Futility Closet

In 1890, French inventor Louis Le Prince vanished just as he was preparing to debut his early motion pictures. He was never seen again. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll consider the possible causes of Le Prince's disappearance and his place in the history of cinema. We'll also reflect on a murderous lawyer and puzzle over the vagaries of snake milking. Intro: In 1826, schoolteacher George Pocock proposed a carriage drawn by kites. George Sicherman discovered an alternate pair of six-sided dice that produce the same probability distribution as ordinary dice. Sources for our feature on Louis Le Prince: Christopher Rawlence, The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures, 1990. Thomas Deane Tucker, The Peripatetic Frame, 2020. Adam Hart-Davis, ed., Engineers: From the Great Pyramids to the Pioneers of Space Travel, 2012. Jenni Davis, Lost Bodies, 2017. Charles Musser, "When Did Cinema Become Cinema?: Technology, History, and the Moving Pictures," in Santiag