The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  He now had two pieces of intellectual property in hand. Marketing came next.

  During the late 1800s, inventors hustled their goods face to face at trade shows, and the biggest shows were the new “world’s fairs.” It had been ten years since the first one, the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, which had risen up in a vast iron and glass hall, dreamily remembered as the Crystal Palace. The template for a dozen trade shows that succeeded it, the Great Exhibition brought together thousands of exhibitors, millions of ticket buyers, and a fascinated press. It showed off both the machines of industry and the industrial state of mind, in which science pointed to mechanization, and inventions looked like the path to the future. (Muygridge had immigrated to America in 1850, so he had missed the event, but he no doubt studied it in the New York newspapers.) The Great Exhibition produced imitators, and throughout the 1850s similar trade shows went up in New York, Munich, and Paris, each pulling in enormous crowds and making pots of money for its sponsors.

  In 1862, a new world’s fair came together in London, the so-called International Exhibition, housed, like the previous one, in an enormous trade hall. Invitations to exhibitors went out (rent for space supplemented ticket sales), and a site was cleared on land in the neighborhood of South Kensington. Muygridge put in an application; he would rent the smallest possible exhibition space to show off his two inventions.

  The monstrous Exhibition Palace, covering sixteen acres, opened to visitors in May 1862, an H-shaped big box in tan stucco. It had fifty arched windows running like two-story piano keys along the four-hundred-yard facade, two long wings set at right angles on each end of the main structure, and two giant glass domes for a roofline. Inside, upward of twenty-eight thousand exhibitors from thirty-six countries, many of them small-change inventors like Muygridge, competed for the attention of a swarming public. Here was an ocean of apparatus—cameras, textiles, scientific instruments, steel, nonbreakable pottery, steam engines, conveyors, pumps, fans, shuttlecocks, sluices, stamping tools. The tide of industry flooded in and washed the eyes with an unintelligible spectacle.

  In London, a wing of the main building in the International Exhibition of 1862, where Muybridge showed his patents (Illustration Credit c16.1)

  According to the catalog, the inventions of “E. J. Muygridge” occupied two marvelously obscure corners. His Exhibit 5310a lay somewhere in the rooms devoted to publishing, in an annex on the north face of the building. There on a shelf, below and above other shelves, a handful of intaglios struck from Muygridge’s patented process (“specimens of the inventor’s plate-printing”) were framed amid a clutter of other paper. To their left stood a display of ornamental bookbinding, and to the right, the exhibit of the British and Foreign Bible Society, “191 versions of the Holy Scriptures in various languages.”

  Muygridge’s washing machine, Exhibit 2037, appeared at the west end of the vast hall in the gallery labeled “Machinery in General.” It sat high above the floor on a shelf, flanked on one side by a display of drainpipe and wire netting and on the other by a pile of leather hoses and belts.

  It would have been an easy matter for the six million visitors to the 1862 world’s fair to walk past the two tiny Muygridge exhibits and see nothing of them, which is what they did.6 Meanwhile, throughout the summer of 1862, Muygridge waited, sitting around in his apartment at 16 Southampton Street, off the Strand. The first-time inventor hoped some manufacturer might step forward with an offer on one or the other patent. But the rich buyers who might have paid for his ingenuity and given him a leg up into the bourgeoisie stayed away.

  The big trade show plan failed him, but France beckoned. After London, Paris comprised the other big market where inventors might find buyers, so Muygridge paid a fee to the French government to extend his English patents to France (receiving brevet d’invention no. 1198). He wrote his uncle, Henry Selfe, in Australia: “I will shortly leave for Europe on business that may detain me for some months,” and sometime in 1862 crossed the English Channel, fitted out with hope, to transplant himself and his sales pitches to Paris.7

  At this point in the story, we have to make room for unintended consequences. In Paris, a new character appears like an eruption, as intaglios and washing machines fade into the background, and Muygridge discovers a fresh obsession—photography.

