The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures [NOOK Book]

From Barnes & Noble

English-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) earned enduring fame as "the Father of Motion Pictures." Less well known is that a jury had acquitted him on a homicide charge, even though he freely acknowledged stalking and killing his unarmed victim. National Book Award-winning historian Edward Ball (Slaves in the Family) captures the brilliance of this enigmatic man in a narrative that one early reviewer called an "enlightening tale of power, the wedding of art and technology, and tragedy."

Library Journal

Library Journal

The New York Times Book Review - Candice Millard

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

“Engrossing…. Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.  While Muybridge’s photographs are widely known, his personal life has been largely neglected, which seems incredible now that, in Edward Ball’s The Inventor and the Tycoon , we have the whole fascinating story, full of strange and surprising details.  Although Muybridge was a chameleon-like figure throughout his life, Ball uses exhaustive research and vivid details to pin him down so we can have a good look at him.”
—Candice Millard, New York Times Book Review


"Amusing and informative.... [The] two lead characters were clearly enough of a literary beguilement for the author to embark with enthusiasm on this project. What lifts The Inventor and the Tycoon...is that both of the principals can lay claim to achievements of national, and one might even say global, significance.... Mr. Ball details the story of the two men's long association with sympathy and flair."
—Simon Winchester, Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating…rich in history.  For author Edward Ball, winner of the National Book Award for Slaves in the Family, Muybridge's projections were the beginnings of the media culture that holds us in thrall today.”
—Matthew Price, Newsday

“Engaging…This story has all the elements of a fascinating HBO drama — wealth, greed, sex, adultery, genius, betrayal, murder, scandal and tragedy. At the center of Edward Ball's compelling yet complicated biographical saga of two formidable men during The Gilded Age of late 19th-century California is an unlikely alliance of invention whose peculiar tale is vividly telling of the place and times."
—Don Oldenburg, USA Today


“[A] remarkable story of the alliance between the eccentric inventor of the motion picture and the mogul who built the nation’s rails. It is a story that, for all its whirling parts and divagations, tells us a great deal about the crossroads of money and art in America.  What is most interesting about this book is the making of an astonishing artist, the marvelous photographs that attest to his genius, the rousing good yarn at the nexus of industry and art.”
—Marie Arana, Washington Post

“Superb…. Ball is an expert himself in kidnapping time and bringing dead men and women back to life.  On the surface, Leland Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge were an odd couple. Set securely in the context of the culture of the Gilded Age, The Inventor and the Tycoon provides a beautifully written account of the collaboration of these two ambitious, contentious and ultimately incompatible men.”
—Glenn C. Altschuler, San Francisco Chronicle

“In The Inventor and the Tycoon , Ball, author of the National Book Award-winning Slaves in the Family, has brilliantly fused the stories of two larger-than-life figures into a single glittering object: part social-cultural history, part melodrama, part chronicle of American self-invention.  one gallops through this book with undiminished ardor [and] Ball carefully sculpts prose of bright exuberance.”
—Dan Cryer, Boston Globe

 
“Fascinating…Ball's The Inventor and the Tycoon [is] a beefy and rambunctious history that is both a Victorian-age saga and true crime mystery, complete with a court trial that suggests the current-day obsession with celebrities gone bad. Inventor dwell[s] in a similar sinister underbelly as Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City."
—Mark Guarino, Chicago Tribune

“Sprawling and richly detailed…reads like a Hollywood-style thriller. The Inventor and the Tycoon tells the story of how wealthy mogul Leland Stanford and photographic wizard Edward Muybridge joined forces to create the moving picture, the technology that now dominates our image-flooded age.  This nonfiction book, which reads like a Hollywood-style thriller, is set mainly in the City by the Bay, with a raucous history of westward railroad expansion (with Stanford as lead) thrown in for added depth. Fans of both early photography and the history of the West will be rewarded by the story Ball weaves together.”
—Tyrone Beason, Seattle Times

