The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  A handler called Budd Doble drove Occident on the day of the race against Fullerton. Stanford’s horse won two out of the three heats against the challenger, running the middle heat in the fastest time ever recorded in California, 2:18 for a mile. For good publicity, Stanford turned down the prize money—the Palo Alto Stock Farm and its owner both looked better for it.

  Some days after being jailed, Muybridge hired a lawyer, the former state senator Wirt Pendegast. The attorney had an office in the courthouse, downstairs from the jail: to consult with his client he would merely take the staircase. Muybridge had heard of Pendegast—they said he had a reputation for oratory. They said he usually got his clients off. Pendegast came to see Muybridge in jail. The grand jury had not indicted yet, Pendegast said, but would do so in about a month. The charge would be capital murder, the lawyer said, which carried the penalty of death by hanging. (The lawyer knew that his client knew these things—both the client and the lawyer also understood that they had to be said out loud.) Pendegast told Muybridge he could expect to stay in jail until the trial. In a case like this, three months, maybe four.

  KING EADWEARD

  At Waterloo Station in London, I bought a train ticket out to the hometown of Edward James Muggeridge. It cost five pounds. Muggeridge grew up in Kingston-upon-Thames, fifteen miles southwest of central London, eight stops and twenty-eight minutes on a commuter line. When he lived there, Kingston was one of England’s thousand hermetical villages; then the railroad came. Now the town sits under the London canopy, another piece in the city’s sprawl.

  He was born in Kingston, lived in America for nearly fifty years, and went back to England in his late sixties. He died in Kingston in 1904—as Eadweard Muybridge, age seventy-four—and in his will left his remaining negatives and photographs, as well as some of his equipment, to his hometown. He also left the projector that put the first moving pictures on screens. (Or at any rate a second version, built to replace the one he used at Leland Stanford’s house.) I wanted to have a look at the machine that had started the revolution in vision, the device he grandly named the zoopraxiscope.

  Kingston-upon-Thames sits on the river upstream from London, and its history goes back about 1,300 years. For most of that time, the River Thames made the only way in and out, but the railroad arrived during Muggeridge’s childhood and turned the old town into a station stop. Lately Kingston has become a heritage town. Like many ancient places in England it sells the past, antiquity being one of the few brands that small places can make money on. Day-trippers come from London to shoulder down crooked medieval alleys and look at half-timbered Tudor houses in the thousand-year-old market square, to row a bit on the Thames and drink the ale at waterfront pubs. The river, sluggish and bending, measures about fifty yards across at Kingston. Get into a boat, push downstream, and you come to London. The trip was one Edward Muggeridge would have made often as a boy, shuttling between his antique birthplace and the coal-blackened metropolis, but it takes five or six hours.

  I walked through the oldest part of Kingston and came to his house. A tasteful green plaque on the front reads: CHILDHOOD HOME OF EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, PIONEER PHOTOGRAPHER, 1830–1904. It’s a two-story brick merchant’s townhouse on a busy commercial street, just as it was almost two centuries ago, with a door that opens directly onto the sidewalk. The house shares its walls with the neighboring townhouses. Each house also possesses a storefront, the Muggeridge place with a carriageway leading to the back. There is a curve in the narrow street at this point; the back of the house faces the Thames, thirty yards away, and you can see that the curve of the street follows the bend in the river. The Muggeridge place was the kind of house where people worked and lived before the industrial tide came in and swept everything before it, turning the idea of business done at home into a useless husk.

  Kingston is old even by creaky English standards. The tourist literature calls it the “Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames,” part of the heritage spin and a reference to a royal backstory. The “royal” trademark, which came alive during Edward Muggeridge’s youth, seems to have awakened in him personally during midlife, prompting the photographer, at age fifty, to change the spelling of his first name to the medieval “Eadweard.” That name dates from the Saxons, and one of the curious things about the man who was arguably the inventor of moving pictures, a modern man if you like, is that he felt attracted to a thing so old and dead as the name of a Saxon king.

  The childhood home of Ted Muggeridge—30 High Street (then called West-by-Thames) in Kingston, England, fifteen miles southwest of the center of London. John and Susannah Muggeridge and their four sons occupied the upper floors of the commercial townhouse, and a hatmaker rented the store below. (Illustration Credit c11.1)

  A record shows a settlement at Kingston, on the banks of the River Thames, in 838. For a thousand years it served as the region’s market town, farm life coming and going. About the year 1200, a bridge went over the river at Kingston, the only bridge upstream from London, and hundreds of carriages and wagons and stagecoaches crossed the water every day, adding the role of highway station to that of river town. Another six hundred years passed, the river and the bridge framing village life. Kingston was already a changeless relic when the Muggeridge family, during the 1820s, moved into their house, the one on the bend in the river, with the nice enameled plaque.

