The Inventor and the Tycoon Read online

  Illustration Credit col1.1

  Illustration Credit col1.2

  Frontispiece photographs: (top) Eadweard Muybridge, self-portrait, swinging a railroad lineman’s pickax, 1879; (bottom) Leland Stanford (center, a hammer in his right hand) during the “last spike” ceremony at the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869

  Copyright © 2013 by Edward Ball

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover illustration © Wellcome Library, London

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ball, Edward

  The inventor and the tycoon : a Gilded Age murder and the birth of moving pictures / Edward Ball. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Muybridge, Eadweard, 1830–1904. 2. Muybridge, Eadweard, 1830–1904—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Stanford, Leland, 1824–1893. 4. Trials (Murder)—California—San Francisco. 5. Cinematography—United States—History. 6. Motion pictures—United States—History. 7. Cinematographers—California—Biography. 8. Businesspeople—California—Biography. I. Title.

  TR849.M84B35 2012

  777—dc23 2012019977

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53549-6

  v3.1

  for Candace

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword: Floodwaters

  Preface

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1. The Stanford Entertainment

  Chapter 2. The Yellow Jacket Murder

  Chapter 3. God of the Sun

  Chapter 4. Harnessing the Elephant

  Chapter 5. The Photographer

  Chapter 6. Flora Downs

  Chapter 7. Occident

  PART TWO

  Chapter 8. Harry Larkyns

  Chapter 9. The Octopus

  Chapter 10. Little Harry

  Chapter 11. King Eadweard

  Chapter 12. Marital Rights

  Chapter 13. The Grocer

  Chapter 14. The Immigrant

  Chapter 15. The Trial

  Chapter 16. The Speculator

  Chapter 17. Verdicts

  PART THREE

  Chapter 18. The Horse Lovers

  Chapter 19. Prestidigitator

  Chapter 20. Motion, Study

  Chapter 21. Celluloid

  Chapter 22. The Flood

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  FOREWORD

  Floodwaters

  The man with beaten clothes could be forgiven for his crime, because he had invented a new way of seeing.

  In the late 1800s, in California, the photographer Edward Muybridge and the railroad capitalist Leland Stanford, whose lives and personalities differed sharply, made a strange and unforgettable discovery. Using horses and cameras and speed, Muybridge, the creative one, and Stanford, the rich one, built a technology of vision. Together they married the camera to the railroad and became the inventors of moving pictures, the basis of our culture of screens—handheld ones and televisions, theater screens and screens on counters and desks. For this they stand at the headwaters of the visual media. 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.

  There is another uncommon thing about Muybridge and Stanford, namely, one of them was a murderer. Muybridge, the photographer, killed coolly and in a meticulous way, with the expectation that he would die as he killed. As an artist and inventor, Muybridge helped turn the world into a community of spectators—people who watch, transfixed by screens. As a killer, he fascinated Americans with his story of sexual possession. The photographer’s crime did not seem to trouble Stanford, his friend and patron, so common was murder in California during the frontier years, but the Muybridge killing became an early sensation, a fitting prelude to the technology he and Stanford loosed on the world. I should add that these things unfolded in a particular order. To be truthful about the sequence, Muybridge killed, and then came the invention of media.

  PREFACE

  The story of the people who improvised moving pictures and put them on a screen, during the 1870s, when everyone still rode horses and cut firewood, might be worth the trouble of telling by itself, but Edward Muybridge has an enigma to add to this feat, which is his crime. Muybridge—and his friend and patron, Leland Stanford (in the old sense, the moneyed man who pays for art)—brought visual media into the world, a kind of seeing that grew from the kernel idea of “motion studies.” Thus began the source of distraction and pleasure that much of the world uses much of the time: moving pictures fill daily life and fascinate us. But the mystery that Muybridge carries is that he was a murderer—not an accidental killer, but a cool one, and remorseless.

  Edward Muybridge’s life as an artist and inventor who happened to be a killer means trouble for a biographer. Most accounts of artists’ lives are admiring of their subject, whereas the crime of murder tends to put a man in a bad light. Many have talked about Muybridge, but no one knows quite what to do with his violence—the usual line is to focus on his photography and to box away the crime, hiding this embarrassing “mistake.” At a distance of many years, the photographer looks to be a romantic hero, a soft glow haloing his wild hair, a lonely visionary at work in the fields of early industry. Gustave Flaubert said that writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful, and that some historians do just the opposite. In this story about the strange partnership of an artist and a railroad magnate, in which I find the genesis of the media, I do not provide a roll call of the many other people who made the movies and their later child, our society of spectacle.1 I don’t tell the full tale of all the toys and tools, from the panorama to the zoetrope and magic lantern, that came together to make the cinema. Instead, I see the photography with which Muybridge shot animals and people performing daily tasks—and his projection of these on screens—as the genetic imprint of all the visual media. The strand that holds together all our ways of looking at screens is the fascination with what moves, which is satisfied by an apparatus that captures time and plays it back. This is the story of two difficult, important, and incompatible men who joined photography to the railroad, and in so doing opened an exit from the Machine Age and an entrance to our own virtual worlds.

