When it comes to motion pictures, the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison have gone down in history for their cinematic inventions.
But there's a lesser-known figure, a man described as the forgotten father of cinema, who should have been more in focus.
In 1888, the French inventor Louis Le Prince made a short film on a camera he invented.
"His films, by an odd quirk of fate, could be dated very precisely to have been made seven years before that of the Lumière brothers," author and film producer Paul Fischer tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
But Le Prince never took his rightful place in film history because he mysteriously vanished before he could screen that film in New York in 1890 as he planned.
"[Le Prince's] machine still exists in a museum; he held the patents. [He] shot these films, got this paperwork approved, and then disappeared," Fischer says.
Curiously, a few months after Le Prince disappeared, Thomas Edison announced that he'd invented a motion picture camera in 1891.
"One of the great twists in the story is that Le Prince's family, his widow and his children became convinced that Edison had just stolen Louis Le Prince's ideas," he says.
Historically Edison has been accused of stealing other people's ideas via bureaucracy, Fischer says.
Worse, Le Prince's widow Lizzie thought that Edison may have been involved somehow in her husband's disappearance.
'The spark'
Louis Le Prince was born in 1841 in Metz, in eastern France.
He grew up in a middle-class military family and studied the arts, optics and chemistry at university.
"He was very much like one of those people at the end of the Victorian era who were trying to combine artistic pursuits with technological development," Fischer says.
In 1869, he married artist Elizabeth Whitley, and they moved to England, where he worked at her family's iron forge.
"That's where he kind of discovered this whole world of patents, and this idea that you can invent something that would change your fortune," he says.
According to his wife, there were two things that sparked Le Prince's fascination with creating a motion picture camera.
He began experimenting with photography in his shed. While holding two frames in his hand, one slipped, and for a moment, it created the appearance of a moving figure.
The second part of his idea was sparked after his father-in-law gifted his grandchildren with a magic lantern, which was an early form of a projector.
After this, the invention became Le Prince's obsession. And he was willing to put his family's entire fortune and reputation on the line to see it come to life.
"At times, when you read [his] correspondence, it feels like his sort of sanity is on the line; that this spark, this vision, had taken over his life," Fischer says.
Finally, Le Prince's determination paid off. He created a standing camera that ran at 12 frames per second.
"[Le Prince's] son has some writing where he suggests they were aiming for 14, 15, 16 [frames per second]. But 12 is the most they could do," Fischer says.
And it was on this camera that Le Prince captured the famous Roundhay Garden Scene.
Shot by Le Prince in October 1888, this short film is the oldest surviving motion picture in the world.
"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.
"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."
Around the same time, George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak, began marketing flexible roll film. So Le Prince finally had a way to effectively capture and project his film.
Before that, he had to project his film on glass plates or paper, which were at risk of catching fire or breaking.
"So there are letters, and correspondence and diaries, where [Le Prince] and his collaborators, and Joseph, his father-in-law, say 'He's done it, he's figured it out'," Fischer says.
Eager 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. And he told everyone that he was going to move to New York.
A disappearance
Before leaving, Le Prince returned to France to visit his brother and sort out a family inheritance.
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.
"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.
Because of the geography and lack of technology, it was weeks before anybody realised that he'd gone missing.
Then, not long after his disappearance, New York newspapers published an article declaring that Thomas Edison had invented a motion picture camera.
"As Elizabeth is reading it, [she realises] it sounds exactly like what Louis was working on — and was about to make a fortune from," Fischer says.
Despite Elizabeth's suspicions, Fischer doubts that Edison was responsible for Le Prince's disappearance.
He says Edison would often wipe out his competitors by filing caveats instead, an action that stopped other inventors from bringing their ideas to fruition.
A caveat is a legal notice that prevents other people who have an interest in something, be it property or land, from temporarily pursuing it.
Being a wealthy man, Edison filed hundreds of caveats, laying claim to huge areas of technology he'd never even thought about, let alone work out, Fischer adds.
"So if somebody actually filed a patent, to invent something, then the patent office would send out a cable saying someone has activated your caveat number. And Edison would then have a year and the information from the patent somebody else had filed to create his own copy," he explains.
But that didn't stop Le Prince's son, who assisted in many of his father's experiments, from taking Edison to court to annul his claims of inventing the motion picture camera.
The family wanted Le Prince's hard work to be acknowledged for what it was worth, but the lawsuit was unsuccessful.
Without a trace
Over time, other theories about Le Prince's disappearance and suspected murder have emerged.
There were suggestions that someone close to Le Prince, such as his brother-in-law, could have killed him over a quarrel or a need for money, Fischer says.
There's also the possibility that he was killed or kidnapped in Paris, which was rife with street crime at the time.
"It was common for people to pull bodies out of the River Seine," he says.
"[Another] theory is that Le Prince didn't disappear, but made himself disappear, that his work was going very badly, and he was out of money. And so he decided, either by dying by suicide or by running away and starting a new life, to make himself disappear.
"And finally, there's a possibility that another competitor, who wasn't Edison, may have been involved in doing what Le Prince's family had accused Edison of doing, which was eliminating the rival."
Yet Le Prince's disappearance remains one of the greatest unsolved Victorian mysteries.
And unfortunately, his family weren't able to cast the spotlight on his legacy until it was too late.
"One fascinating thing about his disappearance is at the time in law, if somebody went missing, if a body wasn't found, and he couldn't be declared dead, then all of their property, including intellectual property was frozen for seven years, or until a body was found," Fischer says.
"So in Le Prince's case, for seven years his family couldn't exploit his patents, and couldn't present this machine and couldn't license it and couldn't make money from it."
Le Prince was officially declared dead on September 16, 1897.
In the intervening years, Thomas Edison released the Kinetograph — a motion picture camera — and the Lumière brothers invented the Cinématographe. They all made a fortune.
Fischer says: "[So] in a weird, ironic twist of fate, by the time Lizzie is able to sign the deed and take over Le Prince's property, the race has been run."
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