Lizzie was certain Thomas Edison had something to do with her husband's disappearance. Everyone knew he stole credit that wasn't his and Louis had vanished eight months before Edison had suddenly unveiled "his" Kinotoscope, so similar to Louis's invention. Adolphe, too, was certain his father had been "eliminated." It was said, after all, that Edison sometimes worked with Allan Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, whose squads infiltrated unions and violently broke up labot movements, whose armed watchmen could be relied on to do whatever it took to protect the financial interests of their clients. Paul Fischer, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
Fischer makes a good case for Louis Le Prince as the inventor of the motion picture; his patents in America and Europe in 1890 were the first from a number of inventors working on this same idea. But Le Prince disappeared in 1890 and no trace of him was ever found, therefore Louis's wife Lizzie could not invoke the patents until 1897, when Louis was declared officially dead and Thomas Edison had succeeded in manipulating his own patents in order to declare himself the inventor of motion pictures and to sue anyone who exhibited films as infringements on his invention (which was actually developed by Edison's employee William K. Dickson). Le Prince's first film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was produced in 1888 but shown only to friends and not publicly shown.
Fischer's book is partly a defense of Le Prince as inventor of motion pictures -- including a great deal of technical detail -- but is also a history of others who were working towards the same end, including those we may have heard of, Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers, as well as those we may not have heard of, William Friese-Greene and Etienne-Jules Marey. Fischer's research is both deep and wide, from the France of Le Prince's birth to the time he spent in America and, mostly, in England, including the names of all his helpers and assistants.
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