Roundhay Garden Scene 1888

What is on it

Four people walk about a garden. An old man turns, and his coat-tails fly out. An old woman steps backwards as she turns round, as if she were dancing. Then it stops. Twenty frames survive, and as they are usually shown they last about two seconds.

They are a family, or nearly. The old couple are Joseph and Sarah Whitley, and the garden is theirs: Oakwood Grange, at Roundhay, a suburb of Leeds. The young man is their grandson, Adolphe Le Prince. The young woman is a friend of the family, whom the museum's record calls Harriet Hartley and other accounts Annie. Behind the camera is Adolphe's father, Louis Le Prince, the Whitleys' son-in-law. The Science Museum Group, which keeps what is left of the film, explains the odd choreography: they are "walking in a circle to keep within the area framed by le Prince's camera".

The same day, by the museum's account, he filmed Adolphe playing an accordion on the steps of the house. Later that month he filmed the traffic crossing Leeds Bridge.

The man and his camera

Le Prince was a Frenchman from Metz who had studied chemistry and painting. He came to Leeds in 1866 to join the Whitleys' firm of brass founders, married their daughter Lizzie in 1869, and with her ran a school of applied art. In 1881 he went to the United States, where he managed a group of painters of huge circular panoramas and began to experiment with pictures that moved.

His first camera had sixteen lenses. He built it in Paris in 1887 and took several sets of pictures with it. Sixteen lenses see a scene from sixteen slightly different places, so the result would have jumped about on a screen.

Back in Leeds, in a rented workshop at 160 Woodhouse Lane, he and two local craftsmen built something simpler. By the summer of 1888 there were two cameras with a single lens each. He called them "receivers". They took unperforated paper film a little over two inches wide, wound from one spool to another.

How it is dated

The day in the reference books is 14 October 1888. It comes from Adolphe Le Prince, who is in the picture, and the Science Museum Group repeats it. Guinness World Records says only early October. The historian Stephen Herbert has paper negatives exposed in the garden "apparently as early as the summer of 1888".

One date is not in doubt. Sarah Whitley died on 24 October 1888, and she is in the film. Whatever the day, the camera was working before that month was out. Ten years later her death certificate was evidence in an American court.

What survives

Not the strip of paper that went through the camera: that is reported lost. What exists is a glass copy negative made at the Science Museum in London in the 1930s, with twenty frames that its record numbers 110 to 129. Le Prince's daughter Marie had given the museum his apparatus, and accounts differ on whether it copied the paper negative itself or paper prints that she supplied. The camera is on show at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.

How fast should it run? Adolphe said twelve frames a second, and Guinness says ten to twelve. Later analysis of the movement, which the 2015 documentary The First Film follows, puts it nearer seven. If that is right, the familiar two-second version is too quick, and the true length is nearly three seconds.

Could he show it? He built projectors, which he called "deliverers", and people close to him said afterwards that they had seen his pictures projected in the workshop. Herbert's summary is that these machines "did not succeed to Le Prince's satisfaction": paper is a poor thing to shine a light through. By 1889 he was probably trying celluloid.

The disappearance

In the summer of 1890 Le Prince packed up his machines for New York, where his wife had rented and done up a mansion to show them in. First he went to France. On 16 September his brother saw him onto the Paris train at Dijon. He did not arrive. Neither he nor his luggage was ever found, and in 1897 he was declared dead.

Every explanation has been tried: suicide over money troubles, murder within the family, a new life somewhere else. His widow suspected foul play by the rival camp in the patent wars, which meant Thomas Edison's. No evidence supports that, or any of the others. In 2003 a photograph of a drowned man of 1890 who looked like Le Prince was found in the Paris police archives; it has been objected that the body was too short.

The family fought on. In 1898 Adolphe gave evidence for the American Mutoscope Company, which Edison was suing as the sole inventor of the moving-picture camera. The court found for Edison, and the ruling was overturned a year later. In 1901 Adolphe was found dead on Fire Island, near New York: by his own hand according to some accounts, in suspicious circumstances according to others. He was not yet thirty.

Why it matters

It is the oldest film that survives, and the wording is careful. Photographs taken in quick succession are older. Eadweard Muybridge photographed a galloping horse with a row of cameras in 1878, and Le Prince's own sixteen-lens machine caught a man walking round a Paris street corner in 1887. The garden at Roundhay is different in kind: one camera, one lens, one strip of film moving through it, which is how films went on being made. The Science Museum Group calls it "the oldest surviving film in existence", and Guinness World Records lists it as the first. The researcher Irfan Shah says only that many people now consider these the first true films, and notes that much of the familiar story rests on articles written in the 1920s from the family's own account.

It led nowhere. Le Prince never showed his invention to a scientific society, a photographic society or the public, and after 1890 there was nobody to carry it on. The cinema that people paid for came from elsewhere: Edison's Kinetoscope, a peepshow, opened to customers in 1894, and the Lumière brothers projected films to a paying audience in Paris in 1895. The museum that keeps his camera states his claim soberly:

Though he lacked the financial backing and research facilities of Thomas Edison and the Lumière Brothers, the acknowledged pioneers of motion pictures, and did not live to exploit his invention commercially, Louis Le Prince came close to achieving a successful process of cinematography.

Science Museum Group, catalogue entry for Le Prince's single-lens camera

Leeds has not forgotten. A bronze tablet went up at the Woodhouse Lane workshop in 1930, and a blue plaque marks the building by Leeds Bridge that he filmed from. Oakwood Grange was pulled down in 1972. Its garden walls are still there.