Welcome to the final part of Irfan Shah’s series about Louis Le Prince, which gives a rare insight into the details of interchange between an inventor and the US Patent Office, with its strict codes relating to ‘novelty’ and other aspects of invention protection. SH.
Prior Art
The US Patent Office’s response to Le Prince’s amended application was swift. On 2 April 1887, just two days after the date of the latest amendments, William Burke wrote back informing Le Prince that Claims 1, 2 and 5 of his apparatus were considered untenable “in view of the state of the Art as shown by the English Patents, No. 1,588, A.D. 1865, and No. 1,457, A.D. 1861, and the U.S. Patent of Muybridge No. 279,878, June 19, 1883 (Camera Attachments).”
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The USPO was now objecting to three of Le Prince’s original claims: one which claimed for the method of taking images at regular intervals and reproducing the sequence “giving to the eye the impression of the real object in motion;” one claim for a receiver with a series of lenses working in combination with a series of shutters and the method of operating them successively and continuously; and one broader final claim for the overall method of reproducing images in quick succession.
Perhaps a fuller understanding of what Le Prince was actually trying to achieve with his design had actually led to the Patent Office to a fuller understanding of what prior art already existed. Where Le Prince’s claim had referred to “reproducing” images of motion, might the Patent Office have initially understood this to mean a reproduction of the image and only now fully appreciated that it referred to reproduction of movement? Either way, it may be instructive to look at the work cited as ‘prior art’, not just to understand the uncertain progress of Le Prince’s patent application, but to appreciate how motion pictures emerged from overlapping waves of sympathetic ideas and technologies.
Du Mont
The British patent 1,457 A.D. 1861, referred to as prior art, was by Belgian inventor Henri Désiré du Mont. Working before exposure times were sufficiently fast for his designs to be completely successful at realistic motion picture capture, du Mont nevertheless anticipated a time when they might be, and produced a “photographic device suitable for reproduction of the successive stages of movement” accordingly.
Du Mont described three methods his invention might deploy. In the first, exposures were to be taken on glass plates or – a detail usually missed in ‘pre-cinema’ histories – “cloth prepared with collodion.” The photo-sensitised cloth would be “placed on a circumference of a cylindrical or prismatic drum or box.” As the drum is turned inside the camera casing (or “obscure chamber”) the cloth feeds past a focal point to be exposed (a slightly different approach was used for glass plates).
A second method was to place the plates on a long frame (or “sash”) and move them intermittently past the focal plane of the lens either horizontally or vertically. The third method was to queue the plates up inside a long box which then moved the plates forwards towards the lens. A plate reaching the front of the ‘queue’ would be exposed and then pushed forwards so that it fell down into a box moving in the opposite direction. This method, the only one to be illustrated in the British provisional patent, was virtually identical to the design later proposed by Leeds-born Wordsworth Donisthorpe in 1876 (see Part 1 of this series of posts).
The intermittent movement, exposure of successive stages of movement and the superficial similarity between Le Prince’s design and du Mont’s vertically moving sash in particular, may have prompted the Patent Office to cite du Mont’s design as prior art.
Du Hauron
British Patent 1,588 of 1865, usually referred to in biographies of Le Prince as being by du Mont, is more likely to be that of the Frenchman Louis Ducos du Hauron. This was a British equivalent of an original French patent from 1864, and described two machines. One, a camera obscura, contained rows of lenses – ten rows of four and ten rows of fifteen, making a total of 190. The shutter was a length of paper or fabric with small circular apertures that wound past the lenses (the apertures acting as open shutters), exposing successive images onto a large sensitised collodion plate. The second machine used essentially the same principle, but incorporated two chambers holding photographic plates: when one plate had been fully exposed it could be replaced while the plate in the other chamber was exposed. This idea seemed to be a genuine forerunner of Le Prince’s alternating rolls of film.
Du Hauron also described the projection of these images, using lights behind the lenses that were arranged at slight angles in order to converge towards a screen resulting in the projected images playing on a single point. Du Hauron’s awareness of what could be achieved with his apparatus went above and beyond the conventional capturing and playback of continuous motion. As he described it himself, his machines would be able:
- To condense into a few moments a scene which in reality took place over a considerable period of time. Examples: the growth of trees and plants and all the phenomena of vegetation. The construction of a building or even a complete town, the succession of the ages of the same individual, the growth of a beard or a head of hair etc.
- Equally, to slow down those transformations whose speed sometimes makes them impossible to see.
- To reverse the order in which a scene or phenomenon takes place; that is to say to start at the end and finish at the beginning. N.B.: in a great many cases, one may, instead of photographs, utilise carefully executed drawings. One may also combine photography and drawing, by drawing an animated subject which changes from one picture to the next onto an unchanging photographic background.
It’s difficult to be sure exactly what Du Huron envisaged by that last arrangement, but he clearly had some interesting animation technique in mind.
Muybridge
The 1883 Eadweard Muybridge patent cited was his ‘Method of and Apparatus for Photographing Changing or Moving Objects’, a system of cameras (plural) connected to an electrical circuit which triggered their shutters successively (or, if required, “more or less of them together”). The whole would be powered by a motor of some description and it is interesting to note that the electrical triggers would be set off at regular intervals according to the movement of the motor rather than the trip-wires more commonly associated with Muybridge’s work.
