The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  If not here, Muybridge may have stood in the Music and Art Room, a gallery twenty yards long whose wine-red walls were hung with fifty-some landscapes and portraits, and whose ceiling was painted with medallions depicting the faces of Rubens, Van Dyck, Beethoven, Mozart, Raphael, and Michelangelo. “Few palaces of Europe excel this house,” said one newswriter, who may not have been to Europe but who knew the fantasies of Americans who looked up to the Old World.

  Or he could have been in one of the other downstairs parlors, or in the library, the ballroom, or the aviary. Huge mantelpieces and elaborate rosewood fittings dominated each of them, and a grove of furnishing spread to the edges in leather, silk, brocade, or velvet. Wherever Muybridge was, he had to clear away the crush of decor and work around chandeliers heavy as cannon that dangled just above the head, because he needed a straight thirty feet for what he had to accomplish. Muybridge made pictures that were very different from the imagery that decorated the walls, ceilings, and floors of the Stanford mansion. His pictures were not massive, like most of the fixtures, and they were not imitations of art found in Europe. They were evanescent and thin, they were pictures flung on air.

  A scattering of guests arrived in twos and threes, with buttons on bulges, lace on bosoms. Some were politicians, like the newly elected governor of California, George Perkins, and Reuben Fenton, U.S. senator from New York and former governor. Behind the lawmakers came a phalanx of rich people, a few of them as rich as their hosts, the Stanfords. In this group were the neighbors, Charles Crocker and his wife, Mary Ann Deming, who lived two blocks away in a brown house only a little less grand than the Stanfords’ palazzo. There was also a young woman, Jennie Flood, an heiress in the new California manner. She came with her father, James Flood, a silver miner who had gotten rich on specie metal from Nevada and built a supreme and impressive house around the corner, at California and Mason Streets. Lesser elites and their spouses filled out the invitation list—a judge here, a doctor there.

  One of the downstairs salons of the Stanford house, the Pompeian Room, in which every square foot of surface stalks the eyes (Illustration Credit 1.3)

  Servants brought in drink, gaslight drank the air. The woman of the house, Mrs. Jane Stanford, presented herself, tall, ample, and bejeweled. Jane Stanford cultivated a gothic look. She liked to drape herself in crimson velvet, with pools of hem and long trains behind, old lace circling her neck. She was sure to be wearing an arm’s length of opals or a parure of diamonds consisting of necklace, bracelets, and earrings.

  The night promised a pageant of some kind, but two men already radiated something of the theater. Leland Stanford and Edward Muybridge were the best-known men at the party—Stanford for his money, Muybridge for his pictures (as well as the other thing), and together they inspired most of the hushed chatter. They had known each other for almost ten years and had spent a lot of that time talking and wondering about a single subject: the gait of horses. A narrow topic, yes, but one on the mind of many in the year 1880. Everyone knew that Stanford was horse-mad, and that he and Muybridge had formed a bond over horses. It was Stanford’s belief that during a gallop, horses at some point in their stride lift all four hooves off the ground, that in effect, they become airborne. No one knew, really—the legs of a horse moved too fast to tell with the eye. Stanford had asked Muybridge to solve his problem, to prove or disprove his hypothesis, which horse people referred to as the theory of “unsupported transit.”

