The Inventor and the Tycoon

The Inventor and the Tycoon, by Edward Ball, is essentially a dual biography of two men who radically changed the world, and shared a moment in history. The Inventor was Eadweard Muybridge, who, according to Ball, "invented a new way of seeing." The tycoon was Leland Stanford, who went West seeking fortune and found it, linking the American coasts by rail.

The moment they shared was when Stanford hired Muybridge to photograph horses. "That a man who photographed a horse became a piece of national, and then international, news shows something of the widespread desire for the fleetness of photography, the craving for movement, for speed and acceleration in horses, railroads, emulsions."

Photography in the 1870s was still in its developmental stages (no pun intended), and there was an age-old question that could conceivably now be answered: did horses' hooves entirely come off the ground as they ran? "What especially excited Stanford was Marey's hypothesis that all four hooves of the animal did, in fact, leave the ground during a gallop. It was a question the horse collector regarded as second only, perhaps, to conception."

Ball jumps back and forth between Muybridge's and Stanford's biographies, sometimes abruptly so, in the middle of a chapter. He also tells the story out of chronological sequence, which at times was confusing, as the other major event in Muybridge's life was being tried for murder: he shot and killed his wife's lover, but was acquitted, mostly on the barbaric tradition that a man was entitled to protect his honor. At times I had trouble figuring out if events were before or after the murder. Right now I'm still not quite sure if the horse photos happened before or after the crime.

Stanford was one of America's major magnates, and like most of them, his fortune wasn't completely on the up and up. He was governor while he secured government contracts for the Central Pacific, which would link the nation by railroad for the first time. As his fortune grew, he and his cohort became known as "the Octopus," having their tentacles everywhere, ruling by oligarchy. He and his company resisted efforts at workers' rights, but a tragedy late in life led to his establishing Stanford University (he named the town it resides in, Palo Alto).

Muybridge as the far more interesting story. He was born Edward Muggeridge, and would change the spelling of his name many times. For a time he went by the name Helios. Born in England, he left for America when he was 20 to sell art prints in New York, but then went West and became a celebrated landscape photographer. He was also a tinkerer: "he would patent several things--a clock, a shutter for a high-speed camera, and an apparatus to generate stop-motion photography, which involved equipment that filled a barn." But his most important invention was the zoopraxiscope, which he oddly never patented. It was basically the first motion-picture projector.

Muybridge was an eccentric, a man who sported a long white beard and wore clothes until they fell apart. He married a woman who worked at a photography gallery, but she had an affair with another man. Muybridge tracked him down and shot him dead, in an act of frontier justice. "The Alta California newspaper reported that there had been 560 killings in California in 1854. With a state population of 100,000, this amounts to about one hundred times the homicide rate of California during the early 2000s."

After his acquittal, Muybridge traveled the world, showing off his zoopraxiscope. Stanford, though, never game him much credit (and only reluctantly and lately paid him). Eventually Muybridge would meet with Thomas Edison. "'We talked about the practicability of using the Zoopraxiscope in association with the phonograph, so as to combine, and reproduce simultaneously, in the presence of an audience, visible actions and audible words.' They talked about, in other words, a recipe for sound movies."

Edison would basically steal his idea and set up the first movie studio in West Orange, New Jersey, and would get the whole ball rolling, but it was Muybridge, Ball asserts, that planted the seed. At the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, Muybridge had a theater, which was essentially the first movie theater in history.

The book is mostly engaging when discussing Muybridge and his inventions, less so with Stanford, who frankly isn't that interesting. The men did know each other, and were linked to the revolutionary horse pictures (they were taken by use of a series of still photographs, which of course movies were for over a hundred years), but the pairing of them seems almost random. Many books, I think starting with Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, have sought to put two historical events together. Sometimes, as with Larson's book, it works, sometimes not so much.

But I was glad to learn about Muybridge. I'm a movie history buff, and I can't say I'd known much about him. I've heard of the Lumiere brother and George Melies and Edwin Porter (who worked for Edison), so it was nice to read Muybridge getting his due: "From Stanford and Muybridge came the first spray of images that became the stream of pictures in which most of us bathe for half our waking hours."