  First, however, a newspaperman takes notice. Although Muygridge had left America two years before, a San Francisco reporter who was in France thought his appearance in Paris was important enough to send word of a sighting. “There has been a great influx of Californians [to Paris] within the past few weeks,” the Alta California said in a bulletin dated October 24. “E. J. Muygridge was here a few days since.”8

  Initially, Muygridge’s trip to France took the shape of a sales call, but the Paris junket turned into the occasion for his leap into photography, the art that would occupy him for the rest of his life. The evidence accumulates that Muygridge got involved with cameras in the fall of 1862. In the letter to his Australian uncle, the inventor said that he was taking up offices at 9 rue Cadet, Paris, in the 9th arrondissement, and that people should send correspondence to him there. The address, it turns out, was that of the photography studio Maison Hélios operated by the Berthaud brothers. Muygridge used the Berthauds’ studio as his business address, while he probably slept at a hotel.

  Paris, at this time, had an obsession for photography. In a book published the year Muygridge turned up in France, a pair of art critics surveyed the young art, waxing excitedly about the French fixation on the camera. “Words cannot describe the almost giddy infatuation that has taken hold of the Parisian public,” wrote Léopold Ernest Mayer and Pierre-Louis Pierson, in Photography Considered as an Art and an Industry. “The sun rises each day only to find innumerable instruments leveled at the horizon in anticipation—everyone, from the scholar to the respectable bourgeois, having become experimenters under the camera’s influence.”9 Photographers in Paris were public figures, thanks to Félix Nadar, a master of publicity stunts. The photographer Nadar drew headlines when, as a deft showman, he went up in balloons to photograph Paris from above—no one had ever before photographed a city from the sky—and used the flare of gas jets to make pictures underground, in the sewers and catacombs. When Muygridge arrived, Nadar was ballooning over Paris, a caper that resulted in a caricature by Honoré Daumier, published in the newspaper Le Boulevard, which showed the photographer looking down at rooftops through his camera.10 To an English inventor, Nadar must have seemed a romantic and superb figure.

  Circumstantial evidence implies that Muygridge learned about cameras, photo chemicals, and lenses at Maison Hélios, his contact address in Paris. As I mentioned earlier, the evidence consists of a name, on the one hand, and a logo, on the other. The Berthaud brothers named their business after Helios, the Greek god of the sun, and ran a photographers’ guild, Société Hélios. Muygridge appropriated both the name of the Berthauds’ studio and its logo—the word “Helios” with rays of light emanating from the center—when he established himself in San Francisco as a photographer four years later.

  In Paris, Muygridge got nowhere with his inventions. He sold nothing, and he returned to London. One trouble was a glut in the washing machine market. Some twenty-six designs for similar devices had already received patents in France during the five years before Muygridge entered the clothes-cleaning trade.11 As a result, Muygridge had time on his hands, which he seems to have spent at the photography studio, Maison Hélios.

  Edward Muygridge seems to have had a distant cousin, an influential figure in London politics, Sir Henry Muggeridge. Sir Henry was both an alderman in London and a former sheriff of the city. He must have been a formidable presence in a room. In a photograph, he is stout like a good Victorian, has a wraparound “chin curtain” beard, and looks like a walrus in costume, wearing the regalia of a Freemason, a getup of skirts, jacket with braids, and epaulettes. (He belonged to the city’s Lion and Lamb lodge.) As sheriff during the 1850s, Si
r Henry had been knighted after running security during the state visit from France of Emperor Louis Napoleon. But his job in the constabulary took up just part of his time—the sheriff also served as an alderman on the Court of Common Council, London’s governing assembly.

  Between his two political posts, Sir Henry felt at home with both preening businessmen and gin-racked criminals. In 1859, at age forty-five, Edward Muygridge’s cousin acquired another line of power when he helped to found a new finance company, the Bank of London. Within three years, the Bank of London, with Sir Henry as one of ten directors, had a branch on Threadneedle Street and another near Charing Cross, reported £300,000 on deposit, and posted a superb profit for investors.12

  Henry Muggeridge and Edward Muygridge were two leaves on the same family tree, with Sir Henry fifteen years older than Edward.13 Both came from Muggeridge families in Banstead, a village ten miles southwest of London. Sir Henry had been born and raised there, while Edward Muygridge’s father, John Muggeridge, also had been born in Banstead, before his family had moved to the town of Kingston, a bit to the north. To possess a well-placed cousin when he was angling to change careers and looking for the main chance was a circumstance not to be ignored, and Muygridge had already turned to his London relatives, the more successful ones in his father’s family, when he needed a job as a teenager. This much is conjecture, but to judge from the strange veering in Muygridge’s life in the year 1863, it appears Sir Henry helped to guide our protagonist’s next move.