  Edward James Muggeridge, born April 9, 1830, left few traces of his feelings and thoughts. He left no diaries. The confessional style, in which artists write down the names of their lovers and leave journals to be collected by posterity, came later. His surviving letters talk about his photographs and how to sell them. He did not write a memoir or otherwise disburden himself of what it was to be a boy growing up in an old place outside the capital. One of his cousins, however, in a memoir she wrote, recorded some observations about him from the time they were both children. The cousin said he went by the name of “Ted.”1

  A photograph of Ted Muggeridge, probably at age twenty, shows a plump and dressed-up boy, scrubbed bright. He wears a vested suit and a tie in a way that says he has put them on before, occasionally. The face is clean-shaven, the cheeks buxom and the lips thick. He has strong eyebrows and straight brown hair. Muggeridge looks chunky and fresh, not yet burned by anything, apparently not yet disappointed, but there seems to be uncertainty at the eyes.

  His family was comfortable but not wealthy. England had a small elite and a mass of farmers and workers, and the Muggeridges occupied the lower part of the slender middle. They left more copious records than most lower-middle-class people, because a handful of their in-laws owned real estate. Ted was the second of four sons—his father was twenty-four at the time of Ted’s birth, his mother twenty-three. They gave him the name of his mother’s father, Edward, and the middle name of his father’s brother, James.

  Ted Muggeridge, ca. 1850. Probably taken when he was twenty—just before he emigrated from England to America—for the benefit of his family, who did not know whether they would see him again. It is the only photograph of Muggeridge at an age younger than thirty-five, and the sole picture that shows his face without his lifelong, substantial beard. (Illustration Credit c11.2)

  When Edward James Muggeridge was born, his parents lived in the house with its back to the river, at what is now 30 High Street. (The street runs west from the center of town, beside the water—during his childhood it was called West-by-Thames Street.) The Muggeridge family lived upstairs, renting their floors from the landlord, one Daniel Dacombe. Downstairs was a hatmaker, Mrs. Phillips, who rented the storefront. Maybe you could smell the millinery as you walked past. Street life around the Muggeridge house was beery. Two doors one way stood a pub, the Ram Inn, two doors the other way a drunks’ alley, where boatmen staggered and leaned.

  His parents baptized Ted beneath the thirteenth-century Gothic arches of All Saints Church, three blocks from their doorstep. As a boy Ted might have been made to go to services. The stone church was the town’s
venerable landmark, a building with a past that reaches almost to the time of St. Augustine’s mission to the Saxons, with additions and changes made every few hundred years, and walls studded with marble memorials to long-dead parishioners.

  John Muggeridge, Ted’s father, sold corn and coal for a living, according to a census. He lived on commissions, which meant the family money went up and down. John Muggeridge had married up in class, rising from people who made ends meet to join his wife’s clan of small business owners. John Muggeridge’s parents, Ted’s grandparents, had moved to Kingston from the village of Banstead, ten miles south by a winding road, where most of the Muggeridges had been tenant farmers. After their move Ted’s grandparents had found a living in Kingston as makers of malt, the first step in beer brewing. Malt making was a process that went on in scores of houses and barns—the huge beer thirst of the people was such that many had to be recruited to it, so-called maltsters. Ted’s grandparents used to buy a barrel of barley at a time, stew it, and when it sprouted spread it out on the floor of an empty room to dry. Fires in the basement helped the parching, and the malt was then sold to a brewer. Kingston shared its hunger for beer with every other English town. At a time when public water sources ranged from unreliable to unclean, and epidemics came and went, beer gave people fluids and calories free of disease, while it soothed psychic injury.

  Ted’s uncle, Charles Muggeridge, had followed Ted’s grandfather into malt making. When Ted was a boy Uncle Charles lived with his wife and four children a few doors away. Thus there were at least two Muggeridge households in Kingston. Added to these were two houses where his mother’s siblings lived with their families. A network of cousins, aunts, and uncles surrounded Ted, as it did many village people.

  His mother was one Susannah Smith, and of his two parents, her family was the more posh. The Smiths owned a venerable business that ran barges on the Thames. For some fifty years they had been sending their flatboats loaded with farm goods or coal or timber down to London and bringing them back with city stuffs. Horses moved the barge traffic. One end of a rope was tied to the prow of a flatboat and the other end to horses on land—the animals pulled from a towpath that ran beside the river, heaving the boats at walking speed. The family of Ted’s mother employed some ten bargemen, and these so-called bargees lived in shacks by the water at the foot of the Smiths’ backyard. The colony of workmen, many with families of their own, imparted to the Smiths a feudal glow, with the bargees in the role of serfs and their employers as minor-key lords. The Smiths lived a quarter mile from the Muggeridges, five minutes by foot along the river, in a big house with two servants living in, on Old Bridge Street (the place where the first bridge had stood a thousand years earlier). They made good money most years and had one foot conspicuously planted in the drawing room. But the barge trade had an enemy, the railroad, which was appearing on the horizon.

