Fischer adds vivid colour as he chronicles his subject’s obsession with bringing the world’s first motion picture camera to market, and sketches the revolutionary backdrop to this story of transatlantic treachery.

Fischer lays out his case meticulously and with many footnotes, though he takes pains to entertain. Those two aims don’t always jibe, particularly when his more poetic flights of prose come up against the granular realities of R&D.

... lively.

... absorbing.

... the work Fischer has done in going back to primary sources, in particular the unpublished memoirs of Lizzie and Adolphe, sheds light on Le Prince as a free-spirited idealist, more interested in the social and expressive potential of film than in its commercial exploitation. The claim Fischer’s biography has on our attention rests both on Le Prince’s achievements and the vision he had for them. One of the pleasures, and sadnesses, of Fischer’s account is its evocation of a period, however brief, when the emergence of a technology seemed to herald a new age of human interconnectedness. What followed instead was Le Prince’s disappearance, the theft of his ideas, and the cornering of a fledgling movie market by practices verging on gangsterism. The story of his life amounts not only to a captivating whodunit, but to a lens on the development of cinema itself.

... the book’s real strength is not its crime-solving (Fischer concludes with a plausible if not provable suspect); it’s the way Fischer, who is also a film producer, helps us see how revelatory motion pictures were at the time..

... an astonishing real-life whodunit.

... this diverting mystery — and Edison’s putative involvement in any crime committed — is only the headline here. A fascinating sideshow for sure, and arguably a marketing tease. But make no mistake: The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures delivers much, much more.

Fischer’s adept character sketches bring to life dozens of people who played a role in the creation of motion pictures and help reveal the cutthroat world inhabited by late 19th-century inventors.

With a spellbinding, thriller-like presentation supported by painstaking research, Fischer puts forth evidence to try to unravel the mystery of Le Prince's life and death. Deftly organized facts, coupled with the technical minutiae of filmmaking, reveal fascinating details of Le Prince's life and the challenges faced in his work, while also exposing the mysterious circumstances surrounding his disappearance. Fischer's stellar, suspenseful narrative is a work of art unto itself that finally gives Le Prince--and the impact of his often overlooked, cut-short creative genius--his due..

Fischer presents Thomas Edison as a sinister figure singularly interested in Le Prince’s disappearance—a bit of misdirection, as Fischer has a more likely suspect in mind—but the sensational end of Le Prince’s life remains unsolved. Fischer’s book also successfully chronicles the history of photography and explores how moving pictures were the next logical step—and how several inventors were in competition to get there first.

Fischer’s sketch of the historical context in which Le Prince worked is consistently entertaining and illuminating. The author vividly renders the personalities and science involved in the production of early cinema, and he lucidly explains the complex technological challenges and breakthroughs. Particularly insightful are Fischer’s interpretations of the likely motivations of Le Prince and his assistants as they attempted, under frequent financial duress, to complete a workable prototype of their camera and secure international patent protections. Also intriguing is the book’s contribution to the ongoing demythologization of cultural icon Edison, who seems to have routinely schemed his way into taking credit for the work of others. Though Fischer’s ultimate conclusion about the circumstances behind Le Prince’s death remains speculative, he offers and defends a plausible version of events that draws persuasively on extant historical evidence.

... fascinating.