Le Prince was never able to perform a planned public demonstration of his camera in the US because he mysteriously vanished; he was last known to be boarding a train on 16 September 1890.

His education went on to include the study of painting in Paris and post-graduate chemistry at Leipzig University,[15] which provided him with the academic knowledge he was to utilise in the future.

When in Paris during their honeymoon, Le Prince repeatedly visited a magic show, fascinated by an illusion with moving transparent figures, presumably a dancing skeleton projection at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin with multiple reflections of mirrors focused on one point or a variation of Pepper's Ghost.

[18] Le Prince and his wife started a school of applied art, the Leeds Technical School of Art,[19] and became well renowned for their work in fixing coloured photographs on to metal and pottery, leading to them being commissioned for portraits of Queen Victoria and the long-serving Prime Minister William Gladstone produced in this way; these were included alongside other mementos of the time in a time capsule—manufactured by Whitley Partners of Hunslet—which was placed in the foundations of Cleopatra's Needle on the embankment of the River Thames.

[citation needed] In 1881, Le Prince went to the United States[15] as an agent for Lincrusta Walton, staying in the country along with his family once his contract had ended.

[4] He became the manager for a small group of French artists who produced large panoramas, usually of famous battles, that were exhibited in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

[15][16] During this time he began experiments relating to the production of 'moving' photographs, designing a camera that utilised sixteen lenses,[16] which was the first invention he patented.

Although the camera was capable of 'capturing' motion, it wasn't a complete success because each lens photographed the subject from a slightly different viewpoint and thus the image would have jumped about, if he had been able to project it (which is unknown).

The film was shot from Hicks the Ironmongers, now the British Waterways building on the south east side of the bridge[1] and marked with a commemorative Blue plaque.

In September 1890, Le Prince was preparing for a trip to the United States, supposedly to publicly premiere his work and join his wife and children.

[22] Rawlence claims that at the time that he vanished, Le Prince was about to patent his 1889 projector in the UK and then leave Europe for his scheduled New York official exhibition.

In 1898, Le Prince's elder son Adolphe, who had assisted his father in many of his experiments, was called as a witness for the American Mutoscope Company in their litigation with Edison [Equity 6928].

By citing Le Prince's achievements, Mutoscope hoped to annul Edison's subsequent claims to have invented the moving-picture camera.

[23] In 1966, Jacques Deslandes proposed a theory in Histoire comparée du cinéma (The Comparative History of Cinema), claiming that Le Prince voluntarily disappeared due to financial reasons and "familial conveniences".

Journalist Léo Sauvage quotes a note shown to him by Pierre Gras, director of the Dijon municipal library, in 1977, that claimed Le Prince died in Chicago in 1898, having moved there at the family's request because he was homosexual; but he rejects that assertion.

[26] A photograph of a drowned man pulled from the Seine in 1890, strongly resembling Le Prince, was discovered in 2003 during research in the Paris police archives.

[8] On 10 January 1888, Le Prince was granted an American patent on a 16-lens device that he claimed could serve as both motion picture camera (which he termed "the receiver or photo-camera") and a projector (which he called "the deliverer or stereopticon").

[30] Those close to Le Prince have testified to him projecting his first films in his workshop as tests, but they were never presented to anyone outside his immediate circle of family and associates and the nature of the projector is unknown.

On 12 December 1930, the Lord Mayor of Leeds unveiled a bronze memorial tablet at 160 Woodhouse Lane, Le Prince's former workshop.

In 1992, the Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) directed Talking Head, an avant-garde feature film paying tribute to the cinematography history's tragic ending figures such as George Eastman, Georges Méliès and Louis Le Prince who is credited as "the true inventor of eiga", 映画, Japanese for "motion picture film".

Remaining surviving production consists of two scenes in the garden at Oakwood Grange (his wife's family home, in Roundhay) and another of Leeds Bridge.

In May 1931, photographic plates were produced by workers of the Science Museum from paper print copies provided by Marie Le Prince.

Roundhay Garden was alleged by the Le Prince family to have been shot at 12 frame/s and Leeds Bridge at 20 frame/s, although this is not borne out by the NMPFT versions (see below) or motion analysis, with both films being estimated at a consistent seven frames a second.

This appears to have been shot onto a single glass plate (which has since broken), rather than the twin strips of Eastman paper film envisaged in his patent.

Le Prince sent 8 images of his mechanic running (which may be from this sequence) to his wife in New York City in a letter dated 18 August 1887,[35] which suggests it represented a significant camera test.