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And this gives a shorter story about his whole life.

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A new documentary aims to prove that Yorkshire was the birthplace of the movies. Tony Earnshaw explores the curious case of Louis Le Prince.

Seven long years ago Leeds-born David Wilkinson, a film producer and former actor, embarked on a quest to rewrite history and restore the reputation of a man who, for many, has been heralded as "the Father of Cinematography".

That man was Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, an ex-pat Frenchman living and working in Leeds who, in October 1888, shot the first motion pictures on paper film using a single-lens camera.

These fleeting sequences - known as Roundhay Garden Scene and Traffic on Leeds Bridge - have been accurately dated to the autumn of that year, thus crediting Le Prince as the first of the many Victorian pioneers to invent cinema. And he did it in Yorkshire.

Yet the full story of what happened when is shrouded in mystery and the truth marred by claim and counter-claims. Historians continue to debate the veracity of Le Prince's invention and around the same time, Thomas Edison in America and the Lumière brothers in France were also racing towards the finish line in what became a desperate sprint for glory.

In the end it was the Lumières who secured a vital patent in 1895. Edison was close behind. And Le Prince? What of the man who spent countless nights toiling over his process in a workshop on Woodhouse Lane in Leeds? Where does poor, forgotten Louis figure in this Machiavellian tale of dark intrigue and corporate skulduggery?

The answer is entwined with more than 120 years of despair, penury, accusations, paranoia and a lonely yearning for closure. For on September 16, 1890, in the spirit of the very best plot twists, after boarding a Paris-bound train in Dijon, Louis Le Prince vanished off the face off the earth.

Le Prince's English wife, Lizzie, suspected murder and believed agents acting for Thomas Edison had done away with her husband when he was on the brink of patenting his work in America.

Her claims were perhaps unsurprisingly embraced by son Adolphe and daughter Marie who battled for years for some semblance of official recognition. Adolphe, who featured in his father's embryonic films, died in a freak hunting accident. Again, murder was suspected. Again the finger of suspicion was pointed at the patent-gobbling Edison. But in December 1930 Marie enjoyed a belated tribute to her father and his discovery when a bronze memorial tablet was erected at 160 Woodhouse Lane, the site where his workshop had stood.

Among the people present that day was Frederick Mason, the woodworker who, as a young man, had assisted Le Prince with custom-made cabinets for his moving picture machines.

Next month it will be 125 years since Le Prince filmed his sequences in Leeds. For David Wilkinson, a former actor turned film distributor and producer, Le Prince's rehabilitation is overdue.

As a teenager Wilkinson, now 57, starred in a West End production of The Winslow Boy opposite Richard Todd. On film he was Stuart Sutcliffe in The Birth of the Beatles. As a producer he handled Sir Anthony Hopkins' directorial debut and distributed scores of modest British and Irish movies.

His latest project eclipses them all. Wilkinson has spent seven years building funding for a feature-length documentary, The First Film. Shooting began in the spring in Leeds before Wilkinson and his all-Yorkshire crew headed to Paris. More filming is earmarked for New York where Martin Scorsese may contribute his thoughts on this most contentious topic.

Wilkinson says his Yorkshire roots are fundamental in understanding his need to tell Le Prince's story. He is, he says, "on a mission" to prove Le Prince's right to be hailed as the inventor of cinematography.

He is open about the problems he has faced, both in securing backing from people within the film industry and an acceptance of Le Prince's position in cinema history.

"They don't believe it," says Wilkinson flatly. "But when I was first told this at Benton Park School in Rawdon in the late 1960s, I didn't believe it either. In the early 1980s I changed my mind and submitted it as an idea to Yorkshire Television, Channel 4 and the BBC. Nobody was interested. Over the years I found no-one in the British film industry believed this story. Only Mark Cousins and a few obscure film historians have written about Louis."

Which seems to suggest that the history books are right and Le Prince, regardless of the mystery of his tragic disappearing act, was not a winner but a loser.

"But those who recorded the facts got it wrong," claims Wilkinson. "Had Le Prince invented film in Paris or London or New York I can't help thinking that we would all know about this fact.

"There are American and British patents. A few frames of the film exist and are at the National Media Museum in Bradford. There is written testament. It's all there in black and white. We have had to dig to find it but it is there. His untimely death also dates the film to before Edison and the Lumières."

Wilkinson is reluctant to cast stones but nonetheless he is staggered at the lack of interest and support shown by the movers and shakers in Leeds. He claims to have written to all the city's politicians; only one MP responded.

"With the exception of Hilary Benn and Bernard Atha it tells me that all of them are not interested in this very important milestone in the history of Leeds. Luckily there are so many ordinary people in the city who support us and want the world to know that this city is the birthplace of the moving image.

