FATHER OF FILMS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXV, Issue 19008, 16 October 1931, Page 3

FATHER OF FILMS.

MAN WHO RACED EDISON. A memorial to her father, Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince, the first man in the world to give an exhibition of moving pictures, has been unveiled in Leeds by Miss Le Prince, an art teacher in New York, who crossed the Atlantic specially to perform this ceremony, says the “Ch!stian Science Monitor.” The memorial is a bronze tablet, 2ft by 2ft 6in, decorated at the comers with the French fleur-de-lys and *he white rose of Yorkshire, and has the f olio wing inscription:— “Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince had a workship on this site where he made a one-lens camera and with it photogi-aphed animated pictures. Some were taken in Leeds Bridge in 1888. He also made a projecting machine and thus initiated the art of cinematography. He was assisted by his son and by Joseph Whitley, James Wm. Longley, Frederick Mason, of Leeds. This tablet was placed here by public subscription.” As one climbs the somewhat rickety ladder that leads into the loft which Le Prince used as his workroom at 160, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, it is rather difficult to realise that in this bare and tiny wooden room was born an invention which has carried American and British culture into the remotest coners of the globe—one which provides entertainment to more than 200,000,000 people every week and which gives employment to innumerable men and women at salaries ranging from £1 a day to £IOO,OOO a year. Yet this loft, as the public sees it to-day, is the veritable starting-point of the gigantic motion-picture industry. A representative of the “Christian Science Monitor” was informed by Frederic Mason, who assisted Le Prince in his experiments and cut the films which the inventor used, that the workshop had changed little, if at all, in appearance during the last 40 years. Le Prince was bom at Metz in 1842, and studied physics and chemisty at Leipzig University. His 20 years’ connection with England was due to his marriage to a Leeds girl whom he first met when she was an art student in Paris. Settling in England, Le Prince and his wife founded a school of applied Art in Leeds, some of the photographic, ceramic, and enamel productions of which will be exhibited in the National Collection at South Kensington. Le Prince spent five years in the United States, but it was an Englishman, Edward Muybridge, whose experiments turned his attention to animated photography. The great French artist, Meissonier, was criticised for his representation of horses racing, and he employed Muybridge to justify the accuracy of his canvas by means of pictures c-f horses in motion taken with about two dozen separate cameras. Le Prince’s thoughts, once turned in the direction of moving pictures, soon bore fruit. On November 2, 1886, he secured an American' paent for a camera for taking animated photographs, and in 1888 in the garden of his brother-in-law at Roundhay, Leeds, he photographed moving pictures at the rate of 12 per second. Early in 1889, still before Edison’s famous exhibition of the kinetoscope at West Orange, N.J., in October of that year, Le Prince successfully experimented with celluoid films, rendered suitable for his camera by Frederic Mason, whose name is recorded on the memorial tablet. Le Prince also foreshadowed the methods of colouring motion pictures which are now employed, and would doubtless have carried on his work still further but for his mysterious disappearance in 1890. He boarded the Paris train at Dijon on September 16, 1890, and was not seen or heard of again.

After that the development of motion pictures went on perforce without him. The work of Edison, Eastman, Robert W. Paul, Louis Lumiere, Leon Gaumont, and Charles Pathe removed outstanding difficulties, and the first organised exhibition of moving pictures became possible at .he Regent street Polytechnic, London or September 20, 1896. In 1903 Edwin S. Porter made “The Great Trail Robbery,” the first complete full-reel film, and two years later the motion picture industry formally entered :he public entertainment world with the opening of its first theatre a “nicklelodeon,” at Pittsburth, Pennsylvania.