  When he returned to London from France, Muygridge would have seen occasional items in the papers about deals made by the Bank of London and Sir Henry. He might have merely read the notices, or, more likely, he heard from his own family that Henry’s new bank (Remember your father’s cousin?) was piling up opportunities, and tracked the man down. The banking success of Henry Muggeridge begins to explain why and how that year Edward Muygridge suddenly decided to try his hand in another area, namely finance, and to fit himself into the unlikely role of an investor and capitalist.

  Edward Muygridge was living as a changeling, adopting positions and putting on masks: inventor … would-be photographer.… He had seen how precarious the life of an inventor could be, how industry threw only occasional scraps to the actual innovators of machines and processes. And although the photography tryout in Paris might have gone well, he remained an amateur at that. Banking? Muygridge had no experience with money, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  The 1860s in London were high times for bankers and financiers, a relatively fresh class of economic masters in the capital of capitalism. During the early nineteenth century, much of England’s wealth had come from the new, dirty industries—coal, textile mills, and iron. The factory became the hinge of the economy, and the cult of the machine combined with masses of workers to make England into the workshop of Europe. That was in the period of Muygridge’s childhood. But for the ten years that Muygridge was away in America, England had started a second kind of capitalist revolution. New money flowed into banking, joint-stock companies, and insurance, and finance replaced industry as the prime mover of economic life. By 1860, the owners of financial houses in London—Barings, Lloyds, the new Bank of London—overtook factory owners as the richest class of businessmen.14

  Sir Henry Muggeridge, the sheriff-turned-capitalist, was himself a first-time operator in finance, but it is not impossible that he showed his cousin Edward Muygridge how he had done it. Muygridge as a striver stood outside gentlemen’s circles, and if he wanted to set up his own bank—which for some reason, he did want to do—he had to follow some mentor. Sir Henry, the heavyset Mason in his father’s circle, would have been the obvious beacon.

  The background for this weird turn, Muygridge’s chase after money, involved a new law in finance on the one hand, and an old war on the other. During the late 1850s, Parliament had changed the laws around partnerships, allowing for joint-stock companies while simultaneously limiting the liability of shareholders. The result, after 1860, was a speculation bubble in finance. Dubious investment schemes and stock offerings spread like weeds, along with stories of quick fortunes. In this climate Muygridge came to think that he, too, might make some easy money, and, improbably, the event that drew him into finance was England’s war in the Crimea. The Crimean War, a fight for influence over the decaying Ottoman Empire, seated in Istanbul, was waged around the Black Sea between Russia on one side and France and Britain on the other. It ended in 1856 with a treaty that left Istanbul a colonial dependent of Western Europe. Acquiescing to London, the Ottoman premier, Sultan Abdülmecid, opened the financial markets of Istanbul to English investment companies, and some speculators in London thought new fortunes might be had from the Ottoman spoils.

  Edward Muygridge, donning the financier’s uniform of spats and top hat, formed two companies to raise money. Both existed on paper, but neither had visible staff. As a vehicle to raise money, he set up the Ottoman Company, a brokerage firm, with eight other directors. “This company is formed at the express solicitation of merchants and others engaged in trading and monetary operations in the Ottoman Empire,” said the prospectus, probably a lie.15 As a former dealer in art prints, Muygridge approved the design of the Ottoman Company’s printed shares. The picture engraved on the stock offering showed a man wearing a turban and seated on a camel. (At this time no camels existed in the Ottoman Empire, but no matter—the Oriental fantasy played well.)