  Some of the talk that Stanford aroused would not have flattered him. At least some of the guests at the party, perhaps the politicians and the more middle-class group, inevitably regarded their hosts with ambivalence—envy would not be too strong a word, and maybe a touch of fear. Almost twenty years before, Leland Stanford and several others had founded the Central Pacific Railroad, with Stanford in the role of company president. The firm, using big government subsidies, and the sweat of perhaps twenty thousand Chinese immigrants, had built the western half of the transcontinental line, the 850-mile track over the Sierra Mountains that linked California to the eastern states. In the early years of the Central Pacific, Stanford had been an object of fealty. Newspaper accounts painted him as a great benefactor of California: he brought work and wealth and even glory to the West, his admirers said, justifying the stage name of California, the Golden State. But after a rosy flush, Stanford’s reputation had fallen. The Central Pacific and its sister company, the Southern Pacific, which Stanford also ran, had built a transportation monopoly. The Central and Southern had acquired millions of acres of public land and looked at times to be bigger than the government of California, which they seemed to run to their liking. Stanford’s railroads picked up a nickname: “the Octopus.” Newspapers ran cartoons that showed Stanford and his partners as a watery beast, tentacles reaching out to strangle farmers, factories, and politicians. Stanford became the West’s most famous symbol of greed. Not long before this evening’s event, several thousand marchers, followers of the Workingmen’s Party of California, had come up Nob Hill and surrounded his house, calling out for Stanford to be lynched.

  Edward Muybridge was not quite equal to Stanford in the number of news items that trailed him, but his name was also in print throughout America. Seven years earlier, in 1873, Muybridge had made national headlines when his camera first brought motion to a halt. He had photographed a horse, one of Stanford’s, in the middle of a full trot, making it stop in the air. In the forty years of photography, no one had done anything like it. Though the picture was blurry, no one had trapped such a tiny instant in an image. Five years later, in 1878, Muybridge had set up twelve cameras to catch twelve slices of a horse’s run. It was while taking pictures of a mare called Sallie Gardner and a stallion named Occident that Muybridge had first split the gallop into many parts. His photographs were seen and admired around the world, his name and accomplishment published in scientific journals like Nature, popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly, and in their counterparts in England, France, and Germany. The multiple-camera experiment made Muybridge into an international celebrity. Some saw him as an artist, others regarded him as a scientist, and he did not shy from playing either role. Some understood him to be a conjurer, because he had done something so very elusive as to appear impossible.

  There was an uneasy balance to the relationship between the artist and Stanford, the Octopus. The two men helped each other, but to Stanford, Muybridge was something less than an equal: he was a friend, but also a subordinate. The photographer wasn’t exactly an employee. To make the pictures on show tonight, Muybridge had worked on and off for eight years without a fee. Instead, Stanford had paid for the photographer’s giant expenses—a mountain of equipment, several assistants, horses and a track, and mechanisms that added speed to the cameras. The two shared interests, but Stanford’s money was in charge.

  Both Stanford and Muybridge would have remembered the time almost ten years before when the photographer first worked for the family, taking pictures of their house in Sacramento, the California capital, one hundred miles upstate. As a commercial photographer, Muybridge dutifully made a portfolio of that Stanford residence, the place the family had lived before building the mansion with rooms that had names.

  Muybridge had gone to some length to cultivate Stanford’s attention, but their friendship looked off kilter in other ways. The two neither looked nor acted anything alike. Even in their choice of clothes, the host and his entertainer flaunted the separate worlds in which they lived. Unlike the silk-and-velvet-attired Stanfords, Muybridge conspicuously dressed down. Photographs from this period show him in rough outdoor gear—a loose and rumpled cotton jacket and weather-beaten pants with strings on the cuffs. He had another physical signature, a corncob pipe. People who knew him said he loaded up the pipe in the middle of conversation, sometimes at the midpoint of a sentence. The pipe helped Muybridge fill out the role of a rustic, the man with the floppy hat who didn’t care what people thought.

  There was also his speech. Eve
ryone would have noticed that Muybridge had an English accent, a residue of his birth and upbringing near London. His diction was respectable, although not precious. He had not attended university, but his English was careful enough that he could compose an artful sentence in front of an audience and keep his consonants in line. The speech of Leland and Jane Stanford, notwithstanding their exorbitant surroundings, showed their plain American roots. Both had been born and raised in upper New York State, where Leland was the son of farmers and odd jobbers, and the former Jane Lathrop the daughter of merchants.