The series of cameras would mean, therefore, a series of lenses, and perhaps this was a reason to cite Muybridge’s work as prior art. A regular and successive triggering of double shutters might be another. Although the Muybridge patent contained a lot less detail than Le Prince’s (a machine could not be built from those instructions alone) and did not describe a method of reanimation, it must nevertheless have been a blow to Le Prince’s morale. However, at the same time, it is possible that it led him to new ideas, for although Le Prince’s current design had his shutters operated by mutilated gears, when he eventually built this machine, one significant difference would be that the shutters were operated by electro-magnetic triggers. It is therefore not implausible that a scenario occurred at the beginning of April 1887 in which Le Prince, exasperated by the Patent Office’s objections, went reluctantly to a Muybridge patent only to find a revelatory description of electric triggers for double-shutters which he would take and incorporate into his own work.
Le Prince’s perspective versus The Patent Office’s perspective
Le Prince might have been forgiven if he felt any sense of frustration at this point. He had effectively been manoeuvred into a ‘Catch-22’ situation by the Patent Office, who had first objected to his attempt to patent what it saw as two separate inventions. When the inventor had, reluctantly, forfeited patent claims for his deliverers so that all that was being patented was a chronophotographic camera, the USPO had rejected his surviving claims pointing to a series of patents for chronophotographic cameras.
However, it might be instructive to try for a moment to appreciate the position of the Patent Office in the matter. If (as seems to have been the case) it took a personal visit from Le Prince himself to explain to examiners that the nature of his invention relied upon the reanimation of extended sequences of motion, then the Patent Office, having understood this properly only in the previous few days, had had to come to terms quite quickly with the notion that they were helping to usher in a potentially new classification. At the same time, they were cognisant of similar mechanisms doing similar things (albeit to different ends), and therefore arguably belonging to different classifications. In this context, it might appear that their approach was cautious as opposed to deliberately obstructive.
It is ironic that the Patent Office’s perceived obstinacy has been used subsequently as “evidence” of obstruction, partly because one result of its objections was to force Le Prince to not only become more diligent in his amended claims and descriptions but to add detail to his application that enhanced his work (and our understanding of it). Perhaps there is no better example of this than Le Prince’s response to these latest objections by the Patent Office.
5 April 1887 – Le Prince’s response
On 5 April 1887, Le Prince’s attorneys wrote back with the inventor’s amendments. They did not change his actual design in response to the objections, but added detail, highlighting where and how the design achieved more and different things compared to the other patents, and attempting to make explicit the differences implicit in the existing specifications. At the end of the specification, in the preamble to the actual Claims of invention, the following paragraph was to be inserted:
“By my invention I am enabled to take negatives of any object or objects at intervals, regular or irregular, and with or without short or long interruptions and at the slowest or most rapid speed, regular or irregular as may be wanted, attaining several thousand per minute, and provision is made for moving the objective in any direction required, horizontally, vertically or both, simultaneously, and also to lengthen or shorten the focus whilst taking the pictures, the apparatus being essentially portable and self-contained, and independent of the objects or subjects of which it takes the pictures, and entirely under the control of the operator, and adapted to act equally well upon solid ground, or moving platforms, such as boats, cars, balloons etc.”[1]
This seemingly dry piece of text might nevertheless tempt a reader to imagine the very human emotions behind it (for example, the potential exasperation), as everything was put into a single paragraph-long sentence, a breathless assurance that Le Prince had created something different from Du Mont, Hauron and Muybridge. The frame rate could be adapted; the operator had control of the intermittency of film movement; the camera could pan and tilt; focussing could take place (and here Le Prince could not be clearer) “whilst taking the pictures” (my italics); the device was portable and self-contained – a conspicuous difference from the several cameras in Muybridge’s patent; and the entire process would be “entirely under the control of the operator,” with manual controls that would allow said operator to adapt the receiving of images to a range of environmental and aesthetic considerations.
The paragraph was brought to a close with a reference to the camera’s portability which allowed it to be used on solid ground (i.e. stationary) or moving platforms. Here Le Prince offered several real-world examples – boats, cars (perhaps meaning tramcars), balloons – examples that were perhaps informed by the “shot lists”, the ideas scribbled in his notebook (see Part 2 of this series) as possible subjects to capture in New York. The paragraph displayed a revelatory understanding of what it would mean to capture movement, almost as if Le Prince had been operating motion picture cameras for years.
From the start Le Prince’s specifications had included descriptions of a knee joint, friction socket, spirit level and thumb screw, allowing the camera (attached to a stand) to pan and tilt, offering implicit evidence of Le Prince’s depth of understanding of motion pictures. But combined with this most recent paragraph, Le Prince’s patent became something greater than its parts. The chronophotographers Marey, Muybridge, Anschütz and others had analysed movement, but to do so they had controlled the moving subjects.
Le Prince, by contrast, was ready to engage with the untamed world. He was dealing in depth and uncertainty and his machine was designed to capture the world as it really was. In order to appease a Patent Examiner who may or may not have totally understood what it was he was examining, Le Prince took him, and us, patiently, indefatigably, into a new realm of possibilities. This latest amendment was a transformational moment that took the patent from simply being the solution to the theoretical problem of passing film intermittently past a lens in sync with a shutter, and made it visible, understandable, as an actual machine whose operation had been calibrated to pre-empt the vagaries of unrehearsed movement. This made it a patent created not just from an engineer’s perspective, but also from that of an end user – a camera operator and ‘imagineer’. And it might be argued that through this amendment we come face to face for the first time, with a device which is, and understands itself to be, a movie camera.
