The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures
Thomas Edison didn’t invent the movie camera, said Peter Tonguette in The Wall Street Journal, and some people will never be satisfied that he didn’t order the murder of the man who did. “Working with the rigor of a historian and the flair of a true-crime writer,” author Paul Fischer has now provided a new probe into the evidence that has made Edison a suspect, and though Fischer “milks the mystery for all it’s worth,” his book is “no mere scandal sheet.” Its hero is a littleknown Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, who vanished in 1890—two years after shooting the first motion picture and several months before Edison unveiled his Kinetograph and claimed it to be the first camera capable of this modern miracle. Whatever the cause of Le Prince’s disappearance, he proves to be a figure worth revisiting.
“The story of his life amounts not only to a captivating whodunit but also to a lens on the development of cinema itself,” said Nat Segnit in Harper’s. Le Prince was one of several individuals advancing photo technology at the time, including better-known figures such as Eadweard Muybridge and George Eastman. But it was Le Prince, a visionary and tinkerer, who left behind the first known movie: a two-second clip from 1888 that shows several family members gamboling about their yard in England. In late 1890, he was reportedly planning to travel to New York City to hold the first motion-picture screening when, according to a brother in Dijon, he boarded a train to Paris. The inventor was never seen again, and his wife, Lizzie, became convinced that Edison had had him eliminated.
“Fischer comes down in favor of another theory,” said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times (U.K.). Le Prince’s brother, apparently, had a motive for fratricide and told lies that obstructed any investigation. But while all but clearing Edison, Fischer “tells the bigger story well,” detailing how Edison muscled his way to a monopoly on the motion-picture business after rivals drove an era of invention that comes across here as “a veritable second Enlightenment, a time of extraordinary creativity.”
(Simon & Schuster, $29)