The Vanishing of the Inventor of Cinema

Louis Le Prince filmed the world's first motion picture in a Yorkshire garden on 14 October 1888, two years before Edison, seven before the Lumières. He held the American patent. He had booked the Morris-Jumel Mansion in upper Manhattan for the public demonstration that would have crowned him, indisputably, the inventor of cinema.

Three weeks before the demonstration, he got on a train and stopped existing.

He was six foot four. He had enormous mutton chops. He was carrying a suitcase of patent papers and demonstration materials, which is to say the entire prehistory of the movies in one piece of luggage. His brother Albert watched him board the Dijon-to-Paris express on 16 September 1890 and waved him off the platform. The train arrived in Paris on schedule. Le Prince did not.

Neither did the suitcase. Neither did the ticket stub. No porter remembered him. No conductor remembered him. A six-foot-four mutton-chopped Frenchman with a trunk full of cinema, and not one person between Dijon and Paris could swear they had seen him sit down.

A century later, a researcher in the Paris Prefecture archives pulled a morgue photograph of a drowned man from the files. The face was his. The body was inches too short.

The man who invented the moving image declined to be seen.