  Their behavior also contrasted them. People who saw Muybridge and Stanford pointed out that the photographer was agitated and sharp, while the rail man was phlegmatic, almost wordless.

  Stanford was nowhere near as nimble as Muybridge, his lithe artist-in-residence. Stanford was fifty-five, his body thick and thickening. He had begun to carry an ivory-inlaid, gold-tipped cane, perhaps for show as well as to manage his heavy trudge. At the top of his barrel-like body was an oval head and a face seemingly without angles, with a trim beard, groomed, dark and speckled gray, and a full run of straight, graying hair, much combed, on his head. In public Stanford was thoroughly adorned, often in tails, low vests, and white shirts starched wooden, with ribbon ties and mother-of-pearl studs. His black shoes shined into dark mirrors.

  The slow-moving and formal Stanford played the accustomed host. He had been a politician for some time and spent a term as governor of California, so for him a reception was common as breakfast. But despite his practiced public life, he was taciturn, and a hundred words came from others for every syllable Stanford spoke. He could afford to listen, or perhaps he could do little else—his fortune meant he spent most days besieged with supplicants for his money.

  Everyone called him “Governor” Stanford. His years in politics were long past, but he liked the honorific. He had quit politics for business, for the railroad. If you asked, however, Stanford might have said (adopting a pose) that actually he had quit politics for his horses. At the family estate, thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, he collected horses, not three or four, but one hundred, give or take—racers and bay mares, thoroughbreds and standardbreds, ponies and trotters. Stanford’s love of horses rivaled that for his wife, Jane, and son, Leland Jr. The horse farm, at the place they had named Palo Alto (high tree, in Spanish), was the centerpoint of his life. The Palo Alto Stock Farm, as it was known, had begun as a diversion from business, but it had turned into an obsession—a riding and training laboratory. At Palo Alto, Stanford could imagine himself as a researcher in equestrian enigmas. In this scenario Edward Muybridge, the photographer who had set up an elaborate studio at Palo Alto, served as his investigator, the man assigned to the scientific study of movement—or, appropriately for a rail-powered fortune, “animal locomotion.”

  Tonight, Edward Muybridge would cease to be a photographer who framed up his client’s possessions. From this point forward he would be an impresario, a man with a new and remarkable show. He could present himself as the builder of an apparatus, born from speed, that captured time. Edward Muybridge knew about acceleration: it was all around him in his world, in the telegraph and in Stanford’s speeding railroad. Tonight he would introduce the element of speed to vision.

  The photographer stood in the middle of the gaping and much decorated parlor, his hands on a machine. It was a modified “magic lantern,” a projector of glass slides, which Muybridge had rebuilt to create his special effect. The projector stood on a large table, a boxy wooden device with brass fittings and a big lens, three feet tall and about as long. When the projector was up and running it blasted out light.a Muybridge the engineer touched the lens, turned a wheel, and adjusted a burning gas jet of hydrogen and oxygen on a brick of lime, the source of the piercing light. He aimed the lens at a screen placed at the far wall to catch the pictures. And, fiddling with his machine, the photographer cued the pictures that he had come to shove into motion.

  Leland Stanford placed his guests in the room. Chairs were occupied, gaslight dimmed. Muybridge picked up a glass disk the size of a dinner plate and fitted it in his machine. And on the screen came a blinking of light, a throbbing of something, and finally a big trembling mass. The look of a horse, almost the size of life, which was running! A picture in motion of a galloping horse.

  As Muybridge whirled the disk in his projector, the horse on the screen seemed to run along for two seconds—and then it started again, repeating the same two seconds, running them over and over. The machine released its flood of pictures, weightless, coming from nowhere, a lighted nothing jittering in space, in the clutter of the Pompeian Room. Muybridge stopped the device, and the ghost disappeared. He turned off the gas jets, and the blasting light went black.

