The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures [Mass Market Paperback]

Christopher Rawlence (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

French inventor Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince vanished while on a train journey from Dijon to Paris in 1890; before his disappearance--he was then presumed dead--he had been on the brink of going public with his one-lens camera and projector. British filmmaker Rawlence here cites evidence left by his widow in her memoirs that Thomas Edison was linked to Le Prince's death. This absorbing, technically and legally overloaded whodunit jumps back and forth between past and present, including suspenseful accounts of the author's research and interviews with Le Prince's descendants on several continents. Rawlence discusses the cut-throat politics of the infant film industry and shady U.S. Patent Office dealings, along with what he considers Edison's dubious business practices. No smoking gun is decisively uncovered, however, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions about Le Prince's fate. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Industrial piracy has been around for as long as there have been people with good, patentable ideas and others unscrupulous enough to steal them. This book deals with one such plausible case involving no less a famous personality in the history of American technology than Thomas Edison, who ultimately received the patent for inventing the motion picture. Curiously enough, Edison himself is quoted in the book as having said that "everyone steals in industry and commerce . . . I have stolen a lot myself." Admittedly, there are a number of versions as to who really invented the motion picture. This fast-paced investigative report examines the travails of Augustin Le Prince who was also working on developing cinematography and who died under mysterious circumstances prior to Edison's patent. Of interest to film buffs, this book is recommended for undergraduate and public libraries.
- Sarojini Balachandran, Auburn Univ. Lib., Ala.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140159738
• ISBN-13: 978-0140159738
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,008,407 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Missing Reel, June 20, 2000

By 

Brian J. Kenyon (Northern, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures (Hardcover)

Interesting to consider that Thomas A. Edison could have been so consumed with the need to succeed that he may have had industrial espionage agents steal the prototype of and plans for the first practical movie projector from its inventor, Augustin La Prince, as the author suggests...

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No smoking gun, but something smells suspicious, September 11, 2008

By 

Rose Keefe "author" (Canada) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures (Mass Market Paperback)

Louis Aime Augustin LePrince was probably the first inventor to capture moving images on film. A couple of short scenes that he filmed in 1888- `The Roundhay Garden Scene' and `The Leeds Bridge' have survived and can be watched on YouTube. But when LePrince mysteriously disappeared from a Paris-bound train in September 1890, just as he was on the verge of going public with his one-lens camera and accompanying projector, the fame and fortune that would been his went instead to Thomas Edison.

Incredibly, LePrince's family believed that agents of Edison either kidnapped or killed the French inventor to prevent his apparatus from hindering public demand for Edison's Kinetoscope. There is evidence that Augustin LePrince was in serious financial trouble after years of sinking funds into his experiments, and was facing possible bankruptcy, which had him in a despondent state of mind. In 2003 a researcher found in the Paris police archives an 1890 photo of a drowning victim that resembles the missing inventor.

In `The Missing Reel' Christopher Rawlence probes the underside of the early movie industry. While the public thrilled at the sight of boxing cats and sneezing men, the inventors were driving themselves into the ground financially, sabotaging each other's work, and endlessly litigating over who created a particular apparatus first.

The author's interest in LePrince began when he bought a house in Leeds where the inventor had conducted his motion picture experiments. Additional research turned up LePrince relatives in America, who had custody of a memoir left by Augustin's widow, Lizzie. She always maintained that her husband had been killed by those acting for Thomas Edison. When her oldest son, Adolphe, who appeared in the surviving LePrince films and testified against Edison in an 1899 court battle, was shot to death in 1902, she saw the probable suicide as retribution for the earlier testimony.

I found that the book was at times heavily laden with legal and technical jargon pertaining to patent law and camera construction, but overall, `The Missing Reel' triumphs as a well-composed biography of Augustin LePrince and an unsettling whodunit. Rawlence advocates the suicide theory to explain the inventor's disappearance, but presents Mrs. LePrince's suspicion of Thomas Edison without being dismissive. There's no smoking gun here, but you definitely catch a whiff of something suspicious.