Black film canister.
One of my favourite spots to show people in Leeds. The very first moving pictures were filmed from the upper window here and the site is marked by a blue plaque.
You can view that very short film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTlXaqG4VyE
A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Louis Le Prince's motion-picture experiments culminated in 1888 in Leeds, England. In October of that year, he filmed moving-picture sequences of family members in Roundhay Garden and his son playing the accordion, using his single-lens camera and Eastman's paper negative film. At some point in the following eighteen months he also made a film of Leeds Bridge. This work may have been slightly in advance of the inventions of contemporaneous moving-picture pioneers, such as the British inventors William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and was years in advance of that of Auguste and Louis Lumière and William Kennedy Dickson (who did the moving image work for Thomas Edison).
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.[1] The reason for his disappearance is not known and his family and supporters invented a series of conspiracy theories, including: a murder set up by Edison, secret homosexuality, disappearance in order to start a new life, and a murder by his brother over their mother's will. No evidence exists for any of these and the most likely explanation remains that he committed suicide, overcome by the shame of heavy debts and the apparent failure of his experiments. In 2004, a police archive in Paris was found to contain a photograph of a drowned man bearing a strong resemblance to Le Prince who was discovered in the Seine just after the time of his disappearance.