Light and Shadow

On the eve of presenting the first motion picture camera to the world, seven years before the Lumière brothers, its inventor, Augustin Le Prince, stepped onto a train from Dijon to Paris and vanished without a trace.

Concerned that Edison’s spies were monitoring his experiments, Le Prince left his family in New York to work in relative privacy in England. In 1888, he filmed the world’s first moving picture in a garden in Leeds.

Two years later, after his experiments had strained both his finances and his marriage, Le Prince was finally ready to present his invention to some of Gilded Age New York’s most illustrious patrons, securing his place in film history. First, however, he had to persuade his brother to settle their late mother’s estate and relieve him of the crushing debts he had not dared reveal to his family. But just before sailing to New York, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon and was never seen again.

His family and friends made concerted efforts to find him, but their searches yielded nothing. Had Le Prince chosen to disappear in order to conceal secrets he was hiding, or was something more sinister at work?