you told me you were going to do a podcast. Okay. And I deliberately not informed myself, Tom, so that I can have the pleasure of learning at the feet of the master. Okay. So Louis Le Prince, he's born in 1841 in Metz. And Metz is, you know, it's on the eastern flank of France. And so it's not surprised perhaps that Louis Lebrun's father is in the artillery. So it's a kind of military station. He's a major. But I think more significantly for our story,

Dominic, he is a friend of Louis Daguerre, as in the inventor of the Daguerreotype. And in fact, taker of the first ever photograph of a person because the exposure when daguerre was taking his photographs it had to last for several minutes so you know traffic's going too fast for that but he takes a photograph in 1838 of a street in paris where there is a man having his boots blacked so there's the man himself and the boot black. And these are the two first people ever to be photographed. So for young Louis, very exciting to be in association with Louis Daguerre. Yeah. And Daguerre teaches Le Prince chemistry and photography.

And that's a reflection of the fact that Le Prince, unlike you, Dominic, he he's interested very interested in the arts but he's also interested in science and it's that is a difference so he he has a very very artistic temperament but he also has a very very keen interest in uh in science and the practical applications of science i only have one of those things tom i know you do i know i know so that is why the likelihood of you making a radical invention in the field of cinematography is limited i would say yeah unlikely louis goes on to study uh painting in paris and then he goes to leipzig as a postgraduate where he studies chemistry and while he's at leipzig he meets up with uh an englishman called john robin whitley and whitley the, he's the eldest son of a guy in Leeds who owns an iron foundry. And he's called Joseph Whitley. So this, LaPrance's new friend, John Robin Whitley,

he's a product of the industrial revolution in Victorian Britain. And they get on tremendously well. Le Prince, I think, he seems to be a very lovable figure. He's a large kind of bear of a man, very gentle, so kind of gentle giant, much admired for his brilliance and for his kindness. So a very nice man. Sounds great. I would say of all the people perhaps that we've discussed on our podcast, he seems to be the nicest so far that is a big claim tom that is a big claim but i can't think of anyone who's nicer in the episode on the costas reek and civil war you have two characters don pepe and dr valverde i think he's nicer than both of them crikey that is i never thought i'd hear those words anyway so

it will not surprise you bearing in mind mind how nice Louis Le Prince is, that John Robin Whitley, the son of a Leeds industrialist, invites him to come to Leeds and to visit him. And so Le Prince goes in 1867, and he joins Joseph Whitley's firm. And two years later, Dominic, in 1869, he marries whitley's sister elizabeth who like le prince i actually very like him he's she's um a very talented artist and she's very interested in photography so again there's that that kind of fusion that you no offense completely laugh that fusion of artistic brilliance and fascination with technology. I could not have married that woman, Tom. You could have done.

I'm sorry to say. You could have done, but it wouldn't have been as much of a marriage of equals as was the case with Louis and Elizabeth. And they got on tremendously well. They set up a school of applied arts in Leeds. It's incredibly successful. Their particular gimmick is that they take photographs and they fix it onto uh kind of metal and pots and pans and all kinds of things they fix photographs to pots pans yeah so you you kind of project it onto the pots and pans okay well so photographic images onto metal that's

that's their gimmick um but they also specialize in portraits so So they take a portrait of Gladstone, for instance, and they take a portrait of Queen Victoria. Golly. And the measure of their renown is that in 1878, when Cleopatra's Needle gets set up on the bank of the Thames, so Cleopatra's Needle is an obelisk that's been brought from Egypt. It's still there to this day, reputedly cursed. Before they set it up, they put a underneath you know in the foundations where it's going to be

erected and there is uh there are there's a rupee is put there a railway guide a copy of whittaker's almanac a baby's bottle various other things um photographs of england's 12 greatest beauties and a photograph taken by Louis and Sarah of Queen Victoria. And it goes in there. I do like a time capsule, Tom. They've gone out of fashion now, haven't they? They have. But they're great things. Yeah. And Louis and Sarah are very much a part of it, this exciting time capsule world. Yeah. So it's all going well. But Louis is clearly a man of, well, of international ambition. So having conquered Britain in 1881, he decides he's going to go off and conquer America. So he goes with his wife and his family and they set off. And while he's out there, he serves as an agent for a company that's making that very kind of deeply embossed wallpaper that people loved in the late victorian period yeah so dense and textured and very heavy wallpaper yes and uh he also becomes the agent for a group of um french photographers who are out there so he's very much kind of you know keeping up with his photographic interests

