The trial’s catalyst was the disappearance of Le Prince, who, two years after shooting the garden scene, had boarded a train in France – and was never seen or heard of again. Somehow, somewhere between Dijon and Paris, he had vanished.
Le Prince’s final fate remained unknown. His wife, Lizzie, however, had a theory. Louis, she said, had been kidnapped and killed – and the man who ordered the murder was Edison.
Le Prince and Lizzie had met in 1866 in Paris, where she was studying sculpture. They made a beautiful but conspicuous pair: the Yorkshire lass, fingertips often stained with splatters of paint, and the tall Alsatian intellectual in his suit and beard à la mode. In 1869, the newly-weds settled in Lizzie’s home town of Leeds, where Le Prince began experimenting with compositing – blending together two or more photographs into a more artful whole.
One day, the glass plate and the paper print beneath slipped in his hands, and to his tired eyes, the person affixed on both layers suddenly “gave a distinct impression of movement”. For a moment, the image he held had come to life.
Shortly after, at a birthday party for one of his children, Le Prince took out a magic lantern and slides of Chinese fireworks. As the images danced on the wall, he turned to Lizzie and said: “Moving photographs will be the next invention.”
They moved to New York, a foreign city that enthralled Le Prince just as Leeds had. “Untried fields held fascination for him,” Lizzie wrote.
They ended up teaching art to deaf-mute children. “Only those who have tried to teach these things to the deaf,” Lizzie remembered, “can realise the intimate knowledge of detail, tact, assiduity, and patience required.”
They helped their students stage a pantomime at the unofficial 1884 World’s Fair in New Orleans. Distinguished visitors crowded in to see their display. One of them may have been America’s most famous sufferer of hearing loss: Thomas Edison.
Edison’s name was all over the New Orleans fair, which had been wired with 5,000 of Edison Electric’s lamps. The man himself arrived in New Orleans two months into the fair’s run. He was by then 38, seven months a widower, and pursuing a 19-year-old girl.
Very hard of hearing since childhood, Edison never wore a hearing aid and preferred to see his condition as “a blessing in disguise”. He would not pay $10,000 to be “cured” of his deafness, he told a journal, “because it prevents him hearing many things which he does not wish to hear, such as cars, carts, licensed venders [sic] in the morning, bores, telephone calls, political speeches and cats”.
“I don’t care so much about making my fortune,” Edison said on another occasion, “as I do for getting ahead of the other fellows.” In truth, his original ideas were rare, and seldom came to fruition: over the years these included concrete furniture and housewares, books printed on nickel, and an electric ray with which to carve ice. He predicted metals would be transmutable by the 21st century, making gold “as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel”, ushering in a world of “golden taxicabs” and ocean liners “of solid gold from stem to stern”.
Instead, Edison worked best when he identified existing innovations and improved on them. He collected technical publications in several languages and read every issue of Scientific American, scouring the pages for patent announcements or letters to the editor in which naive amateurs gave away their innovations for free.
His incandescent bulb had been inspired by William Arcand’s imperfect “mineral oil” lamp, which Edison had seen at work in 1878 and which he combined with the globe bulb and carbon filament invented by the Englishman Joseph Swan, announced in Scientific American in October 1879. Likewise, though Edison liked to think of himself as the inventor of the telephone, he’d invented only the carbon microphone, which improved on Alexander Graham Bell’s original. Edison was smart enough to know that Bell’s was one invention he couldn’t altogether erase publicly: instead, he frequently repeated the allegation that Bell’s device was inaudible, unreliable and basically useless.
Edison was, undoubtedly, the finest inventor of his era, but increasingly his genius appeared to disserve him: combined with wealth, fame and expectation, it generated a pressure for him to create. The Wizard’s audience, like all wonder-seekers, could be kept happy only with new tricks. And by the late 1880s, Edison needed one desperately.
Suddenly, great minds everywhere seemed to be talking about photography’s possible uses. In 1887, Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion appeared, which broke down sequences of motion – a nude man swinging a racquet at a tennis ball; a lion; a monkey; a racehorse – into 20 or so photographs.
Thankfully for Le Prince, no one had yet successfully explored his avenue: that of using instantaneous photography to recreate live movement, as opposed to stopping movement to dissect it. Muybridge had placed multiple cameras in a line, stretching dozens of yards, and had to erase his backgrounds into grids and white blanks to fake a single point of view. Le Prince tried to unite the pictures into a single point of view. To put it another way, Muybridge captured movement in a lab. Le Prince had stumbled across the first stone on a path to seizing life whenever and wherever it lived.
Le Prince drafted a list of possible subjects suitable for filming: “B. BILL, BARNUM, SURF” as well as “HUDSON RIVER BOATS” and “BDWAY FROM OFFICE, CENTRAL PARK FASHION AND BOATING, BASEBALL, GIRL THRO’ PAPER DISKS ON TIGHTROPE.”