Compromises
Despite having emphasised the specific qualities and difference of his design, Le Prince then acceded to the Patent Office’s instructions and took out Claims 1, 2 and 5. However, he inserted one more claim, a brief description of focussing mechanisms. Le Prince was quite possibly beginning to realise that his broader claims would not survive the attentions of the Patent Office. His “art” of producing motion pictures had become his specific ‘method’ and now was broken down so that only certain aspects of the technology behind the method might be accepted as novel. And so, the ability to focus on an object whilst taking a sequence of pictures – something which had been described in detail in the specifications – was now also moved into the final section of the patent where its mechanisms were added as a claim of invention:
“The combination with the series of lenses and the series of tubes […] for receiving the lens tubes. The latter held upon an independent frame, in combination with means for moving said frame and lens tubes out and in, for changing the focus during an expansion, to correspond with an approaching or receding object.”
12 April 1887 – Objection
Once more Le Prince waited for the Patent Office’s approval. On 12 April 1887, it wrote to inform Le Prince and his lawyers that his Claim 3, inserted just a week earlier, was “found anticipated by the patent of Wing no. 78,408, May 26th 1868 (Cameras).”
Simon Wing’s 1868 patent was for a device for a multiplying camera. It described a plate mechanism that was designed to help block out light leaking into the lenses as they moved forwards and backwards to focus, and another shutter/plate at the front of the camera which ensured that shutters opened and closed over all lenses simultaneously – a design feature that, in fact, created a significant difference between his and Le Prince’s designs, involving simultaneous as opposed to successive exposures. This part of Wing’s design, in fact, went to great lengths not to do what the Le Prince machine did.
Wing’s patent showcased two significant features: 1) the action of a spring will keep partition C in Figs 1 & 2 pushed close to the back of the lenses, so that even if the lenses were pulled backwards or forwards from the shutter plate (effectively, moved to zoom in or out) the partition also moved to avoid light leakage into the lens. Wing also showed small compartments for each lens, again to stop light bleeding in. Secondly, as can be seen from Figs 2 & 3, the plate (G) in Wing’s camera contains the same number of apertures as there are lenses. Without the apertures, the plate would be one large shutter. If it moved upwards, it would let in light into the bottom row of lenses first (and vice versa if it moved down). Wing designed a plate with the same number of apertures as lenses – in the diagram it is nine holes in a 3 x 3 grid, so that as it moved up or down, all apertures would be aligned with camera lenses at the same time.
19 April 1887 – Le Prince’s response (and a tentative theory)
Le Prince’s response, on 19 April 1887, was to take out the Claim 3 he had just put in and replace it with something that, at first sight, seemed almost identical.
The previous Claim 3, that had sought protection for lenses working with the focussing tubes, referred to the machine focussing on an “approaching or receding object,” which surely implied a change of focus during ‘filming’. However, we should allow for the possibility that a patent examiner, already struggling with the concept of motion picture reproduction, might not have picked up on the nuances of the description. Le Prince had decided to give the Patent Office a nudge in the right direction, and so the replacement claim still sought protection for the lenses and focussing tubes but was careful to state that “changing the focus” could be done “during [my italics] successive exposures” thus making explicit the fact that Le Prince’s design allowed for focussing whilst the camera was recording, something that the Wing patent demonstrably did not do.
At this point, it might be the case that discussing these claims is not simply a dry exercise in linguistic analysis but a glimpse at the way an invention slowly began to take shape in contemporary consciousness. It is of historiographical interest to see how a patent may have been altered, not to modify a design but to help a patent examiner to understand the implications of a new technology. Le Prince’s sixteen-lens machine was sufficiently thought out and clearly described that it provided a transitional point between motion pictures in theory and in practice, an idea that materialised gradually but inexorably within the pages of the inventor’s patent document. It now remained for Le Prince to discover whether this alteration would satisfy the Patent Office.
23 April 1887 – Success
On 23 April 1887, the United States Patent Office in Washington D.C. stated: “Application filed Nov. 2 1886 has been allowed.”
It seemed that Le Prince, after some sacrifices but also having made some new claims, was finally successful in his attempts to gain a patent for his multi-lens machine.
It was around this time that Le Prince’s friend, Henry Woolf, offered to raise funds and invest in a sixteen-lens machine. This would have been done “on his [Le Prince’s] return to New York,” for Le Prince had decided to continue his work in Europe. Different reasons have been given for Le Prince’s decision to leave New York, including a series of hints by Lizzie that it was to protect his work from unscrupulous competitors. However, it appears that Le Prince was travelling to Europe to avail himself of assistance and resources that he would not have had in the States. Other factors may have also been in play. For example, on attaining success with a US Patent, Le Prince would have been keen to take out patents in Europe as soon as possible. On a more personal level, his brother-in-law John Whitley was to open his latest grand project, an American-themed industrial and cultural exhibition, in London in May and it was likely that, although not imperative that Le Prince be there, this may well have been a date of which he was aware.
Other familial influences may also have been factors. The Le Princes and the Whitleys seemed to have been genuinely close, loving and mutually supportive, and Le Prince would quite possibly have taken the opportunity to visit his mother in Paris and his inlaws Joseph and Sarah Whitley in Leeds, all of whom were elderly, no longer living with their children and vulnerable to ill health (none of them would live beyond the next three years).
It should also be acknowledged that, according to Lizzie, constructing a marketable device “promised also to clear our financial horizons, which from constant inroads for changes and improvements in models and machinery, loomed rather darkly.”