and these are guys who are specializing in kind of panoramas of you know spectacular american vistas and also particularly of battlefield scenes so battle gettersburg that we think not that long after the civil war yeah so so that um and he because he he you know he's he's flogging his wallpaper keeping in with photographers and then he gets to palo Alto by Stanford in California. And there he sees photographs by a man called Edward Muybridge. Have you heard of him? Oh, yeah.

Very famous. So the pioneer of photography and horses. He was all about horses, Muybridge. Yes. He was originally called Edward Muggeridge. Yeah. And he changed it to Muybridge because he thought that that sounded more antique. And he changed his name, Edward Anglo-Saxon spelling yes he did yeah so it says Eadwood yeah and didn't he murder somebody he shot his he shot his wife's lover right and got acquitted because they said basically

said fair enough right so he's an interesting man yeah um yes exactly so he takes his photographs and it's kind of like umaccato. So you put them together and you get the sense of a horse galloping or a man running or whatever. And Leprince is obsessed by this. He becomes fascinated by it. And he starts to experiment with a camera that can shoot moving pictures. So rather than kind of take them individually, we'll shoot them and essentially create what we would call film, I guess. So taking multiple frames in quick succession. So he patents this camera, but we don't know if he ever managed to project the film that he'd taken. And even if he had, it probably wouldn't have worked because for reasons that I don't quite

understand, the camera is taking it at different angles. So you wouldn't get the sense of a kind of continuous running film. It would be coming at you from different angles. So you wouldn't get the sense of a kind of continuous running film. It would be coming at you from different angles. It would look quite odd, I think. But definite sense that he's onto something, he's on the right track here. And so he realizes that actually the best place to develop this isn't America, but his father-in-law's factory back in Leeds. And so he goes back to England. He leaves his wife and children in America. He takes his eldest son, who by this point is a very able young boy called Adolf.

Oh, that's unfortunate. No, Adolf. Oh, Adolf. Adolf. You said Adolf. Well, because he's from Metz, isn't he, originally? So there's, you know. All right. Or maybe you're pronouncing it in a West Yorkshire way. Hey, Adolf. Adolf, you know. All right. Or maybe you're pronouncing it in a West Yorkshire way. Hey, Adolf.

Adolf. Adolf. Adolf. Okay. I don't know what Adolf looked like, but I imagine that he wore a sailor suit. Almost certainly. But surely not when he was in Yorkshire.

Papa. Papa. Surely then he wore clogs. May I help you? And a flat cap. Hey, up. Come on, Adolf. So anyway, so Louis and Eddard and Joseph Whitley.

Yeah. They're all piling in. Please do the whole thing in that accent. Do the rest of it in that accent. They're making camera. And Joseph Whitley's doing metal work. Actually, don't, don't,'t don't all right okay and le prince is working and working on his invention refining it making it better and better and better and by 1887 dominic yeah he is starting to shoot film

up and as i've invented cinema hi anyway so i think that at this point we should take a break yeah and maybe we should in the break we should do all our accents and then come back and do it properly in the second half so we don't offend and horrify listeners. We will return. We will return, accent-free, with Adolphe, more Adventures of Adolphe after the break. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Welcome back to The rest is history uh now pleasingly accent free at least i'm accent free tom are you accent free we very good continue please with the story of louis leprance inventor of cinema okay so we are in august 1887 and lepr Prince sends footage to his wife in New York, which is 16 frames of a man walking around a corner. Now, you may laugh, Dominic. You may laugh, but this is where it all begins. One minute you're doing that, the next it's Peter Jackson and the return of the king. Exactly. However, the problem for Louis is that he doesn't know whether it's worked or not.

