The Lumière brothers' Cinematograph is without a doubt a discovery that turned the world upside down. Of course, this invention is not "one-time", it was preceded by several technologies of photography, "zootrope" by William Horner, "kinetographer" by Edison …
But there was one device, forgotten, as if deleted from the history of the development of cinema. We are talking about the apparatus "LPCCP MkII", the inventor of Louis Leprince, who not only made the first film in history, but also became the first film director. Roundhay Garden Scene, have you heard of this movie?
Born in 1841 in France, Louis was surrounded by image preservation technology from childhood. A friend of his father, Louis Daguerre, was one of the creators of the technology of the first photographs - daguerreotype. He instilled in the future "father of cinema" an interest in physics, chemistry and photography. Leprince grew up, studied well, built a brilliant career … and continued to search for a solution for "moving pictures".
In 1888 he was able to develop a technology for applying a photographic emulsion to a paper tape and achieved the movement of this tape in the apparatus. After developing several different cameras, Louis designs the LPCCP MkII, the same single-lens, single-reel camera that filmed the first ever motion picture on 1888-14-11: Roundhay Garden Scene, 2.11 seconds long (played at a dozen frames per second).
The Kinoapparat LPCCP MkII used a roll of photographic paper fifty-four mm wide. The paper tape moved intermittently, fading for a short time in the frame window. During its movement, the lens was covered with a disc shutter. Leprince tried to patent "LPCCP MkII" in Europe, but the patent was obtained on November 16, 1889 in America, which was progressive at the time.
The European patent guaranteed the best protection, and the inventor returns to Europe, hoping to obtain it in the UK. These plans were not destined to come true: on the sixteenth of September 1989, Louis boarded the Paris-Dijon train, intending to visit his brother, and disappeared: no one saw Leprince getting off or getting off at train stops. No body or baggage was found.
"Traffic on the Leeds Bridge" - 2.76 s, playback frequency 23.5 fps - Leprince's second film:
Promotional video:
This mystery, which remained unsolved, gave birth to several versions of what happened: Leprinse did not get on the train, fearing the exposure of his fraud (as if he had not filmed any movie at all!); his brother killed him for money; and, the most popular: Leprince became a victim of the "war of patents" (or they said directly - he was "removed" by Thomas Edison). In 2003, in the Paris police archives, there was a photo (from 1890) of a drowned man, similar to Leprince, but nothing more.
Following the announcement of death, Leprince's patents were revoked and the machines confiscated. The films that Louis made a year and a half before Edison's "Kinetograf" and seven years before Lumière's "Cinematograph" have never been shown to the general public. Only in 1989, the British Museum in Bradford, from paper negatives, were reconstructed in "digital" two films of Louis Leprince. The third, "Accordionist", where Louis's son plays, exists only in the form of individual shots and amateur editing.
