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16/9/1890 - Louis Takes a Bow
In September 1890, Louis Le Prince, who appeared to be taking giant strides towards presenting the first projected images to the public, bowed out of the history of cinema in mysterious fashion.
By April 1890, Le Prince had demonstrated his films on a self-made projector to M. Ferdinand Mobisson, the secretary of the National Opera in Paris, and must have been close to exhibiting to a larger audience. This, remember, occurred a full five years before the Lumiere Brothers made their first public demonstrations.
We can only speculate on how much further Le Prince might have taken his groundbreaking experiments with motion pictures. On 16th September 1890, he boarded a train in Dijon bound for Paris after visiting his brother to collect his share of an inheritance. He had with him an improved version of his projector and papers referring to his experiments. While Le Prince was seen boarding the train, he - and his possessions - were never seen again and, despite exhaustive investigations by both French and British police, the mystery was never solved. Some theorists speculate that Thomas Edison had Le Prince murdered, but a more recent (and plausible) theory is that Le Prince chose to disappear because of mounting financial problems. [ADD]
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