According to his wife, there were two things that sparked Le Prince's fascination with creating a motion picture camera.
"At times, when you read [his] correspondence, it feels like his sort of sanity is on the line; that this spark, this vision, had taken over his life," Fischer says. "It's Le Prince's in-laws, a family friend and his son doing silly walks in the garden of their family home in Yorkshire," Fischer says.
Eager for the masses to witness this new invention, Le Prince asked his wife to rent a mansion in New York to use as a venue to publicly show his films for the first time. And he told everyone that he was going to move to New York.Before leaving, Le Prince returned to France to visit his brother and sort out a family inheritance.
Then, not long after his disappearance, New York newspapers published an article declaring that Thomas Edison had invented a motion picture camera.