The Mysterious disappearance of Louis Le Prince.

     Who was Louis Le Prince you ask? Well That is a great question and I am dying to tell you. He is just a footnote in history when in actuality he should be one of the most famous inventors ever known. After I tell you a little bit about him and his mysterious disappearance I will tell you one theory that will shock you but has a very high chance of being real. I have been away from my blog for a while dealing with real life issues, unfortunately when you are an adult real life comes knocking and as much as you don’t want to answer it you know you have to. Well stuff is still going on and I am slightly more distracted than usual but I had to do something to keep myself sane and grounded so I figured I’d get back to the blog. I will apologize in advance if I seem less than normal, I will get back to my abnormal self soon enough. Until then I hope you enjoy what I can share with you while dealing with real life. I split coffee all over my new keyboard last week and I’m using it trying to get all the keys loose and the w is sticking big time! So if I am missing a w in some ords, I’m sorry. (I did that one on purpose!)

Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince as born on 28 August 1841 in Metz, France. His father was a major in the French Army but it was his father’s friend who would have the most dramatic impact on his life and the future of photography. Le Prince was introduced to his father’s friend, Louis Daguerre, when he was a young child. Mr. Daguerre just happened to be one of the most influential photographers of the day, he also was the creator of  Daguerrotype Photography . Young Le Prince was fascinated by not only Daguerre but in photography itself so Mr. Daguerre spent time in the studio with Le Prince and taught him the ways of photography and the chemistry necessary to produce the prints. Long story short, he went on to study the arts and Chemistry at Lepzig university and never lost his passion for photography. You really should look him up on Wikipedia, his story is fascinating. I am going to fast forward a bit so we can get to the mystery. While working in the US he developed an unusual camera that utilized 16 lenses for the purpose of creating motion pictures. The motion picture was still just a concept and many inventors and photographers were attempting to be the first to patent the technology capable of doing so.

Le Prince's first effort at the moving picture came in the form of a 16-lens camera which rotated between the lenses to take a sequence of frames. He anticipated that for the brain to see a continuous image as opposed to the familiar flick-book effect, there needed to be 16 frames per second. Le Prince's first solution to this problem was very much an Occam's Razor kind of approach; if you would like sixteen pictures, use sixteen lenses. However, this produced an obvious problem: each lens was if only marginally in a different position from its predecessor, and thus, the resulting frames when put in a row and projected would create a very wobbly motion picture. Nevertheless, this was Le Prince's first patent, which interestingly covered cameras and projectors with as many as 16 lenses.

 In May 1887, however, Le Prince and his family returned to Leeds where his innovation took a large and important step for both him and cinematography. He built a new camera with the purpose of capturing motion pictures, but this one was single-lens, but that was only the tip of the iceberg of his innovation. He had come to the conclusion that it wasn't as straightforward as having the shutter open and close sixteen times per second, as the exposure wouldn't be correct and the film would be moving, which would create blurred results. Le Prince created a sort of clamp that would stop the film every time the shutter "opened," but this could cause the film to snap as it makes its way through the process. This meant that there had to be an additional alteration where the film only moved when the shutter was "closed." The solution is the reason for "opened" and "closed" being in quotations when discussing this single-lens camera. The camera's shutter was actually nothing more than a hole in a rotating disc — a very intelligent approach.

Unfortunately, capturing the motion picture was only half the problem. The next minefield to be navigated was projecting the results as the intended moving image. With flexible celluloid not being readily available quite yet, the only real option was for the images to be put on to glass slides and to have them move in front of a lens. The slides would be on a sort of conveyor belt that would rotate them in order in front of the lens and then back around again so that a continuous projection could be achieved. As you might have spotted, the difficulties with doing this are nearly a perfect mirror of capturing the images in the first place: namely, the slides had to move at the same speed they were captured and without the slides moving within the device too much. Nevertheless, Le Prince had made a monumental breakthrough. The first motion picture captured (and it is believed to be the first ever) was from Leeds Bridge in 1888. (The Mysterious disappearance of Louis Le Prince, Father of Cinematography , Robert K. Baggs).