  There is one unusual obstacle to speaking about “Eadweard Muybridge,” as he is usually called, namely that my subject’s name cannot be pronounced. It can hardly be spelled. The best I can do, aloud, is “aid-weird my-bridge.” It is a name that looks back at you and says, Well, so? And also, I am. Muybridge changed the spelling of his name every ten years or so; his many names float over his life like his dissolving pictures, and “Eadweard Muybridge” was merely the last version. He coined five spellings, using one and tossing it, choosing another and leaving that one behind. Although he called himself “Edward Muybridge” during the years of his most important work, I will use all of his names, as he himself did, attaching each to the time in his life that he assumed it.

  Edward Muybridge—perip
atetic, obsessed, murderous—was uncomfortable with renown and at the same time wanted it. And so to the first name, and to what happened.

  Eadweard Muybridge, Horses. Running. Phryne L., Plate 40, 1879 (Illustration Credit p01.1)

  Click here to view a larger version of this image.

  THE STANFORD ENTERTAINMENT

  The mansion in San Francisco had collapsed with the earthquake in 1906 and burned to nothing a day later in the fires. I walked up the face of Nob Hill to look at the place where it used to stand. Could there be a tiny remnant of this temple of money? The hill had been known as California Hill until Leland Stanford and family moved there in 1876, followed by their preposterously rich friends. After that it was Nob Hill. Stanford and the other nabobs (a word borrowed from Mughal India, trimmed in America to “nobs”) built houses that showed their money and looked with a possessive gaze at the city below. The day after the earthquake the fire came, on a Thursday morning in April, and the two disasters took down all the big houses but one.

  At the top of Nob Hill today are apartment buildings, hotels, a little park. The place that survived, the last sign of the sovereigns who had set themselves up on these blocks, was the Flood house. James Flood, a mining multimillionaire, was one of the men who exploited the Comstock Lode, a thick vein of silver in Nevada that ended up in most coins. The fire had somehow wrapped around and missed his house. When the silver man died, the Flood mansion went into the hands of the Pacific-Union Club, which seems fitting—a men’s club whose members dote on money, the way the nabobs did. I looked at the Flood house, a megalith in brown stucco, and imagined it in its original setting, amid a colony of American palaces. The first and most ostentatious of them, the Stanford house, used to stand a block to the east, at California and Powell Streets. An eight-story hotel now occupied that site, planted over the ruins. Only the granite wall that used to frame the house remained.

  Mark Twain’s novel The Gilded Age gave its name to the late nineteenth century, a time of monopoly with its high tide of corruption and greed. Nob Hill was one of the age’s capitals, and whatever went on here took shape on a Brobdingnagian scale. But one episode of those years, as far as I can see, has been overlooked. It could be said that the world of visual media got under way on this hill, amid the new money of California, in the late 1800s. It happened one night at a party at which the entertainment was a photographer called Edward Muybridge.

  JANUARY 16, 1880

  CALIFORNIA AND POWELL STREETS, SAN FRANCISCO

  It was the night pictures began to move. Just what it was that happened that night could not be accurately described for many years. It would not be comprehensible until the movie theaters had spread and the television stations were built, or maybe even until screens appeared in most rooms and people carried them in their hands. That winter night in San Francisco pictures jumped into motion, someone captured time and played it back. A newspaperman noticed that something unusual had happened, although he did not say anything about time. He noticed only that whatever it was that happened had taken place in the home of the best-known citizen of the state of California; he noticed these facts but missed the main event. The newspaperman pointed out that a photographer of angular shape named Edward Muybridge and his new machine had been the reason for the gathering, but he did not describe what Muybridge had done. Thanks to the paper (and notwithstanding the reporter’s oversights), we know who was there, in the house. We know who came around to the stupendous mansion where Muybridge assembled his mechanism and put it in motion and carried it through its initial performance.

  Edward Muybridge often photographed the property of Leland and Jane Stanford, particularly their horses and houses. In San Francisco, the Stanfords’ home on California Hill (later Nob Hill), built in 1876, had some fifty rooms, depending on how you counted, and the showiest decor west of the Mississippi. (Illustration Credit 1.1)

  The event with the photographer took place in the home of an abnormally rich family. It was the end of the week. The family stayed in for the evening and invited some friends for a party and a show.

  Their brown, stuccoed palazzo occupied the best site on California Hill, looking out to the flickering lights on San Francisco Bay and down at the streets of the rolling city. From a block away—and you had to get that far back to see the whole thing—the house looked to be a chunky, dark mass, Italianate in style. The owners of the house wanted it to exceed, if possible, the pomp of the European palaces, and to achieve this they had hired the New York design firm Pottier & Stymus, which had a record of extravagance, to ornament every square yard of its interior. When the decorators were finished, the place had a magnitude and pretense that no one in California had previously seen. Without rival, it was the most talked-up house west of the Mississippi.