The decision to travel to Europe was a significant one and therefore probably not an impulsive one. Having said that, Le Prince’s departure must have been almost immediately after hearing of the allowance of the patent. Might it have been that he was set to go as soon as he had attained patent success?
2 May 1887 – An unexpected response
Making sense of the events of late April and early May 1887 is further complicated by what happened next. Having achieved success with the patent, and with Le Prince en route to Europe, his attorneys produced an unexpected response to the Patent Office. On 2 May they wrote and requested that the successful application be withdrawn. Additionally, they now attempted to reinstate Le Prince’s original Claim 2, already rejected and withdrawn, and make it the new Claim 1, with Munn & Co claiming it had been “inadvertently erased by amendment.” That claim was for:
“The photographic receiver provided with a series of lenses in combination with a series of shutters and means substantially as described for operating the shutters successively and continuously as and for the purposes set forth.”
After all the refinements and reworkings of the past six months, this clause at first might not seem to offer anything that was not already included in the surviving claims. The only element not found elsewhere is the very specific assertion that the lenses work in combination with the shutters. Patent law language is necessarily pedantic, and every connection must be specified, cannot be assumed, or it might possibly fail to find protection. Le Prince was making explicit the connections between each part of his “method” and “apparatus”.
It is pertinent to ask why Le Prince took the risk of withdrawing his patent at this stage and why he complicated things by inserting an already rejected claim. The answer might be that he felt that by this time and after all the explanations and iterations that had occurred, the rest of his patent was now in a sufficiently robust form that this one small but useful amendment might now have been viewed by the Patent Office as acceptable.
There is another aspect of this yet to be explored in biographies of Le Prince. When reinsertion of the claim was filed on 2 May 1887, Le Prince, who had set sail for England in late April, would not have been in New York. If, as might be presumed, he had stayed in New York only until his patent was accepted and then travelled immediately, then why would he choose to reopen the application when he was not there to oversee this? And how did he do this whilst sailing across the Atlantic? Was this reinsertion of a claim already prepared and Le Prince could no longer wait and instructed his lawyers to send it anyway? Munn & Co had explicit permission to take such actions on his behalf. The firm, which was also the publisher of the esteemed journal Scientific American, was highly respected, which at least suggests that it knew what it was doing in regard to Le Prince’s case. However, whatever the reasons were for re-opening the patent application and for doing this while Le Prince was away, and to what extent it was done on Le Prince’s behalf and/or with his co-operation, they are matters that have not been explored in previous biographies of the inventor. This is simply one more gap in our knowledge of the story of Louis Le Prince.
The Patent Office took very little time to reply. On 4 May 1887, Burke assured Le Prince that his re-inserted claim had been “carefully re-examined […] and no good reason found for changing the previous action of the office.” The gamble had failed. “As it stands” continued Burke, “the clause involves no invention, in view of the state of the art, shown more particularly by the patent of Muybridge, No. 278,878, June 19th, 1883 (Cameras), already cited.”
The bad news would not have reached Le Prince immediately, for at this point he was aboard a steamship headed towards the port of Liverpool, England.
Leeds 1887
Le Prince arrived in Liverpool the day after the Patent Office’s latest notice of rejection and travelled immediately to Leeds. Probably ignorant of this latest setback, Le Prince quickly set about making arrangements for his next phase of motion picture experiments. He wrote to Lizzie from the Whitleys’ foundry in Leeds, on 6 May 1887:
“Ma bien Cherie,
I arrived at Liverpool at 2pm yesterday, after delay in the St George’s Channel on account of fog, and had just time to catch the 3pm train dinner less and without a minute even to wire.
So I took Grandpa and Grandma by surprise at 6pm last night, and we had a jolly good talk about you all […] I have been running over the foundry with Grandpa, and am going to call at Brown’s Bank to see Wilson, Harvey Reynolds re. photo apparatus &c. and some little shopping […]”
At this point in the story, we reach a particularly tangled thicket of dates and events which have not previously been laid out with any particular clarity or accuracy, and while we remain some way from a definitive chronology of events, we should at least try to identify what we can and admit to what we cannot. One thing is certain – the first few days Le Prince spent in Leeds at the beginning of May 1887 must have been a flurry of activity.
In Leeds, Le Prince contacted a firm of local woodworkers, William Mason and Son on Woodhouse Lane, and arranged for a young joiner, Frederick Mason (a young Quaker in his twenties, just finishing his apprenticeship), to assist Le Prince in building parts of a camera. It is unclear if there was anything for Mason to actually construct at this stage and it may have been a case of Le Prince sourcing personnel before travelling away.
Evidence also suggests that during these few days in May 1887, Le Prince commissioned Rhodes Bros of Hannover Lane, Leeds to build parts for the Double Wheel Viewer. Their mechanic was a talented young engineer and an inventor himself, named James Longley.
With these arrangements in place, Le Prince set off for Paris via London, where he was to visit his brother-in-law, John Whitley, and witness his latest grand project, the American Exhibition.
The American Exhibition
After what seemed like years of commercial misadventures, John Robinson Whitley had finally brought to fruition a project whose scale and impact were commensurate with his ambition. A huge swathe of wasteland in West London had been transformed into the greatest show on earth: the “American Exhibitions of the Arts, Inventions, Manufactures, Products and Resources of the United States of America” had been designed to showcase the very best of the New World.
