Louis Le Prince

Louis Le Prince was a French-American artist and inventor who built an early motion-picture camera and has been credited as the father of cinematography. Born on 28 August 1841, he worked in Leeds, England, where in October 1888 he filmed short moving-picture sequences with a single-lens camera and Eastman's paper negative film. These include Roundhay Garden Scene and Accordion Player, which shows his son Adolphe playing the accordion, and in the following eighteen months he made Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge. His work appears to precede that of contemporaries such as Friese-Greene and Donisthorpe and came years before the Lumiere brothers and Dickson, who did the moving image work for Thomas Edison. Le Prince disappeared on 16 September 1890 and was declared dead in 1897; several theories about his fate have been put forward, but no conclusive evidence supports any of them. Because he vanished, his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema. His son Adolphe appeared as a defence witness in Edison's 1898 patent case against the American Mutoscope Company.