Page 155 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Louis le Prince: Roundhay Gardens motion picture experiments 1888
Louis Le Prince: Roundhay Garden Scene 1888. Louis le Prince was an inventor, learning photography under Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre - the inventor of the Daguerrerotype (1839). In Leeds he invented a 16-lens camera that made sequential images on photographic paper - several years before Edison and Lumiere perfected their different motion-picture systems, but Le Prince’s system was a cul de sac - the projected images were poorly registered and the motion too jerky.
“The first inventor to actually demonstrate his motion-picture system - several years before the Lumieres and Edison - was the Frenchman Le Prince, living in Yorkshire, England at the time. What an adventure in the fusion of technology and aesthetics! That this was a clumsy (16 lens. paper- substrate) system with considerable registration problems - resulting in a shaky projected image - is less important than its claim of precedence.”
“But it is the technical clues which suggest most strongly that the specific images we now associate with Le Prince’s stuttering and secretive projection of films in Leeds are not those he showed his workshop audience, but instead are what he had left on the ‘cutting room’ floor: Le Prince, working before celluloid became readily available, used rolls of sensitised paper in his camera. Using such a material in a projector, however, proved infeasible as it would cockle and burn in the heat of the lights. Le Prince therefore used a specific form of sensitised paper, which allowed him to peel off the exposed, emulsified images and mount them individually onto small glass plates, strong enough to withstand a projector’s heat. Images which had successfully been screened, therefore, would be mounted on glass”.
(from http://www.openculture.com/2020/05/the-earliest-known-motion-picture-1888s-roundhay-garden-scene-restored-with- artificial-intelligence.html)