Oh. Because he doesn't have a projector. So he shot it on the camera, but he doesn't have a projector. What, there's no projector to be found in all of England? He hasn't invented it yet. Oh, he invents the projector. Well, he's got his camera,

he's shooting this film, but he doesn't know whether it works because he doesn't have a projector. Okay, right. So it's unknown, but he's confident enough that he is on the right track that he applies for a u.s patent right and he is given this patent on on january the 10th 1888 it is patent number 376 247 and it is the method

of an apparatus for producing animated pictures. So there it is. It's commercially registered, set up, ready to go. If he can get it to a sufficient state that he can start making money out of it. And to do that, obviously he has to demonstrate that it works. By October of that year, so 1888, he is shooting film at a rate of about 12 to 16 pictures per minute. So he's upped the rate. And that October, he starts to take sequences of film that are incredibly, incredibly moving. You can see them. You can go on YouTube or whatever and look them up. So the first one,

he goes to Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, which is an area in leeds and oakwood grange is the house of his parents-in-law so that's joseph and sarah whitley right so he goes there thank god he didn't invent sound tom they go out into garden and um there he films he just films a little scene oh so you see sarah his mother-in-law, she's dancing backwards and she turns around. And then you see Joseph and he's there and his coattails are flying as he turns around. And it's kind of incredible. This is where it's beginning. Adolphe is there as well.

And a friend of Le Prince is called Annie Hartley. So they're all there. And this is where it all begins. He also films Adolphe playing his accordion. Listen to me play my accordion. So that's going on. And then he films traffic crossing a bridge in Leeds. So all of this is taken. Now, what is unclear is whether he has developed a projector that is sufficient to display this. And a lot kind of hangs on this because we're reaching the climax of the story. And there's a mystery around what happens to de la Prance that is, I suspect, very strongly connected to the fact of whether he had developed the projector or not so over um 1889 to 90 he's working with a mechanic in uh in leeds called james longley

and they're they're working on what they call deliverers what we would call projectors right louis leprance seems to have reached a kind of a he's he's either decided that it is going to work or it's not going to work well Well, that's narrowed it down. I know it has. Evidence for the fact that he thinks it is going to work. In 1889, he takes American citizenship to go with his French citizenship. Because he wants to establish himself in America. He wants to go and establish himself in America.

Late 1890, he's planning to sail to America and join his wife there. Yeah. But before he does that, he goes back to France to see his brother. So he goes to Paris. He goes to Dijon, which is where his brother is. On the 16th of September, he's due to take a train back to Paris where he's going to be met by three of his friends. He misses that train. His brother says that he then helped Louis onto the next train right the train went off and louis is never seen again he's never seen again he vanishes completely crikey and body never found well there is a police search they find no trace of him whatsoever and there are no leads at all to follow he it's as

though he's vanished off the face of the earth and so the question then obviously is well what happened to him and there are various theories and the most popular theory which was pushed by uh louis leprance's wife is that louis leprance had got his projector going he'd got his film he'd got his patent he'd got his American citizenship. He was coming back to America and he was going to premiere his invention and his work in New York. And this would establish him clearly as the father of cine film. The person who does establish himself as the father of the moving camera is Thomas Edison, who was a notoriously horrible man, incredibly jealous of his own work, ever ready to get rid of competitors.

And Edison demonstrates that cinematography works the year after Le Prince dies, or vanishes, or whatever happens to him. So he does that in May 1891. And theory is is that perhaps edison or people working with edison wanted to nobble the prance who knows what happened maybe they got rid of him but would edison's reach extend to the trains between where was it paris and dijon yeah well uh so in 1898 um edison sues an american company and he does so on the basis that he is the sole inventor of cinematography, that no one else has developed it. And the American company that's being sued call Adolf as a witness for defense, for their defense.

And Adolf says, yes, he insists that his father had invented it. Edison wins. And although that verdict is subsequently overturned, it's enough to establish him absolutely clearly as the father of cinematography. And Laplace's widow is incredibly bitter about it. And basically says, she very, very strongly implies that Edison was responsible for her husband's disappearance. So we don't know. I mean i agree it's i don't think it's very likely other theories yeah that he was murdered by his brother you know who he'd come to visit who he'd come to visit well i mean so in cases of murder people the police invariably look at family