  The Stanford family lived here, just three people, a mother and father and their eleven-year-old son. The Stanfords employed about twelve servants, half of whom lived in the brown house and some of whom traveled with the family to serve them at their horse farm south of the city. Newspapers were soaked with ink about the Stanfords’ outsized lives. The San Francisco Daily Call labeled tonight’s event “The Stanford Entertainment,” and from those three words everyone knew where and for whom the photographer Edward Muybridge was doing whatever it was he did with his picture machine.

  This year he was Edward Muybridge, but the spelling of his name would soon change, as it had done on four previous occasions. Every few years, the photographer would move a vowel or switch a couple of consonants. He used to be Edward Muygridge, and before that, Edward Muggeridge. For a few years he used the professional name “Helios,” the single moniker of an artist, borrowed in this case from the Greek god of the sun.

  Leland Stanford, his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, and their son, Leland Stanford Jr., 1881 (Illustration Credit 1.2)

  Along with his name, his working life had already passed through several metamorphoses. During his twenties Muybridge had been a book and print salesman for a London publisher; he sold dictionaries and encyclopedias and art books, engravings, and lithographs. In his thirties he tried to make a living as an inventor but failed when buyers showed indifference to his patents. After that, he put on the top hat of a capitalist: he started a mining company, and then an investment firm. Both ended badly. At age thirty-seven, he invented himself for the last time, as an artist: he became a photographer. He had followed a wandering path and only came to a single road as a middle-aged man. The choice of photography, at last, seemed to him to vindicate all the disappointments and failures that had gone before.

  Edward Muybridge wore a beard down to the middle of his chest, a gray weave with a dark residue. Occasionally he might have combed it. The hair on his head was white, swirling at the ears, tossed up from his brow. His eyes were sharp blue. The crinkly beard and flowing hair made him look antique, wizardlike. One newspaper said that Muybridge looked “at least ten years older” than his natural age, which was forty-nine: a man in midlife wearing a mask of seniority.

  After twelve years with the camera, he was the best-known photographer in San Francisco. Part of his renown came from his pictures, notably the ones he had taken in Yosemite Valley. The naturalist John Muir had explored and written about the seven-mile-long chasm in upper California, an extravagance of cliffs and depths and vistas. A photographer called Carleton Watkins had been one of the first to descend into Yosemite’s hollows and come back with pictures. But Muybridge’s photographs of the valley’s flagrant rock faces and bridal-veil waterfalls had exceeded those of Watkins and helped to make Yosemite a part of national lore. The landscape of Yosemite, its wildness and excess, which Muybridge framed and made mythic, had come to represent the West to people in the eastern states.

  Yosemite was part of Muybridge, but other parts of him were urban. Three years earlier he had made a panorama of San Francisco in photographs, the city in 360 degrees. To shoot it he had stood on the turret of the Mark Hopkins house, another mansion farther up the hill
from the Stanford place. Muybridge had cranked the camera around on his tripod, measuring and panning, foot by foot, until the whole city went under the lens. He had given Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, the biggest version of the panorama, an unrolling carpet of a picture, seventeen feet long and two feet high—an expensive thank-you gift for years of assignments and friendship.

  The photographer who tramped the wilderness and scaled city summits had a thin, vigorous body. The same witness who called him “old” also wrote that Muybridge possessed the jauntiness of a twenty-five-year-old man. People knew his athleticism. He was the man who skipped down flights of stairs, the agile camera operator most conspicuous around San Francisco, a blur seen in continual movement from the Golden Gate to San Jose. The tripod went up—it must be Muybridge again—and it came down.

  Edward Muybridge had another stroke of renown, outside of his work, which was the fame of his crime. Wherever he went, it followed the photographer. He was a murderer, and the aura of his violence lingered, stirring an atmosphere as palpable as his acclaim as an artist. Muybridge’s crime had been reported throughout the United States, so strange were its details, so fascinating was its passion to so many people. The photographer had a reasonable claim to be the one citizen who pulled behind him the largest cloud of dark gossip in the state of California. Of course he pretended as though the talk about him did not buzz incessantly, that he was merely a member of San Francisco’s small, vivid cultural establishment. Perhaps he had no other choice but to pretend. Certainly this pose worked more to his advantage than fully inhabiting the role of a killer.

  Tonight Muybridge stood at a table in the middle of a giant room. In the Stanford mansion, the rooms had names. This one, in all probability, was the Pompeian Room, the showiest room, which the family used to entertain. About forty feet square, it had four walls of murals that replicated frescoes found in houses uncovered beneath the volcanic dirt at Pompeii. The Stanfords had paid Pottier & Stymus, the decorators, to create a showplace of replica history in their house. In the Pompeian Room they had placed gilded chairs and marble-topped tables with slender legs to make a pastiche of ancient Rome, and life-size marble nymphs to stand guard.