“Ball tells this interesting tale of invention and mayhem in The Inventor and the Tycoon. Ball’s book pairs the stories of Muybridge, gifted photographer and one of the founders of motion pictures, and Stanford, creator of the Central Pacific Railroad and the university that still bears his name.  Detailed and thoroughly researched, The Inventor and the Tycoon is at its best describing the milieu of a frontier world where ordinary men like Leland Stanford could amass great fortunes, and where Edward Muybridge could find what genius he possessed (and evade justice in the process).”
—Tim Brady, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The Inventor and the Tycoon involves capitalism, money, murder, trains, horse racing , photography and the beginning of moving pictures. Ball has infused the famous and the infamous into a story so large it might as well be fiction.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“The Inventor and the Tycoon  displays Ball’s particular ability to mine history and create a compelling narrative that includes larger-than-life characters and reveals something about our inheritance.”
—Adam Parker, Charleston Post & Courier

"National Book Award winner Ball (Writing/Yale Univ.; The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA, 2007, etc.) returns with a complex story about railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and the murdering man who for a time was his protégé, pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge.... A skillfully written tale of technology and wealth, celebrity and murder and the nativity of today’s dominant art and entertainment medium.”—Kirkus

Kirkus Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

For biography lovers — those of us who can't get enough of the engaging and often instructive mix of happenstance, striving, conniving, satisfaction, and woe that factors into the lives of both the well known and unknown — dual biographies can add up to a double treat. Frequently about married couples, these twofers often focus on famous pairs like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom Hazel Rowley chronicled in Tête-à-Tête, or relatives of the author, such as Vikram's Seth's great-aunt and -uncle in Two Lives, or Francine du Plessix Gray's parents in Them.

Edward Ball's The Inventor and the Tycoon is a different sort of dual biography. Like Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, it zeroes in on the unlikely confluence of two disparate men, a brief convergence that resulted in the creation of something with enduring value: in the case of Winchester's duo, the Oxford English Dictionary, and in Ball's, the early stages of motion picture technology.

Ball, best known for his National Book Award–winning history of his family's slave-owning past, Slaves in the Family, explores the unexpected collaboration between railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and renowned photographer Eadweard Muybridge in nineteenth-century California — a meeting that brought art, technology, and money together with far-reaching cultural impact. The Inventor and the Tycoon captures not just the improvised, unpredictable life trajectories of its strong-willed characters — but also the emergence of California onto the national stage and a period of unprecedented technological advancement in American history. Its themes of ambition, greed, and progress on the backs of others remain ever relevant.

Neither of Ball's subjects would win points for charm. Leland Stanford, the financial wheeler-dealer behind the western half of the transcontinental railroad, was unscrupulous in business and taciturn in person. Eadweard Muybridge, the eccentric, British-born photographer and inventor, was for a time as renowned for having killed his wife's lover as for his iconic landscapes of the American West. His early photographic work, many reproductions of which are included in Ball's book, include breathtaking views of Yosemite, extraordinary panoramas of the still-young and rapidly growing city of San Francisco, and what Ball declares was "some of the first ethnography in North America."

Muybridge was an itinerant loner who reinvented himself multiple times, down to the very spelling of his name, which mutated over the years from Edward Muggeridge to Eadweard Muybridge, with several stops in between. Although he did his most important work as "Edward Muybridge" and ended up as the unpronounceable "Eadweard," Ball has chosen to use all of the variations, "attaching each to the time in his life that he assumed it." A more difficult challenge in writing about Muybridge is that the man left so few traces beyond his photographs. Ball meets this by filling in the gaps with conjectures and suppositions supported by circumstantial evidence. The result is a text filled with more "would haves" and "might haves" than you usually see in biographies.

Yet as Ball reminds us repeatedly, both men left lasting legacies. Stanford, "the West's most famous symbol of greed," who was often referred to derisively as the Octopus for the way he engulfed smaller companies, was in large part responsible for the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad. He amassed an astounding fortune, but, lacking an heir and a raison d'être after his only son's death at fifteen, he changed his will and redirected his wealth toward the founding and endowment of the university in Palo Alto that bears his name. As for Muybridge, Ball makes the claim that he "was arguably the inventor of moving pictures" — although he does acknowledge the contributions of Thomas Edison, Étienne-Jules Marey, Louis and Auguste Lumière, and Georges Méliès, among others.

