n the first half of the 1990s, an old photograph appeared in the archives of the Préfecture de Police de Paris.
It showed the body of an unidentified drowned person, which quickly sparked speculation: could this unfortunate man be the French inventor Louis Le Prince, who disappeared without a trace in 1889?
This could have been nothing more than a typical police case, except for one crucial detail: had it not been for his disappearance, Le Prince would have been considered the true inventor of the cinematograph, ahead of the Lumière brothers and Edison.
The case becomes even more intriguing if we think of the hypotheses that have arisen to explain the sudden disappearance of an inventor who was preparing to travel to the United States to present the machine with which he had recorded the first moving images.
This is where it gets morbidly interesting, as issues such as patent wars, financial problems and the subsequent death of his son after testifying against Edison in court come into play.
Louis Le Prince was born in the French city of Metz in 1841.
He was the son of a military officer decorated with the Legion of Honor, a friend of Daguerre, an artist considered the great precursor of photography for having invented the daguerreotype two years earlier, based on previous experiments by chemist and lithographer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who captured the first real image in 1826.
Daguerre, who received the same medal as Le Prince's father, had an atelier where he took on the young Louis as an apprentice, teaching him painting as well as chemistry and photography.
The master died in 1851 and, according to La Brujula Verde, the student had to continue his studies in Paris and Leipzig; in the latter, he graduated in Chemistry and, in 1861, traveled to Leeds, England, accepting the invitation of a fellow student whose father owned a foundry.
Eight years later, Le Prince married his friend's sister and business partner, Elizabeth, who was a specialist ceramist trained in Sèvres.
Together, Louis and Elizabeth - or Whitley Partners, as their partnership was called - opened an art school in 1871, the Leeds Technical School of Art, where they taught photographic techniques, which by then had become widespread, and used ceramics to print color images.
The quality of the Le Princes' photographic work, which was obviously very appealing, led them to receive commissions from Prime Minister William Gladstone and even Queen Victoria.
Jorge Álvarez
In 1881, Whitley Partners sent Le Prince as a representative to the United States, where they owned the rights to a new interior design process called Lincrusta, and where they decided to settle permanently.
Le Prince eventually left this job to become the manager of a company of French artists specializing in panoramas (360º images) of great historical battles, which they exhibited on tours throughout the country.
To improve these works, Le Prince began experimenting with the possibility of adding movement to the photographs used as backgrounds, to make everything look more realistic.
To do this, he designed and patented a special camera with 16 lenses, which, however, did not produce the desired result; it captured the movement from different angles, thus projecting a confused image.
Louis Le Prince needed funding, so he contacted the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison, but the help didn't materialize: he was advised to stay away from Edison, who was known for appropriating other people's inventions.
So it took him six years to make a second attempt, in a workshop he had opened with the help of his father-in-law. This time, he used only one lens and succeeded.
In 1888, he made what would be the first recording of authentic moving images, far beyond those of the kinetoscope.
The scene has the unofficial title of "Roundhay Garden Scene", because it is a brief scene showing one of his six children, Louis, his parents-in-law Joseph and Sarah (who curiously died a few days later), and a friend called Annie Hartley pretending to walk in a garden.
It should be noted that the recording was brief, lasting just two seconds. However, it is now part of history and its inventor, who had patented the device, was able to film more scenes. Filming, in fact, is the correct term: he used Kodak photographic film on a paper base at a speed of seven frames per second.
After "Roundhay Garden Scene", he recorded "Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge", which portrayed the traffic on the bridge, with pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages and the streetcar, "Man Walking Around a Corner" and "Accordion Player", with his son Adolphe playing the accordion.
Not satisfied with this achievement, he collaborated with a mechanic called James Longley to build a projector with three lenses that could project films onto a white cloth as a screen.
However, only family and friends had this privilege; Le Prince never made a public presentation because he always refused to do so until he was absolutely sure that his invention was working perfectly.
And when his wife finally had everything ready for a presentation in the United States, the enigmatic disappearance occurred.
He went to visit his family in Bourges, France, and on Friday, September 13, 1890, he took a train to Paris to meet his brother in Dijon, saying he would return to the French capital on Monday. But when they met him at the station, he wasn't on board.
The French police and Scotland Yard launched a search that turned up nothing: there was no trace of Le Prince or his luggage. No witnesses reported any suspicions and his body was never found.
This uncertainty has given rise to various theories, all based on the context of his life. For example, his brother's grandson told Georges Potonniée, author of the book "Histoire de la découverte de la photographie", that Le Prince was bankrupt, suggesting that he had committed suicide.
But that doesn't explain the strange circumstances or the disappearance of his luggage, especially since, as we have seen, his financial situation could have been about to change.
In 1967, Jean Mitry, film theorist and producer, proposed in his work "Histoire du cinéma" that if Le Prince's brother was the last person to see him alive, he should be the main suspect, especially as they had quarreled before separating - apparently over their mother's inheritance.
Another variant of this hypothesis is that Le Prince killed himself, not for money, but because of his homosexual orientation - a hypothesis suggested in 1966 by Jacques Deslandes in his book "Histoire comparée du cinéma".
11 years later, journalist and writer Léo Sauvage, who had already covered the case of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1965, added another twist to the story with a note given to him by Pierre Gras, director of the Dijon municipal library.
According to Sauvage, Le Prince didn't commit suicide, but disappeared, possibly through the Foreign Legion; he had military experience, having taken part in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-71, and in 1898 he secretly went to Chicago, at his family's request, to avoid his homosexuality being exposed. However, there is no proof of this.
One last possibility, mentioned by Christopher Rawlence in 1990, is related to a patent war, which he explained in his biography of Le Prince, "The Missing Reel", where he describes Elizabeth and Adolphe's suspicions of Thomas Edison - against whom the American Mutoscope Company filed a lawsuit, known as Equity 6928.
The company wanted to invalidate the patent registered by the American inventor, who had exploited an ambiguous wording in Le Prince's patent registered years earlier. To this end, it demanded the testimony of family members.
However, the case was decided against the plaintiffs and Edison, who is now known to have had no qualms about stealing other people's patents, won the case.
Rawlence, however, believed that Edison would not have gone so far as to commit murder, and that suicide was more likely.
To add to the intrigue of the case, Adolphe, who was devastated by the judge's decision, died in a hunting accident that quickly gave rise to more rumors.
Had Thomas Edison orchestrated Adolphe's death? Had he consciously stolen Le Prince's idea? Had Le Prince joined the Foreign Legion to disappear?
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of one of the pioneers of photography and cinema persists, and the only clue is a photograph lost in some archives that shows a corpse with some resemblance to Louis Le Prince. How ironic!