The heart of the exhibition was to be a building of iron and glass with a principal gallery measuring 1,140 x 120 feet (350 x 37 metres). Inside this was to be a vast array of products and inventions from locomotives to ice machines, firearms to baby carriages, and cameras to false teeth. Around the buildings would stretch American-style streets and avenues and approximately 3,000 square metres of gardens and a scattering of musical pavilions in which bands had been engaged to play twice daily. Visitors would walk past a huge diorama of New York Harbour designed by M. Bartholdi, the creator of the Statue of Liberty, and in the evenings the grounds were to be lit by 250 electric lights and nine giant searchlights.
Just as eagerly anticipated as any of these exhibits, however, were the entertainments, including and especially, Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West” Show with its “true illustration” of frontier life. The Wild West show was contained within a triangle of railway cuttings on six acres of land, on which was built an amphitheatre that audiences would reach by crossing a series of temporary bridges. Around the arena were to be corrals and stables, teepees and tents. The exhibition was, from the moment it opened on 9 May 1887, a sensation.
According to Lizzie, John Whitley “wished to bring out the moving pictures he had seen in New York in 1886 as a feature of his American Exhibition of 1887” but no machine was ready, and it is doubtful whether the secretive and perfectionist Le Prince would have allowed a demonstration of a machine that was anything less than fully working and completely satisfactory to him.
In London Le Prince met up with John, as well as his in-laws Joseph and Sarah Whitley, who had travelled down from Leeds. A celebratory meal was interrupted by a visit from the Queen’s Messenger informing Whitley, as Director General of the exhibition, that Queen Victoria had “requested” to attend a performance of Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West” show. A private performance was hastily scheduled for 11 May 1887, after which the Queen met several of the performers, from Buffalo Bill to Annie Oakley to Chief Red Shirt, as well as the young daughter of one of the exhibition’s General Directors who, accompanied by Le Prince, presented the Queen with a bouquet of flowers. That same night Le Prince continued on his way to Paris.
Paris
In Paris, Le Prince set up a second base of operations, employing carpenters and machinists to work on making his sixteen-lens design a reality. He also had the opportunity to be with his mother, who had become seriously ill. It was a month of intense activity and huge emotional contrast. He wrote again to Lizzie on 18 May 1887:
“Yesterday morning I went with Mother to her garden on the top of Montmartre. It is less than our painting room but it has more plants than our whole garden. It is precious for the health of the dear Mother.
Between times I am preparing parts of my apparatus that the facilities of Paris permit me to do, and thus make up for lost time […] This afternoon I will do Mr Currier’s errand; see Poilpot then my machinists. Tomorrow, patent office, and examiners &c.
The weather is rather cloudy and cool, but very fine for active work […]”[2]
But now that Le Prince was relatively settled in one place, he could respond properly to the US Patent Office’s objections of 4 May.
26 May 1887 – Le Prince’s amendments
Back at the beginning of May, Le Prince had snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory by attempting to reinsert his original Claim 2 as a new Claim 1). The Patent Office had repeated their rejection of this claim, citing Muybridge, and so now Le Prince, presumably communicating with his attorneys by mail and cable, relented and withdrew it a second time. However, he also attempted to insert two new claims, the first of which was to become appropriated in subsequent years for one of the most repeated myths about Le Prince’s patents – that he attempted to claim for a one-lens machine in his US Patent.
“1st. The method of photographing a changing or moving body, or object, or scenery, which consists in successively and continuously photographing the object or scenery at regular intervals from the same point of view substantially as set forth.”
The words “successively” and “continuously” were not only used again but underlined by a lawyer’s earnest hand. Additionally, however, two more details were added (and also underlined): “regular intervals” and “the same point of view.”
It seems, after several rejections from the Patent Office in which Muybridge’s patent 279,878 of 1883 was cited as prior art, that an increasingly frustrated Le Prince was trying to find a way to explain the differences between his and Muybridge’s patents. Where Muybridge had specified several “cameras” (plural), Le Prince had offered a single “receiver” and gone on to alter the language in the patent to refer to a single “apparatus.” And now, the phrase “same point of view” was almost certainly a reference to images being taken from a single entity (the receiver) and with words chosen carefully to contrast with Muybridge’s claim to take pictures from “several points of view.” However, starting from the 1920s and continuing to the present day, the phrase “same point of view” has been used to make the argument that Le Prince had been attempting to claim protection for a one-lens version of this particular machine. This kind of overreach on behalf of the inventor has become a distraction and has not helped his reputation.
Le Prince’s second, more comprehensive new claim, is rarely, if ever, remarked upon:
“2nd. A photographic receiver comprising a casing, a series of lenses therein, a series of shutters therefor, and connections between the said shutters for successively and continuously operating them at regular intervals, whereby negatives of the same object from the same point of vision may be produced upon a suitable surface substantially as set forth.”[3]
And then, at the end of the letter containing these claims, and obviously still uncertain of success, Le Prince’s lawyers added a further explanation of the differences (in their view) between the Muybridge and Le Prince patents. This last section was not intended for publication in the patent. It was a pre-emptive attempt to make the Patent Office understand Le Prince’s position on the two patents:
“In the Muybridge patent the process is entirely different and this is clearly shown in the first broad claim. He [Muybridge] desires to produce different pictures from different points of vision while applicant [Le Prince] produces pictures from the same point of vision so that there is no interruption in the scene which would be continuous and without a break, and if an object was moving across the scene it would be taken until it disappeared and the effect would be natural and life like. Muybridge never contemplated anything of the kind. He could not produce the negatives upon the same surface as is possible by applicant’s construction set forth in Claim 2.”