  In November 1865, Muygridge and seven other directors formed a second entity, which they called the Bank of Turkey.16 Despite its name, it was neither a firm in Istanbul (it was in London) nor a bank with branches (it had a post box), but a paper company intended to loan money (once it was raised). These two firms, the Ottoman Company and the Bank of Turkey, were interlocking schemes: the idea was to use the first to fund the second. The Ottoman Company sold itself in shares in order to finance the Bank of Turkey, which possessed a limited franchise to operate in Istanbul but as yet had no clients, the shares guaranteeing a right to the bank’s profits, if they appeared. It was a shaky plan, a glimmer on the Oriental bubble then swelling through the London money markets.

  A stock certificate for the Ottoman Company, Muygridge’s investment firm in London, ca. 1865 (Illustration Credit c16.2)

  Muygridge took out new rooms, moving from his Covent Garden apartment to a better address, 4 Brompton Square, in Knightsbridge. The Covent Garden rooms had been in the inventors’ district, the Knightsbridge place sat squarely in the financial center. It was the second time he had positioned himself in the London geography of the business he wanted to join. In Knightsbridge, it would be easier to look like a financier. And, as he had done with his inventions, Muygridge in his Brompton Square rooms waited for the money to present itself. Unfortunately, as had happened with the washing machine, the expected swarm of investors stayed away.

  He walked central London, the same streets he had traipsed as a boy twenty years before. But on these new promenades he dressed in striped vest and trousers with silk piping, clothes to imitate as best he could the appearance of a man of means. At age thirty-five, Muygridge thought he could turn himself into a dealmaker.

  Once he was in, he couldn’t stop, and in 1865 Muygridge added a third start-up, this time with an American slant, an investing scheme he called Austin Consolidated Silver Mines. Six other directors joined him on that paper board, convinced it might work and pay everyone a fortune. Austin Silver was Muygridge’s attempt to cash in on the money rush around the Comstock Lode, the big ore strike in Nevada that had turned into a fever just as he had left America, in 1860. He hoped that to London investors, Nevada silver might look like the new California gold, and that his years in the American West would turn him into an expert on mining. He had seen Nevada, the faraway place with its strange frontier society and casual murders between miners fighting over claims. The prospectus for Austin Silver said that Muygridge, the lead director, was “well acquainted with the silver mines,” which was not at all true. It
also said that the company planned to buy four mines on the Reese River, near the Nevada town of Austin, “and set up quartz mills at each mine.” (Quartz mills were the most advanced mining technology at the time, involving machines that used quartz-tipped teeth to crush ore.) The chairman of Austin Silver was the U.S. consul in London, one Freeman H. Morse, and the company put itself on sale at £5 per share. It looked like a genuine venture.

  He placed the newspaper advertisements, an attempt to raise £100,000, putting twenty thousand shares of Austin Silver on sale. Muygridge and company asked for a leveraged investment of ten shillings per share, or one half of face value, with the balance on possession. The terms were reasonable, and they were also doomed.17

  It is possible to imagine Edward Muygridge presenting one, two, or all three of his companies in pitch meetings, pushing his schemes to businessmen in heavy mustaches, cigars in their hands. Most of his prospects would have been superior to him in education, in experience, and maybe in emotional stability. (Muygridge was single and itinerant, while many investors were married, stay-in-England types.) It is possible to imagine Muygridge gesturing with his arms in the air, his chin rising, voice falling on the word “Nevada,” spraying a little fantasy about a gush of money.18

  The investment bubble burst in the second half of 1865, and Muygridge’s money dreams popped with it. After an important railroad company sold a large stock offering at a discount and then went bankrupt, the money markets shook. Interest rates rose from 3 percent to 7 percent, to 10 percent. In May 1866, the big investment firm Overend, Gurney & Co. failed, carrying down debts of £19,000,000, emptying thousands of wallets, and triggering a run on joint-stock firms. Bust followed boom in a panic that continued into the summer. Muygridge’s three speculations—the bank, the brokerage, and the silver mine—all fell apart. He looked to his calling card tray on Brompton Square for envelopes with investors’ notes and found nothing. The money rush to the Ottoman dream and the Nevada promise both came to an end, and buyers beat at the doors to get their money out.