Now, a long time ago in a far-off land called France, there was a man named Louis Le Prince. Le Prince was a magic man. He created a machine that could capture images on film and then make them magically reappear and move across a screen. Some people were amazed, some were jealous, and some couldn’t have cared less. One day Le Prince packed up his magic machine, kissed his wife and children goodbye, and boarded a train. He was embarking on a journey to show off his machine in New York, the city that never sleeps. But when the train arrived in Paris, Le Prince became part of another magic trick: both him and his machine magically disappeared and were never heard from again.Now isn’t that a fun story boys and girls? And it’s true.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, I’m about to lay a conspiracy theory on you. I’ll start off by saying I’m not a conspiracy buff. Other than the fact that our government knows about UFO’s, the Loch Ness monster is responsible for 9/11, and Oswald didn’t act alone, I am a firm believer that conspiracy theories are a bunch of pig plop.
So let’s go back and look at our children’s story a little more closely.
In 1888, Louis Le Prince invented a device that was both a motion picture camera and projector. He was granted a US patent on this device, which consisted of 16 lenses (I have no idea why he needed so many). He eventually refined his machine down to one lens, but was not allowed a US patent. Hmmmm… Le Prince decided to fight back by taking a PR trip, hitting Paris, London, and New York. He’d get the word out, let the world know that he’d created the first motion picture. So in September of 1890, he said au revoir to the family and boarded his train. Then it was bye-bye Louis.
Now, the most commonly accepted theory regarding the disappearance of Le Prince, and the one I believe, is as follows: that p*ick Edision had him whacked! See, Thomas Edison was working on creating the same thing around the same time. He was even able to get an American patent on a single lens camera the same year that Le Prince disappeared. Isn’t that a coincidence? To further arouse suspicion, when the Le Prince family was involved in a lawsuit against Edison to annul his claims of inventing the moving picture camera, Adolphe Le Prince was found dead a couple days before he was set to testify. It was ruled a suicide. Very convenient.
It was well known that “Honest Tommy” (my own affectionate nickname) would take the credit for several inventions that he didn’t create. And he was a bit of a tyrant when it came to his business dealings. Edison could easily afford to pay a couple guys to make sure LePrince slept with the fishes.
Edison couldn’t come right out with projected films, could he? Nope. Much like the government doling out alien technology, he had to do it slowly to make it look like his own invention. Edison came out first with what was called the Kinetoscope, the video iPod of its day. That is, if the video iPod stood three feet high, weighed a couple hundred pounds, and you had to look through a viewer while turning a crank to watch a ballerina dance on a loop for 30 seconds at a time.
Of course “Honest Tommy” wasn’t the only kid on the block working on moving pictures. The first projected showing of a movie would not happen until 1895 (seven years after Le Prince) by a couple of other French guys, the Lumiere brothers. I guess they had all the documentation to back up their work, so they’ve never been implicated into the disappearance of Le Prince. Edison would quickly roll out his version of a projector and the film industry was born.
As for Le Prince, he has basically become a footnote of film lore and fun story to tell around a geeky campfire. Would there be a very different industry today if he hadn’t disappeared? It’s always hard to say. Le Prince’s place in cinema history is rarely acknowledged. Then again, this could just be another one of those crazy conspiracies cooked up by the Oculus Dai to keep us from discovering
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