by Irfan Shah

Created on: October 19, 2009   Last Updated: October 20, 2009

Louis Le Prince - Forgotten Inventor of the Motion Picture

The originator of the motion picture wasn't Thomas Edison, it wasn't Auguste or Louis Lumire, it was a Frenchman who lived and worked in England named Louis Le Prince and the story of his invention is more mysterious and infinitely sadder than you might have imagined.

In the city of Leeds, on Bridge End, the road that crosses over the River Aire, there's a blue plaque commemorating the film that was shot from that spot one hundred and twenty years ago. The plaque itself is positioned inauspiciously above the window of a property letting agency.

It reads:

Louis Aim August Le Prince came to Leeds in 1866 where he experimented in cinematography. In 1888 he patented a one-lens camera with which he filmed Leeds Bridge from this British waterways building. These were probably the world's first successful moving pictures.

Louis Le Prince was born in Metz, France in 1841. His father was a friend of Louis Daguerre inventor of the Daguerreotype - an early form of the photograph - and the young Le Prince spent time in Daguerre's studio helping him with his work.

At Leipzeig University Le Prince met John Whitley a student from Leeds, England. A friendship developed and Whitley later invited Le Prince to Leeds where, after working as a photographer and painter, he joined John's family in Whitley Partners of Hunslet, an engineering firm specialising in the design and production of brass valves and other components.

Louis married into the family and progressed from being a designer in the business to manager of valve production.

His life was not devoid of adventure - he enlisted in the French army during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and was involved in the Siege of Paris for example.

Le Prince was interested in the possibility of creating/capturing moving images. His interest in photography presumably inspired in part by his time with Daguerre was motivated further by the work of Eadweard Muybridge who was producing the first of his iconic images of movement, for example using twenty four separate cameras to capture a trotting horse.

However, Le Prince was not the only person fascinated by the idea of a single camera that captured movement. Edison and the Lumire brothers Auguste and Louis for example were just a few years away from producing their cameras and tienne-Jules Marey had created a camera that could take twelve photos in a second. Note: when playing images back, the human eye will generally perceive

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