"The Metropolitan University has bent over backwards to help us. I have to say I was shocked that the political representatives of Leeds would give me the cold shoulder on this. The film establishment in London is one thing but those in power in Leeds? It is a story that needs to go global."

One of the film's backers is Sir Robert Worcester, the former owner of Mori polls, "an American who wants this story out there," says Wilkinson. Another supporter is a former Lord Mayor of Leeds who wishes to remain anonymous.

"Other funders had to pull out for cash flow reasons. This leaves us problems in the finishing of the film.

"It's the hardest film I have ever raised money for because no-one believes us even though the facts are all there if you look hard enough. It is a really sad fact: it can be proved that moving pictures started in Britain. Not America. Not France."

Among Wilkinson's supporters is Liz Rymer, former director of Leeds International Film Festival and now head of cinema at Leeds Trinity University. She was part of the team that championed Le Prince and the centenary of his films in 1988 during the festival's debut. She appears in The First Film. "Louis Le Prince is of world importance with regard to the development of moving pictures and Leeds should be supremely proud of its links with its role in movie history. It is the true home of the world's greatest, most popular, and most enduring art form," she says.

David Wilkinson is buoyed by such sentiments. With a summer 2014 release date scheduled for his documentary he faces raising a further £50,000 to complete the project. Referencing Le Prince's travails and strange fate he calls it "a small obstacle" that will be overcome.

"I will prove this fact and get the history books rewritten," he says. "Louis deserves it."

To watch a video of Louis Le Prince's early footage go to yorkshirepost.co.uk/video
From silent movies to the the birth of 3D - The early years of film
The beginnings of film might by have been murky, but one thing was clear, by the early years of the 20th-century what started out as little more than a novelty was soon being touted as a large scale entertainment industry.

1906: The first full-length feature film The Story of the Kelly Gang, which runs to more than an hour, is screened in Melbourne.

1911: Winsor McCay, later dubbed the father of animation, films an adaptation of his cartoon strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. Hand-coloured frame by frame, the animation lasts only two minutes and is silent

1927: The Jazz Singer hits cinemas. Starring Al Jolson, the film is recognised as the first "talkie," even though the sound consisted mostly of music with only a couple hundred spoken words.

1928: Walt Disney's first animated cartoon is released and marks the start of the career of one of the most enduring and popular filmmakers.

1939: Having initially being rejected by many studios, Gone With the Wind shows the power of the blockbuster. The Civil War epic, starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, eclipses all previous box office records earning more than $200m.

1953: With fears the rise of television could dent the profits of the big studios, cinema hits back with the release of a number of 3D films, including House of Wax, The French Line and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

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Louis Le Prince: Time to honour cinema's forgotten pioneer

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A new documentary aims to prove that Yorkshire was the birthplace of the movies. Tony Earnshaw explores the curious case of Louis Le Prince. Seven long years ago Leeds-born David Wilkinson, a film producer and former actor, embarked on a quest to rewrite history and restore the reputation of a man who, for many, has been heralded as "the Father of Cinematography".

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It says how he may have disappeared and Louis's family did fight for the name but did not win and some more theories about what happened to him and not many people know his schools tell about thomas edison not louis le prince and how some people think thomas killed louis for the camera idea but not confirmed. So it answers all my questions.

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Vanished From a Train in 1890 – The Eerie Case of Louis le Prince

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It tells about the theories of how he may have disappeared and how people think happened to him.

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Louis Le Prince (1841-1890?) is not only one of the most undeservedly obscure people of the modern era, he is also at the center of one of the 19th century's most intriguing disappearances.

It is a bit of a shock to learn that Le Prince, not Thomas Edison, shot the first moving images on film. In October of 1888, Le Prince filmed two brief moving pictures, "Roundhay Garden Scene," and "Leeds Bridge," using a single-lens camera he had developed and George Eastman's paper film.

So, why has this man never gotten the acclaim he deserved? This is because, on September 16, 1890, he disappeared while traveling on a train from Dijon, France, to Paris. His luggage, stored in a separate compartment, were also never seen again. He vanished before he could stage a planned demonstration of his invention in New York that would have publicized his achievement. As a result, when competing inventors such as Edison and the Lumière brothers developed the ability to create similar films, they were the ones to receive the fame as motion picture pioneers.

Over the years, there have been many theories to explain Le Prince's disappearance. Many years later, his grand-nephew claimed he killed himself because of financial difficulties caused by many years of investing in his experiments. However, surely his pride in his recent inventions-ones that he knew would likely prove to be very profitable indeed-gave him a powerful motive to live. People have been known to commit suicide for no obvious reason, but this is still a very implausible theory.