Stanford first hired Muybridge in 1872 to document his opulent Gilded Age mansions — "the rooms like tombs full of money" —first in Sacramento and later in San Francisco on what came to be known as Nob Hill. (The San Francisco house, built in 1876, collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, rendering Muybridge's photographic record even more valuable.) While their association never developed into true friendship, it broadened for a few years into a respectful patron-artist relationship fueled by Stanford's money and their shared interest in capturing time and motion on film.

Stanford was passionate about gadgets, machines, automatons, and, especially, horses — which, Ball notes, were "becoming objects of nostalgia and decoration" in the wake of the newly completed cross- country railroad. He was obsessed with the question of whether the hooves of his beloved horses actually all left the ground at the same time during a trot or gallop, a phenomenon known as "unsupported transit." It was a riddle that Muybridge's experiments in stop-motion photography helped solve: He caught the hooves suspended in midair. These elaborate experiments at the tycoon's Palo Alto Stock Farm eventually led to Muybridge's creation of the first moving picture projector, which he infelicitously called the zoopraxiscope. He unveiled his invention in the showy Pompeian Room of Stanford's San Francisco mansion in 1880, creating a sensation with his "Horse in Motion" photographs.

This soirée took place, incredibly enough, not six years after Muybridge stood trial for his life for murder. In 1874, after learning that he was probably not the father of his baby boy, the enraged photographer stalked his young wife Flora's lover and shot him point- blank and without remorse in a Calistoga miners' lodge. This revenge killing, which Ball places at the physical and dramatic center of his book, led to instant notoriety and a sensational trial in Napa. One of the three lawyers who represented Muybridge, Wirt Pendegast, was a friend of Stanford's who had earned the tycoon's appreciation when, as a California senator, he had pushed laws in the Central Pacific railroad's favor. Ball vividly conveys Pendegast's brilliant defense strategy — essentially, temporary insanity — and eloquent summary argument before the all-male jury, eleven of whom were married, "which made them perhaps more likely to sympathize with Muybridge, the enraged husband."

Readers should be warned that The Inventor and the Tycoon, like the early motion pictures it discusses, is a bit jerky in its execution — but it is well worth sticking with beyond its shaky start. Unsure where to begin, Ball unfortunately front-loads his book with lots of throat- clearing (both a foreword and a preface!) and repetitive explanations of how his unlikely duo, "[u]sing horses and cameras and speed-built a technology of vision," and introduced "the element of speed to vision." Rather than build to the meeting of his two subjects and Muybridge's notorious crime, he jumps in headfirst and then splashes around in time to right his narrative. Eschewing chronology and trying to heighten momentum (if not suspense), Ball intercuts his various strands cinematographically, but the strain of integrating two such loosely connected biographies shows. The splicing and editing, particularly in his constant interruptions of the riveting courtroom drama of Muybridge's murder trial, often feel forced and disjointed.

Yet despite these structural difficulties, Ball's generously illustrated, richly researched book offers no shortage of meaty material to chew over. In addition to the life stories of two noteworthy men, it provides an introduction to nineteenth-century California history — complete with its surprising political landscape (Stanford, although never popular, was briefly governor and later a state senator) and woeful record on human rights vis-à-vis the state's large population of Chinese and Mexican workers. In addition, the book offers a primer on the history of photographic technology from daguerrotypes to wet plates and celluloid. Ball's well-chosen illustrations lend eloquent support to his text; one especially interesting pair demonstrates the striking difference between Muybridge's 1875 photograph of a cemetery printed with and without the photographer's signature "cloud effect."

The Inventor and the Tycoon spools reels of topics meriting discussion, including parallels between our current gilded age of techno- billionaires and "the poisonously rich" of Stanford's era. Issues of unethical and often downright illegal financial maneuvers — "a classic two-sets-of-books accounting scheme," deliberate overbilling, and bilking the federal government out of vast sums — sound uncomfortably familiar. In flagging Thomas Edison's penchant for peremptorily staking claims to others' "borrowed" ideas by filing "caveats," or announcements of research plans with the U.S. Patent Office, Ball's book also raises interesting questions about intellectual property and the fine line between sharing and poaching innovations. Add to all this the perennial conversation about whether Muybridge's act of murder really was justifiable — temporary insanity? a crime of passion? defense of marital rights? — and you've got enough material to fuel several lively discussions.

Or make a movie.

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Reviewer: Heller McAlpin