Le Prince’s description of his machine producing pictures “from the same point of vision” is questionable, given that up to sixteen lenses could be used, and technically each would produce a picture from a different point of vision (though closer than Muybridge’s patented arrangement).
Building the Sixteen-lens Machine
Le Prince found himself still in Paris at the end of May. He wrote to Lizzie on the 27th: “I am still here, having found a mechanic and electrician who is fitting my lenses that I count on trying in a few days with a large plate, which will decide the practical possibility of my work.”
This sentence is a concise report on the state of Le Prince’s progress. From it, we learn that the machine, being constructed in Paris, was not yet ready but should be in a few days and that Le Prince seemed to have recently found assistants, one of whom was an electrician, which suggests that the camera was working with electromagnetic triggers working the shutters. Additionally, and importantly, reference to a large plate seems to confirm the idea that the camera was not completely finished, as the two rolls of film designed to be used in the camera were here replaced by a single piece of glass. This in turn suggests that Le Prince was testing parts of the camera and was resigned for the moment to the idea that the resulting images would be fixed on glass rather than rolls of flexible ‘film’ from which transparencies could be made and projected back later. The proof of working required by French patent law did not necessarily require a finished product, but expected a machine sufficiently advanced to demonstrate how it would and could eventually operate. Finally, Le Prince’s remark that he was “still” in Paris suggests that he had not expected to be, which could in part have been down to the deteriorating health of his mother. On 28 May 1887, Mme Elizabeth Marie Antoinette Boulabert, Le Prince’s mother, died at home at 6 rue Bochard de Saron, Paris.
4 June 1887 – A decision to make
Amidst the grief of bereavement came a letter from the United States Patent Office dated 4 June 1887. Le Prince’s amendments had been examined and one of the two new claims, “the 1st clause of claim therein presented, found anticipated by English Patent No. 1,457, A.D. 1861, already cited.”
This was the du Mont patent. Brought in as prior art at the beginning of the application process and then seemingly set aside, it was now being brought back.[4] Le Prince had a decision to make – should he relinquish Claim 1, or was there a way to get it past the Examiner?
15 June 1887 – Capitulation, and Success at last?
On 15 June 1887, Munn & Co submitted their response on behalf of their client: “Erase Claim 1”. By surrendering the claim, Munn & Co at last managed to appease the Patent Office. On 23 June, there came a letter from the US Patent Office:
“Application of Le Prince has been allowed.”
Le Prince’s specification for his invention had finally found favour. But at what cost? The patent that had been accepted, and which would eventually be published in January 1888, was a fascinating document. First and foremost, perhaps, it detailed a sixteen-lens receiver so comprehensively that the specifications and accompanying diagrams for it could be considered as effective working plans. In fact, over a century later, they would provide the main source of reference for the construction of a working replica camera as part of the Race to Cinema Project.
As for the deliverers, despite the Patent Office’s explicit objections, a general description of the Double Wheel Viewer had, remarkably, been retained in the specifications, possibly because it had been overlooked by the Examiner. It makes for an odd read, appearing as it does with no warning towards the end of the specification and referring to diagrams that are no longer in the patent. The Main Deliverer (projector for the sixteen-lens design) is a more natural fit, but it is never made wholly clear whether this was in fact a separate object to the receiver or a modified version of it. And the question remains – would the Main Deliverer have worked? And of course, there was the seeming anomaly of Le Prince’s assurance that he was not claiming for a deliverer, before he proceeded to claim for a deliverer.
As for the patent as a whole, how much protection might it have afforded Le Prince? Despite being the focus of complaints by champions of the inventor in later years, the lack of a claim for a single lens would not have been a significant issue. The citing of the du Mont 1861 patent as prior art suggests that the use of a single lens in and of itself could not have been seen as being unique to Le Prince. Moreover, it would be hard to explain how a single lens could work in a machine explicitly built to house two alternating strips of photosensitised material. Later it would be argued that the concern over the lack of protection for a single lens was merely a retrospective attempt to suggest that Le Prince’s later, more successful camera (a one-lens machine made in Leeds) should be afforded some of the protection nominally afforded by the earlier US patent. However, this is a misleading argument. The later one-lens camera would be a significantly different mechanical design and so regardless of how many lenses were covered in the US patent, it would not have provided any real protection for that device. And so, the argument over what “same point of view” might have meant and how it might have helped Le Prince had it meant “one-lens” (which it did not) is a red herring.
The real opportunities for protection may have come in overlooked details such as the mechanism in which pads were pressed forwards to arrest film, creating a flat film surface for each exposure during intermittency of movement over long periods of continuous shooting. Another feature was the ability to focus whilst actively taking a sequence. There is an irony here that this last quality, although included in the specifications, was only inserted as a claim for invention as a result of the Patent Office repeatedly blocking other broader claims and forcing Le Prince to refine his thinking.
Le Prince would later substitute the system of mutilated gears triggering shutters, as shown and described in the 1887 US Patent, with a series of electro-magnetic triggers instead, so in one sense the patent was protecting a camera that Le Prince would never build. And yet, despite all this there are exquisitely designed and comprehensively explained mechanisms in this patent – the intermittent mechanism working in combination with a series of lenses, which were able to focus whilst pictures were being taken, in combination with a series of shutters – this was a complex and, for its time, revelatory and effective design.