An adaptation of this allegation was devised by film historian Jacques Deslandes. He proposed that Le Prince staged his own disappearance because he was nearly bankrupt. A journalist named Leo Sauvage also proposed Le Prince voluntarily vanished. He suggested (on no known factual grounds,) that the inventor was gay, which would had alienated him from his relatives. However, there is not a trace of evidence supporting the idea Le Prince willingly abandoned his life. By all accounts, he was a decent person and a loving husband and father, who had no motive to play such a cruel stunt on his family.

Another yarn has it that Le Prince was murdered for his share of an inheritance by his own brother, who was the last person known to see the inventor alive. This speculation is also generally disregarded due to a complete lack of proof.

And now we turn to the most startling theory: Was Le Prince killed over his landmark invention-and possibly at the instigation of his greatest rival, Thomas Edison, a wealthy man who was as powerful as he was unscrupulous?

Certainly, the timing of Le Prince's disappearance is suspicious. If he had succeeded with his plans for displaying his films in public, it would have been an obvious blow to any rivals in that field. Months after Le Prince vanished, Edison patented his own film equipment-instruments that bore a decided resemblance to his missing competitor's work-and he thereupon insisted that he, and no one else, deserved credit for inventing the motion-picture camera. There is another connection between Edison and Le Prince that, in light of the latter's disappearance, has a sinister aspect: The law partners of Clarence Seward and William Guthrie were prominent patent attorneys. They had been friends of Le Prince, and were among the very few people who knew all the details of his experiments with motion pictures. By the time Le Prince vanished, their firm was working for Thomas Edison. (There is evidence that, even before Le Prince was somehow erased from the scene, there was what can only be described as a widespread legal conspiracy to deny him credit for his invention.) When, after Le Prince's disappearance, his family sought legal help, lawyers usually wound up either ignoring or sabotaging them.

There were other signs that something very strange indeed was going on. Around the time Le Prince vanished, his wife Lizzie, who was innocently awaiting his arrival at the home they were renting in New York, received a visit from a stranger who gave his name as "Mr. Rose." He was very anxious to see her husband. When he was told Le Prince was not there, he left in evident agitation. Sometime later, he returned disguised as a milkman-a façade Lizzie easily saw through-and again asked about the inventor. When Lizzie indicated she recognized him, and threatened to summon the police, he fled. No one has any idea who this man was, and why he was so anxious to see Le Prince.

A further complication for the family was the fact that they were unable to take legal action defending the priority of Le Prince's cameras against those of his rivals until he was officially declared dead-which under American law, took seven years. During all that time, Le Prince's relatives were forced to sit on the sidelines while Edison and others gained credit for inventions they knew he had pioneered. In that sense, Le Prince's disappearance was far more useful to his rivals than his immediate, unquestioned death would have been.

For what it's worth, Le Prince's family, particularly his wife, believed he had been deliberately killed, and that Edison was probably responsible. And the family had not seen the last of their tragedies. In 1898, Le Prince's son Adolphe, who had been his father's assistant, testified in a lawsuit the American Mutoscope Company was fighting with Edison. The company wished to use proof of Le Prince's discoveries to discredit Edison's claims to have invented the motion picture camera. Mutoscope lost the case, ending the Le Prince family's hopes for Louis gaining proper recognition for his work. (They eventually won on appeal, but Le Prince's achievements remained largely overlooked.) Eerily, shortly after the initial negative verdict was announced, Adolphe was found shot dead while out duck hunting. Was it suicide? An accident? Or was Lizzie Le Prince correct in her belief that Adolphe was murdered because he had too much knowledge about his father's work for the likes of certain important men?

Christopher Rawlence's book "The Missing Reel" is the most in-depth study to date of Le Prince and his puzzling fate. The author does not endorse the "Edison-did-it" theory, (the very idea clearly unnerved him,) but he does not entirely discount it, either. Rawlence admitted that his research taught him that Edison was "ruthlessly corrupt...resorting to lying, intimidation and dubious business practices when it came to asserting his power." Rawlence's own book proves that, if anything, he was under-emphasizing both Edison's power and his corruption.

A nice example of the methods used by Edison's team involved an obscure inventor named Thomas Armat. He had created a motion picture projector that was superior to Edison's flailing kinetoscope. In 1896, Raff & Gammon's Kinetoscope Company, approached this potential rival with a deal. "No matter how good a machine should be invented by another," they wrote Armat, "and no matter how satisfactory or superior the results might be, yet we find that the greatest majority of parties who desire to invest in such have been waiting for the Edison machine and would never be satisfied with anything else...While Mr. Edison has no desire to pose as inventor of the machine, we think we can arrange with him for the use of his name to such an extent as may be necessary for the best results."

In other words, Edison-already a powerful brand name-would "temporarily" present Armat's camera to the world, and once "the respective rewards" had been reaped, the true inventor would be given his deserved credit.

