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The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures

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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...

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.