members don't they and uh the brother was the last person to see him alive supposedly so perhaps didn't put him on the train at all he's the only person who vouches for the fact he put him on the train. So yeah, so that's a possibility. So why would his brother kill him? Perhaps there was, I don't know, there was some will or something like that. Nobody's ever been able to find a motive that would explain that. But I guess, again, that's possible. Another theory is that Louis Le Prince was gay and that he negotiated a kind of a divorce and he agreed that he would vanish to spare the family the shame of having a homosexual father or husband. It seems unlikely that he would have abandoned his cinematographical interests. That is definitely an argument against it. And the other argument is that there is absolutely

no evidence whatsoever that he was gay. So it's just completely invented. It's completely invented. The fourth suggestion is that he commits suicide. And really for that to make sense, he has to feel that his business isn't going to work. He has to probably have felt that he hadn't developed the film, that it hadn't worked. He couldn't get his projector. Perhaps he went to see his brother to borrow money, to raise capital, to develop it a little bit further. And sustaining that argument is the fact that in 2003, a photo was found in the Paris archives of a man who had been pulled from the Seine in 1890, who looks quite like le prince people have argued that the the man in the photograph is too

short he's not le prince was a very i said he's a very large man that doesn't seem to correspond to that so again the the the jury is out on that but we don't know you know it's still unproven um we don't know what happened to le prince and And the tragedy of the story is that because he dies, having invented this film, but it never gets shown. And it may well be that Le Prince died not knowing or thinking that he hadn't been able to develop it. He'd never seen his own films. Well, we don't know. There are people who say that he did,

that they developed a projector in Leeds and he showed it to some of his family. But this is contested. But it's possible, I would say likely, that he didn't yeah and it may well be that he died thinking that he'd been a failure and it was only kind of several decades later that finally they were able to to put this film into a projector and show that he had you know he had done it he had got there and so that film of um his father-in-law and mother-in-law and friend and son in the garden in Leeds, and his son playing the accordion and the traffic

going over the bridge in Leeds, these are monuments to the history of film, but they're also monuments to the ghostly legacy of this extraordinary man who really should be better known than he is. So with such an amazing story, why is he not better known? Because he dies and because his film is only seen much, much later. He's written out of the early drafts of the story of film. And so Edison takes the starring role. Yeah, the early drafts, they sort of fall into two categories, don't they? They're either American or they're French.

So they're either Edison and then the development of Hollywood, or they're Georges Méliès and then the tradition of French cinema, I suppose. But he doesn't quite fit, I suppose, because he's moving between Britain, France, and Britain and America. What an interesting story. It is an interesting story, isn't it? Those clips I've just looked at, actually, they are on YouTube, Tom. I mean, they're very short, aren't they? They're short, but they are ghostly, as you say. Yeah. It does seem like you're looking at kind of ghosts. Yes. And in

a sense, you're looking at the ghosts of Le Prince's career and fame. Yeah. Very moving, I think. Tom, I think you should, you're a great campaigner. You should start a new campaign for recognition in Leeds. He's commemorated in Leeds. I think there's a plaque. Right. So the garden where the first film was shot got demolished. But I think there's a plaque on the spot commemorating it.

Le Prince is remembered in Leeds. And I think there was a film that was made about him a few years ago. So he is remembered. But I think, you know, this series is all about resurrecting people who perhaps wouldn't have their own podcast under normal circumstances. So I commend Louis LaPrance. To you, Dominic, and to the listeners. Tom, you've persuaded me. I think some sort of biopic with him and Edison as the villain.

Yes. Edison played by, who would play Edison, Tom? Oh, that cannibal guy. Hannibal? The guy who got cancelled for being a cannibal. Oh, my word. Armie Hammer. Armie Hammer.

Armie Hammer as Thomas Edison. You're offering him a way back. Yes. And who's playing Louis Le Prince? Louis Le Prince? I don't know. Someone who can do both Yorkshire and French. Yes.

Sean Bean. Brilliant. Perfect. Well, sean sean bean always dies sean bean he does always die sean bean would do it superbly uh he's had a lot of interactions with the french and sharp so he can draw on that draw on that when he does his accent uh brilliant uh so that you can file that alongside the blind beak our um great unmade netflix series among the many moving pictures that we ought to have made tom oh and we may yet when we diversify out of the podcast business exactly right so uh thank you very much for listening um merci a toi tom for that fantastic story how do you do and uh we shall see you all next time.

Bye-bye. Au revoir. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.