Louis Le Prince
1842 - 1890 The City of Leeds could have been the film capital of the world if it wasn�t for the mysterious disappearance of Louis Le Prince. The first motion pictures were taken in Leeds by this ingenious Frenchman seven years before the Lumiere Brothers. Louis Aim� Augustin Le Prince was born in Metz, in 1842. The son of a French army officer, he would often visit the studio of his dad�s friend, Louis Daguerre, one of the pioneers of photography. Though a skilled artist, Le Prince went to Germany to study physics and chemistry and then found work as a photographer and painter. He came to Leeds in 1866 after meeting John Whitley, an engineer. Louis worked for Whitleys as a designer for a few years and married Whitley�s sister, Elizabeth, in 1869. Together they opened the School of Applied Art in Park Square. It was the same year that Edweard Muybridge published his famous pictures of a galloping horse and it got Louis thinking. It was in Leeds that he carried out his first experiments on moving pictures. Roget (the same one who devised a famous thesaurus) had first shown that images would merge together, and so look like continuous motion, if they could be shown fast enough. To fool the brain into seeing a continuous image, Le Prince needed a camera that would take at least 16 pictures every second. In 1888 he patented a system which allowed him to do just that. Strangely, his patent covered cameras and projectors with as many as 16 lenses. Rather sensibly, Le Prince took his first moving pictures with a single lens camera. It was at the British Waterways building on Leeds Bridge that in October 1888 was Hicks the Ironmongers and Le Prince came here to film the busiest road in Leeds. He wanted to capture as much motion as possible in one shot. Louis realised that it�s not quite as simple as just letting the film rush past the lens and opening the shutter sixteen times a second. This would take blurred pictures because the film would actually be moving during the exposure. So he made a clamp to stop the film before the shutter opens to expose the image. But, to stop the film snapping when the clamp is on, he had to invent a weird cam that only advances the film intermittently. The shutter was a hole in a spinning disc. Simple, but clever. Of course, capturing the pictures on film is only half the problem. Le Prince�s main challenge was turning his collection of still images into motion pictures, by projecting them in quick succession onto a wall. Unfortunately flexible celluloid wasn�t invented until November 1888. So, he printed his pictures onto glass slides and arranged to drop them down a tube in front of a lens. The slides would be caught at the bottom in a slotted belt that would spiral its way up to the top to continue the projection. Needless to say, it wasn�t a great success. With flexible film, the machinery needed to project the images was essentially the same as the one used to capture them. The film needs to be transported at the same speed as it was in the camera, or the pictures will look speeded up, or slowed down. When the mechanism clamps the frame still for projection, it has to clamp it in exactly the same spot as the previous frame, or the stationary things in the picture, like the bridge, will move about. Le Prince was pretty excited by his results. Edison, Friese-Green and a host of other pioneers were racing to invent a successful motion picture system and Louis had cracked it. He decided to return to New York, where his wife and family had been for the last three years. His wife had prepared a theatre for the unveiling of his films to the world in their New York Mansion. Louis had his cameras and projectors boxed up and left Leeds. He had some family business to settle in France where on September 16 1890, he boarded the 2.42 to Paris at Dijon station. His brother Albert waved him goodbye. Louis Le Prince was never seen again. He and his bags never arrived at Paris and detectives and police were unable to find a trace. For years his wife and children suspected foul play, probably from one of Louis� many competitors. Seven years after his disappearance Edison and his team of ruthless lawyers dragged Le Prince�s name through the courts in a patent war that raged for a decade. Eventually, the American courts acknowledged Edison as the inventor of motion pictures and dismissed the validity of all of Le Prince�s work. |