Dissatisfaction
And yet, the qualities of this multi-lens design have been overshadowed by the subsequent unhappiness with the actions of the Patent Office in reference to the “same point of view” claim and the actions of Le Prince’s lawyers in acquiescing to the Patent Office without, allegedly, informing Le Prince first. Le Prince’s first biographer, Ernest Kilburn Scott, would write that his attorneys
“failed to apprise him until later, by letter, that after he had sailed a most important part of his claims, the right to use a ‘one lens’ machine had again been disallowed by the Washington Patent Office.”
Scott added that: “Le Prince was in England at the time and did not know that this had been done with it was too late for effectual protest”.[5]
This seems a particularly harsh criticism as Munn & Co had no choice but to inform Le Prince by letter as he was already in Europe. Nevertheless, the attorneys were subsequently branded “foolish” by Scott, and it would be argued for years that the most vital piece of protection, that for a single lens camera, had been denied Le Prince in America. As regards the attorneys’ acquiescence and erasure of Claim 1, Lizzie asserted that Le Prince’s signature was “not in his handwriting”. Adolphe Le Prince was more circumspect, but still claimed that
“My father suffered under the disadvantage in 1886 of putting a practical picture machine in the field and the Examiners at the Patent office not well understanding the process involved could not see the great stride forward of the Le Prince patent from prior apparatus. They therefore practically shut out my father from the broad patent he should have had in the United States.”
These assertions were mistaken at best and possibly disingenuous. It has already been explained that the phrase “same point of view” was almost certainly used to refer to a single object (a camera) and not a single lens. Moreover, it has yet to be acknowledged in any biography of Le Prince that on the same day that this claim was rejected by the Patent Office, the Patent Office also allowed a second claim which included the phrase “same point of vision.” As for concerns about Munn & Co making decisions without Le Prince, and the possible suggestion of a forged signature – Le Prince’s patent lawyers had been, explicitly, given “full power of substitution and revocation, to make alterations and amendments” and the signature not in Le Prince’s handwriting was actually written “A. Le Prince per Munn & Co” suggesting that the attorneys were simply using their authority to act on the client’s behalf. More circumstantial evidence comes in the form of a letter from Le Prince written the following year, in 1888, to his British patent lawyers regarding another proposed patent, in which he says:
“Should you think that these alterations do not add to the strength of the patent or that they would do it better in some other form, either suppress them or rearrange them in any form you think best.”
Once again, it has yet to be noted that Le Prince was happy to defer, when appropriate, to a patent lawyer’s judgement, which suggests that he had not felt particularly burnt by previous experience. Nevertheless, doubt as to the Patent Office’s motives towards Le Prince has continued to be felt. In his 1990 ground-breaking biography of Le Prince, The Missing Reel, Christopher Rawlence indulged in some conspiratorial asides while discussing the rejected “same point of view” claim. For example, he stated:
“[What] caught my attention was that someone had drawn a line diagonally right through the claim. In the margin a hurried hand had written, ‘Erase per Q June 15th 1887.’ Who?”
It is likely that Rawlence knew “who” – it was Patent Examiner William Burke, the same person who had put a diagonal line through every other withdrawn claim in the File Wrapper, along with notes in the margin next to them. The “Q” did not refer to a person but was part of the system Burke had employed to try and keep up with the numerous withdrawals, reinsertions and amendments of claims over a six-month period. Instead of numbering amendments, Burke was giving each one a letter – the 15 June 1887 letter in which Munn & Co had agreed to “Erase Claim 1” was labelled “Q” by Burke who then went back to the 26 May letter and next to Le Prince’s insertion of the new Claim 1, crossed it out and wrote “Erase per Q June 15th 1887.” This would allow Burke to find the 15 June letter to remind himself when and why this amendment had been withdrawn.
As a result of this system, the File Wrapper is riven with notes, crossings out, dates and capital letters in margins. This system may have caused confusion (see the typo discussed earlier) but it was not evidence of malign influence.
Although discussion of the conspiracy theories that have developed around Le Prince’s US Patent may have taken this article away from the focus of this series – his work and achievements – it is nevertheless a useful exercise. An appreciation of Le Prince’s real achievements appears to have been compromised by the twin distractions over the years, of conspiracy and sensationalism.
Summary of the process
To recap all the above – although the mid-1880s saw Le Prince construct one-lens and four-lens camera-deliverers in the States, he had also developed a design for a more sophisticated sixteen-lens machine (with a Double Wheel Viewer attached) which became the basis for his US Patent application of 2 November 1886. On 21 December, the Patent Office informed Le Prince that it considered that two inventions were being incorrectly applied for within a single patent application. Le Prince’s response, submitted on 29 December, was to take out some references and claims for his deliverers but – crucially – not all of them, and it is possible he was making a show of co-operation whilst hoping the Patent Office would not notice that descriptions of the deliverers remained.
The Patent Office was not fooled. On 1 February 1887, it specified the exact lines it considered invalid (effectively every one that referred explicitly to a deliverer). This prompted a visit in person by Le Prince to the Patent Office, presumably to explain how the receiver and deliverer were constituent parts of a single process – the reproduction of images to give the impression of life. Le Prince must have felt the meeting had been a success, as he was comfortable enough to ignore some of the Patent Office’s instructions on what to withdraw from the patent. Instead, in amendments submitted on 31 March 1887, he reworked the language in the patent to frame the multi-lens machine as a single entity. He changed the title of the patent to reflect its more modest scope; he inserted the strategically bold assertion that he would not be claiming for a stereopticon deliverer as it would be the subject of a separate application; and then proceeded to add two new claims, both of which included references to stereopticons.
