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October 1888 - Louis and the Bridge
The life and work of Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince are both shrouded in mysteries that are now unlikely to be fully solved. Born in Metz on 28th August 1842, Le Prince received lessons in the art of photography as a child from the pioneer photographer Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre, who was a close friend of Le Prince’s father. Educated at colleges in Bourges and Paris, Le Prince went on to study chemistry and physics at Leipzig university. In 1866, Le Prince met John Whitley – who would one day go on to organise the first exhibitions at Earls Court, and build Le Touquet in France – who invited him to Leeds where he started working for the Whitleys, who owned a brass foundry in Hunslet.
In 1869, he married Lizzie Whitley, the boss’s daughter and, after a spell during which Le Prince served in the Franco-Prussian war, the young couple returned to Leeds, where they started a school of applied art in Park Square. By 1881, the Le Prince’s were living in New York and, intrigued by the work of Edweard Muybridge, Le Prince began experimenting with motion picture machinery.
On the 2nd November 1886, Le Prince applied for an American patent for a 16 lens camera he had built in the workshop of the New York Institute for the Deaf, where Lizzie worked as an art teacher. Le Prince built the camera with 16 lenses because a minimum of 16 frames per second were needed to achieve realistic moving pictures. The lenses were arranged in two panels of eight with two rolls of negative behind each panel, and images were captured on a glass plate by triggering the multiple lenses.
In 1887, le Prince returned to Leeds, England, where he first met his wife, and built a second camera with only one lens and fitted with a roll of sensitised paper instead of a glass plate. After carrying out further refinements, le Prince finally made the first ever cinematographic motion pictures in October 1888. The subjects of this first motion picture were the family of his wife, captured in their garden. The films exist today only as copies of the original paper negatives. A further film was shot of Leeds Bridge, taken from a window of Hick Brothers Ironmongers at the south-east corner of the bridge.
Originally shown only for his family’s amusement, le Prince had, by April 1890, demonstrated his films on a self-made projector to M. Ferdinand Mobisson, the secretary of the National Opera in Paris. He must, by then, have been close to exhibiting to a larger audience - a full five years before the Lumiere Brothers made their first demonstrations. [ADD]
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