  Abe Edgington, a trotter owned by Leland Stanford, appears twelve times in one and a half seconds, starring in one of the first of many “serial photographs” that Muybridge made at the Palo Alto Stock Farm. (Illustration Credit 1.4)

  Click here to view a larger version of this image.

  Muybridge’s projector, the “zoopraxiscope” (Illustration Credit 1.5)

  The idea of moving pictures had appeared in plenty of heads before this. Thanks to the zoetrope, a living room toy, the idea would have occurred countless times to thousands of people. The zoetrope, a popular gadget during the 1860s and ’70s, looked like a little drum mounted on an axle. It worked like a cartoon flipbook, only the drawings were lined up side by side. If you spun it around and peered into it, an acrobat tumbled over and over, or a couple danced a short and endless waltz. Zoetropes were common amusements in homes around America and Europe. By this time, there were also one or two projecting machines that threw little comics and sketches on a wall, and showmen who made a living with them.

  But the Muybridge apparatus was different from all that. Muybridge’s pictures were not like a flipbook, and neither were they posed. He photographed live action, he captured and stored real time, and he played back the scene he had photographed. His cameras grabbed many pictures in a second, he had hired an artist to paint the pictures on a glass disk, and he showed this virtual world based in photographs to an audience. He took his audience out of their routine consciousness and made them into something they had not been—a crowd of mesmerized spectators. By doing these things, all at once, Muybridge brought a new thing into the world.

  Only a single newspaper clipping documents this night at the Stanford mansion. And yet it is not too much to call this occasion the birth hour of the visual media. Movies, television, video games, the twitching images of the Internet user—Muybridge’s pictures contain the primal DNA of all of them. All the media have at their crux images that move, and all of them have a spectator, frozen and fascinated.

  If you had to choose a single trait to characterize everyday life in the twenty-first century, it could be our screenophilia, and the common obsession with moving pictures. The attraction to images that dance and play, the instinctual turn toward the lighted screen, in the hand or on the desk, or on the wall, the fascination with a piece of recorded time cut to shape—all this links the world’s billions in a community of spectatorship. Edward Muybridge and Leland Stanford made the initial template of this visual life. They identified the genetic strand that threads through all media, the moving images that combine in endless mutations on every screen. And they introduced their connecting element, which is speed. The Muybridge pictures accelerated the eye, doubling and tripling and multiplying every glance, quickening vision and communication. After the fast-talking Muybridge and his laconic friend Stanford had finished, we became immobilized as spectators, fixed every day in silence and looking, propelled by screenophilia to attach ourselves to chains and networks of pictures.

  The San Francisco papers made no reference to the reactions of Stanford’s guests that night on Nob Hill, but it may be that some of them wondered about things. It might have happened that at least a few in the audience with a little wine in their stomachs looked over
at Edward Muybridge and his projector and felt a flutter of anxiety—not at the invention, but at the inventor. Muybridge was well known to everyone in the room. Stanford’s friends had heard about his photography. They had heard about the horse pictures, about Muybridge’s trick of capturing time. But like everyone else in California, the well-heeled spectators in the parlor knew there was more to the thin photographer than his work. They knew about the crime.

  When the murder happened, the newspapers indulged a period of frenzy around it, an early instance of a news media rush. California’s papers covered the crime, and after that they followed the trial, and later on, the aftermath and all the stories that trickled out about the famous, and now infamous, photographer. Muybridge appeared in the papers for months, and not only in California. Thanks to the telegraph, another harbinger of speed, and the Associated Press, a clipping service that hastened the spread of news, he drew headlines in Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and around America.

  On this night, as virtual worlds of all kinds first came into focus, more than a few people in this audience of viewers looked over at Muybridge and remembered all this. Years later, Muybridge would write about the night he showed his pictures and his projector, the night he cued up a stored memory and replayed it. He described it several times, and each time he wrote an almost identical version of the story. Muybridge remembered that after he threw the galloping horse onto the screen, he turned to Stanford and described what they were seeing.