The Patent Office responded on 2 April 1887, rejecting Claims 1, 2 and 5 of the application, citing three examples of prior art by du Mont, du Hauron and Muybridge, and Le Prince countered on 5 April by withdrawing these claims, adding a description of the novel qualities inherent in the design (which provided a rich and revelatory sense of the camera’s potential) and adding a narrower, more technical claim for the camera’s method of focussing whilst taking a sequence of pictures.
The Patent Office replied on 12 April 1887, rejecting this claim which it seems to have confused with a patent by Simon Wing for a design which helped block light leakage from lenses focussing in a multiplying still camera, as well as ensuring shutters opened simultaneously (a significant difference from Le Prince’s shutters opening successively).
Le Prince’s response, on 19 April, was to reword what was essentially the same claim to persuade the Patent Office they had been mistaken in rejecting it. The rewording was almost identical but made more explicit the ability of the lenses to focus whilst shooting a sequence. This was successful, and on 23 April 1887 the Patent Office allowed Le Prince’s revised patent.
And then, a series of events occurred which have still to be explained, beginning with Le Prince’s attorneys withdrawing the successful patent application whilst Le Prince was on the Atlantic Ocean, and inserting a previously rejected claim, presumably to tighten up the existing claims by ensuring that the series of lenses working “in combination” with a series of shutters was protected. This was rejected by the Patent Office on 4 May 1887.
The day after this rejection, Le Prince arrived in England, travelled to Leeds, and within the space of a few days had made preparations for future work which involved buying photographic equipment, sourcing craftsmen and commissioning work on the construction of the Double Wheel Viewer. He then travelled to London, visited his brother-in-law, witnessed a performance of Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West” show, presented a bouquet of flowers to Queen Victoria, and left for Paris the same night. In Paris, he began preparation for construction of his sixteen-lens machine and saw to patents. It was during this period that his mother died.
On 26 May 1887, Le Prince withdrew the claim but added two more in an attempt to gain more comprehensive protection whilst simultaneously differentiating his work from that of Muybridge. In order to contrast his design with Muybridge’s “several cameras” and “points of view,” one of Le Prince’s claims referred to taking pictures from the “same point of view” and the other to taking pictures from the “same point of vision.” The Patent Office replied on 4 June 1887 by rejecting the first claim (citing du Mont), but allowing the second.
On 15 June, with Le Prince still in Europe, his attorneys gave their brief response: “Erase Claim 1” resulting in Le Prince’s patent being accepted on 23 June 1887.
Conclusion
During his time in America, Le Prince had envisioned a form of total cinema: continuous motion and sound capture with colour and in relief, to be played back on the giant screens of the cycloramas he had helped to create (see Part 1 of this series). These ambitions had been reined in and a more realistic first step taken in the form of the US Patent application that contained, in its final form, much that was incomplete, contradictory and (in the case of the Main Deliverer) unlikely to work well if built. At the same time, it contained elegant and workable plans for a sixteen-lens camera that was designed to capture continuous sequences from real life and not simply controlled studio set-ups. In a few short paragraphs relating to the receiver’s ability to focus dynamically, move, pan, tilt, be conveyed across water or through the air, to expose slowly in bad light, and generally to engage with the vicissitudes of nature, Le Prince made manifest not just a machine but an understanding of what ‘film’ would achieve and become over the next hundred years. The sixteen-lens machine was a work of astonishing ingenuity. And now, in Paris in 1887, all that remained was for Le Prince to construct it.
Irfan Shah, June 2023
We shall leave the Le Prince story here, with later developments dealt with in the forthcoming book being planned and written by the International Le Prince Research and Engineering Project. I would like to thank Irfan for his deep, diligent research and analysis of ‘the story so far’, which has illuminated many shadowy areas and clarified numerous points of confusion and contention. – Stephen Herbert
Coming next: Bibliography and acknowledgements for the Le Prince series of posts.
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Notes and References
- Despite the range of stylistic possibilities offered by different frame rates, it is more likely that if they were intended to enrich the resulting films, it would be because they had offered the operator the power to adjust film speed and regularity in order to compensate for required exposure times in relation to available light. [re-word, offering both options equally].
And realistically speaking, the idea behind specifying “regular” and “irregular” intervals and “slowest” and “most rapid” speed was most likely an attempt to simply cover all his bases. By making his claims as wide as possible he would have expected there to be less chance of a rival patenting or constructing a slight variation of what he was doing (such speculative pedantry was, and remains, a common tactic in patent wording). [return to text] - The words ‘permit me’ might suggest that Le Prince’s resources in Paris were limited. [return to text]
- Does the term ‘connections’ suggest an electrical arrangement? [return to text]
- It is not entirely clear why du Mont was a barrier to one claim and not the other. Perhaps (and it would be a huge irony if so) the second claim referred to lenses and shutters plural. Or perhaps the first claim, being for the ‘method’ of capturing images, was too broad whereas the second claim, being for a specific device, was a reason. Or perhaps du Mont’s glass plates were seen as separate surfaces as opposed to Le Prince’s single surface of photographic strip. This is yet another area of uncertainty. [return to text]
- He was more likely in Paris. [return to text]
The Optilogue 