Armat trustingly agreed, selling Edison his patent. And the Edison empire well and truly stabbed him in the back. They publicly presented the camera, which they named "the vitascope," as "Mr. Edison's latest," and "Thomas A. Edison's Latest Marvel." And, until the Edison Company eventually abandoned the vitascope for their newly-developed Projectoscope, an Edison invention it publicly remained. Similarly ugly stories--most famously, his nasty propaganda war against Nikola Tesla and alternating currents--abound in Edison's career. The "great American hero" was, in short, a double-barreled bastard.

As I said above, whatever Le Prince's financial status may have been, it hard to believe he would take his own life right when his years of effort and sacrifice to achieve what had become his life's work were on the verge of paying off. An accidental death also seems highly unlikely.

That leaves us with foul play. The theory that the inventor was killed in order to get him out of the way may sound like something from a bad novel, but it cannot be ignored. The birth of the film industry was just as viciously competitive and conscienceless as Hollywood is today, full of spies, conspiracy, and dirty dealings. A stray murder here and there in order to accomplish what certain types of people see as the "greater good" of furthering their own interests is hardly uncommon. If Le Prince was slain, Edison is the most obvious suspect, but he is hardly the only possible one. The truth about Le Prince's end will likely never be known, but his wife was not necessarily deluded in her belief that her husband and son had lost their lives because of their pioneering scientific work.

The only bright spot in this story is that in recent years, Le Prince has received a certain amount of the credit he deserves. Among film historians, he, and not Edison, is known as the "Father of cinematography."

[Note: There is a strange footnote to the Le Prince mystery: In 2003, a researcher found in the Paris police archives a photo of an 1890 drowning victim. Some believe this unidentified corpse was the missing Louis Le Prince. If that guess is correct, it still would fail to explain what had happened to him-or his luggage.]

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The Sinister Disappearance of a Film Pioneer

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Louis Le Prince (1841-1890?) is not only one of the most undeservedly obscure people of the modern era, he is also at the center of one of the 19th century's most intriguing disappearances. It is a bit of a shock to learn that Le Prince, not Thomas Edison, shot the first moving images on film.

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If shows how he was the first to make the moving pictures camera but the sad disappearance

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Many have speculated on the fate of Le Prince, who went missing in 1890, but undisputed is the fact that it was he, not Edison, who created the very first moving pictures.

One of the great mysteries of cinema history doesn't take place on the big screen, but rather, somewhat sensationally, occurs off-camera at the very beginning of the story of the moving image.

The tale of Louis Le Prince, the man regarded as the father of cinematography, ends in rather peculiar circumstances which have yet to be resolved, but for movie lovers everywhere, it's his achievements in the last few years of his life which have granted him a place in the history books.

While Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers dominated the headlines for inventing the equipment which made the moving image possible, Louis Le Prince preceded them by a number of years with a working model which captured motion outside his home in Roundhay, Leeds.

However, his achievements were not widely recognised, because not long before a scheduled public performance of his technology, Le Prince went missing with no clues as to his whereabouts.

Many people have since speculated on his fate (with theories ranging from suicide to murder by rival cinematographers), but the one undisputed fact is that Le Prince was the first past the post with his pioneering work in the medium which would ultimately become film.

Le Prince was born in Metz, France in 1841 and had the fortune during his youth of regularly visiting a studio belonging to a friend of his father-the photographic inventor Jacques Daguerre.

After studying chemistry and physics at University, Le Prince moved to England at the invitation of John Whitley, before establishing the Leeds Technical School of Art where he specialised in tinting and firing of photographic images.

During the 1880s, however, Le Prince became fascinated with the early cinematic technologies which were being developed. In 1886 he created a 16-lens camera and applied for an American patent on 2nd November of the same year, receiving this at the beginning of 1888; on 16th November 1888, he received a British patent for his invention.

The Le Prince Single-lens Cine Camera, currently on display in our Animation Gallery, and believed to be the equipment used to film the famous Roundhay Garden and Leeds Bridge scenes, proved to be one of the most ground-breaking inventions of early cinema.

While the contraption may appear primitive by today's standards, utilising paper-backed stripping film, evidence that the equipment was successful in projecting moving images means that Le Prince's movies pre-date those of Edison and the Lumieres by over half a decade.

In a cruel twist of fate, however, his disappearance meant that the world's first movie maker never got the chance to accept the plaudits that came with such an achievement during his lifetime, but he's since been posthumously rewarded his rightful status as the Father of Cinematography.

The first successful moving images in the world were recorded in Yorkshire, and it's fitting that the equipment used to create them now lives here in Bradford, the world's first UNESCO City of Film.

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The mystery of Louis Le Prince, the father of cinematography

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Many have speculated on the fate of Le Prince, who went missing in 1890, but undisputed is the fact that it was he, not Edison, who created the very first moving pictures. One of the great mysteries of cinema history doesn't take place on the big screen, but rather, somewhat sensationally, occurs off-camera at the very beginning of the story of the moving image.