So eventually by 1890 he had figured it out and had produced the first motion picture in 1888 and in September of 1890 after boarding a train In Dijon that was headed to Paris, Le Prince vanished. When the train arrived in Paris three days later, Le Prince and all of his belongings were nowhere to be found! The train had made no stops and no one remembered any emergency stops. So here did Louis Le Prince go?  Le Prince’s family immediately suspected foul play from one of his competitors, while authorities claimed it must have been a well thought out suicide. Why would the man who spent his entire life trying to and then eventually inventing motion pictures kill himself, especially just a year after accomplishing his dreams?  Others say he disappeared to run from substantial debt but again, he had just invented something that he and everyone knew was going to change the world. Money wouldn’t have been a worry in his future. In 2003, research of Paris police archives yielded a drowning victim in 1890 said to resemble Le Prince but it was never confirmed.  One researcher claims his brother Albert killed him for either money or out of jealousy but these claims were widely ignored as it didn’t fit the profile of Albert of the Le Prince family. What happened to the father modern cinematography then? Well here comes the bombshell conspiracy that makes this worth looking into.

 No good conspiracy theory is complete without an assassination strand to it, but of all the theories, this is the one with the most motive. In 1889, Le Prince was about to patent his new projector as well as exhibiting his new motion picture in New York. The race to achieve this had, for all intents and purpose, been won by Louis, and patenting his inventions would secure his legacy in cinematography. This prompted the Le Prince family's suspicions of Thomas Edison over a patent know as Equity 6928. The result of who was awarded this patent was the person who would have invented the moving picture camera, and it was of great importance. The American Mutoscope Company initiated litigation against Edison in a war of the patents over Equity 6928, hoping to have Le Prince properly credited for the creation of the motion picture camera and called upon Adolphe Le Prince, Louis's eldest son to be a witness. Adolphe had worked closely with his father on a number of his experiments, and the hope was that the court hearing his many achievements would gain Le Prince the recognition he so deserved. Unfortunately, the initial case was awarded in the favor of Edison, and just two years later, any hope of an appeal was shattered when Adolphe Le Prince was found dead on Fire Island near New York while out hunting ducks. . (The Mysterious disappearance of Louis Le Prince, Father of Cinematography , Robert K. Baggs).

Wow! There you have it in black and white. I strongly believe that Thomas Edison not only had something to do with Louis Le Prince’s disappearance but also of Adolphe’s hunting accident. Edison was known for his ruthlessness when it came to acquiring patents for “his” inventions. He was in league with the elite families of the time and most definitely had the means and the motives to get rid of Louis and Adolphe. He had the best lawyers and hitmen money could buy. He spent a living stealing Nikola Tesla’s work, so he would have no problem taking out an all but unknown French inventor. Thomas Edison is placed among the greatest inventors in history books and every school kid must spend some time learning about the “Genius of Menlo Park”, when in reality he was a ruthless, cunning, evil manipulator only interested in one kind of power, the power of money and celebrity.

In conclusion, I am almost positive that Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor ever, according to main stream historians, was directly responsible for the deaths of both Le Prince men. He had Louis killed for his equipment and patent and he had Adolphe killed for knowing too much. The more and more I read about how awful Edison was the more I come to realize how we are brainwashed, indoctrinated or coerced into believing what those in charge want us to believe. Think about this, the guy that your history teachers have always taught was an outstanding citizen and inventor was nothing more than an evil, greedy man with nothing but his own interests at heart and an unlimited supply of cash and influence. In my world we call those people Super-Villains. So yes, the Mr. Edison who electrocuted an elephant just to make Tesla’s alternating current look bad (which it wasn’t and still is better than Edison’s ) or had no qualms about ripping off any other inventor that got in his way or beat him to an idea would have absolutely been capable of the crimes I mentioned above. This story is a sad reminder of how the corruption and ruthlessness of greedy businessmen has been influencing and changing our history to bend to their nefarious ways for centuries and worse yet I don’t see it changing any time soon. How many others have been killed for their knowledge? Many. Those are for a different time and different posts. Until then stay safe, stay vigilant and always question everything.

PEACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 above image: Louis le Prince's 16 lens motion picture camera.