Who developed the first film process?
The first FILM (MOTION PICTURE) PROCESS was developed by the French-born inventor Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince, who began experimenting with moving photographic images at the Institute for the Deaf, Washington Heights, New York, where his wife was employed as a teacher of art. His daughter, Miss M. Le Prince, claims to have seen the dim outlines of moving figures projected on a whitewashed wall at the Institute in 1885.
Although the US patent in respect of an ‘Apparatus for producing Animated Pictures’ was granted on 10 January 1888, the part of the specification referring to cameras and projectors with a single lens was disallowed on the questionable grounds that it infringed Dumont’s British patent of 1861. In fact, this related only to an arrangement of glass plates to form the facets of a prismatic drum, and had nothing to do with the reproduction of moving images on a screen. As it stood, Le Prince’s US patent covered only a more complex 16-lens device. Consequently, many film historians have discounted his claim to have developed a practical single-lens cine camera despite the accumulation of evidence in his favour. The following is a summary of the points made by E. Kilburn Scott in an article published in the May 1931 issue of the Photographic Journal.
(a) Miss M. Le Prince stated that she had clear recollection of her father working with a single-lens camera-projector at the Institute for the Deaf between 1885 and 1887, when the family removed to Leeds, England. The individual frames of the films taken during this period were about 1-1- inch square.
(b) Le Prince’s British patent, issued on 16 November 1888, covered both a single-lens camera and a single-lens projector.
(c) In an affidavit sworn on 21 April 1931, Frederick Mason, a wood-worker of Leeds, declared that he had assisted in the construction of a single-lens camera in the summer of 1888.
(d) Two fragments of film taken with this camera survive, and afford the earliest existing evidence that Le Prince had succeeded in making motion pictures. The first was taken in the garden of Le Prince’s father-in-law, Mr Joseph Whitley, at Roundhay, Leeds and was labelled at a later date by the inventor’s son Adolphe: ‘Portion of a series taken early in October, 1888, by the second one-lens camera. Le Prince’s mother-in-law in this picture died October 24, 1888. Le Prince’s eldest son is also in the picture, as is his father-in-law. Taken from 10 to 12 a second. There was no trial of speed contemplated here’.
The second fragment, taken from the window of Hicks Bros, ironmongers, at the south-east corner of Leeds Bridge, is labelled: `Portion of a series taken by Le Prince with his second one-lens camera in October, 1888. A view of the moving traffic on Leeds Bridge, England, taken at 20 pictures a second in poor light. His eldest son was with him when he took the picture’.
(e) Commenting on the above film, Le Prince’s mechanic James W. Longley indicated that a projector had already been completed at this time.
Leeds Bridge—where the tram horses were seen moving over it and all the other traffic as if you were on the bridge yourself. I could even see the smoke coming out of a man’s pipe, who was lounging on the bridge. Mr Augustin Le Prince was ready for exhibiting the above mentioned machine in public. We had got machine perfect for delivering the pictures on the screen.
According to the testimony of Adolphe Le Prince there were two projectors built, one with three lenses in 1888-9 and a single-lens apparatus in 1889. The former is known from a diagram of Longley’s to have incorporated the use of a Maltese cross to secure intermittent picture shift.
The film used by Le Prince for the Roundhay and Leeds Bridge sequences was sensitized paper in rolls 2 in wide. In the autumn of 1889 he began using Eastman celluloid roll film, which had just been introduced into Britain. This provided a far more suitable support material and it seems likely that Le Prince was ready to start the commercial development of this motion-picture film process by the beginning of 1890. A new projector was built so that a demonstration could be given before M. Mobisson, the Secretary of the Paris Opera. On 16 September 1890 Le Prince boarded a train at Dijon bound for Paris with his apparatus and films. He never arrived. No trace of his body or his equipment was ever found and after exhaustive inquiries the police were able to offer no rational explanation of his disappearance. The mystery has never been solved.
At the same time as Le Prince was engaged on his experiments at Leeds, William Friese-Greene was conducting similar researches in London, but short lengths of his film that survive suggest that his camera was not capable of taking pictures at a speed sufficient to create an illusion of motion.
The first MOTION-PICTURE FILM PROCESS to be developed commercially is generally attributed to Thomas Alva Edison, the American electrical engineer, who filed a caveat with the US Patent Office on 17 October 1888 for an optical phonograph.