  Susanna Smith, Ted Muggeridge’s maternal grandmother, ca. 1860 (Illustration Credit c11.3)

  Susannah Muggeridge, Ted’s mother, seems to have lived under the shadow of her own mother, a woman named Susanna Smith (minus the h she gave to her daughter). This was Ted’s grandmother, who played up the role of a matriarch, doling out favors and cash and running the lives of her three grown children, not to mention her ten grandchildren. Grandmother Susanna Smith had been widowed during her thirties and raised her children alone while running the family barge business, inherited from her husband. She eventually brought into the business her oldest son, Joseph Smith. Ted’s uncle Joseph lived in the house on Old Bridge Street, and he appeared to people in town to be a young eminence—a wife and three children, plus the servants. But the house belonged to his mother, the forbidding Susanna Smith; she occupied the second floor, still owned the barge business, and vetted her son’s decisions. At one point she had a run-in with another of her sons, who was thirty at the time, and added a codicil to her will that stripped him of his inheritance “until he shall be outlawed or be found bankrupt.”2

  By her photograph, Susanna Smith looks to have been about five feet six and stout. She wore floor-length black dresses in lifelong public mourning for her husband. To lighten the black she put on a white lace collar. Susanna Smith was grand in her hands-on-the-till way. In addition to the boats, she owned several houses that she rented to simpler people. The memoir by Ted’s cousin calls her “the family autocrat” and says she dominated her family and her workers, the bargemen, treating the latter like peasants who depended on her.

  Her husband, Ted’s grandfather Edward Smith, had died before Ted was born, and since Ted was named after him, he became something like a memento mori, and it is possible the grandmother had a special zone in her heart for young Ted, the boy who stood in for her husband. The Smith family had some airs—wineglasses and silver, stuffed chairs, rugs, mahogany furniture. Susanna Smith presided at grandish dinners, as Ted’s cousin described them. The matriarch sat at the head of the table, flanked on one side by Ted with his brothers and parents, while the other cousins and aunts and uncles formed similar clusters. After a dinner of some formality came a performance of strange artifice, directed by the grandmother and featuring Ted and the other grandchildren. Smith made each of them stand and “recite, or tell of work done, or answer pointed questions on varied subjects,” and in general account for themselves. She went around the room, and each child had to speak to the group, sum up their life and doings, and say what they had planned. It was a performance that everyone studied for, “preparation which included every detail of health, conduct and dress which might attract the careful oversight of the head of the clan.” Ted like the others steadied his nerves and announced something about his record at school, maybe a word about what work he hoped to get into. It was the song the grandchildren had to sing for handouts.3

  To judge from the way they did business, the Smith family, Ted’s maternal clan, seems to have been a living antique. As telegraph lines were being strung here and there and railroad beds laid, the Smiths still used carrier pigeons for their correspondence. From Kingston, the River Thames runs downstream to London in a meandering path. When the barges went to the capital, they had to cross three different locks, the filling and draining of which slowed the trip, extending it to most of a day. To communicate with home, one of the Smith men brought along a cage containing a messenger bird. In London, the barges were unloaded, and the bargees looked for new cargo to take back upriver—furniture, iron, liquor, clothes, machines. The goods went on board, and the boatman scribbled a note to describe the freight returning that night. The note went into a thimble, and one of the Smith family pigeons carried it back to Kingston.

  When Ted Muggeridge was a boy, five thousand people lived in Kingston and two million in London, the biggest city in Europe, as well as the command post of the British Empire. London threw a long and dark shadow, with its factories that provided new forms of wage serfdom and epidemics that swept thousands from the slums into mass graves. This was the urban hell described by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, a chronicle of despair from the early 1840s. London would have pressed itself into Ted’s world—the industrial storm creeping toward his town, the strict ways of the Regency fading and in retreat. As the city came closer, it both frightened the outlying places as well as teased their desires. For many, the big adventure would have been to go into the capital. To get there Ted had an advantage, since the boats belonging to his mother’s family went back and forth to the docks. It might have been his habit to go to London for a day, the riverboat men his chaperones, and take a dose of the stinking, trembling metropolis.

  If he paddled in the other direction on the river, not downstream but up, and around the first bend, Ted would have come to another blast of power, Hampton Court Palace. This ancient and stupendous royal residence overlooked the river near Kingston as indifferently as the Pentagon, and on nearly the same scale. What Ted would have seen, after twenty minutes in a rowboat, was two palaces, a sixteenth-cent
ury red-brick fortress with turrets and a serenely square, white addition built in the eighteenth century. He would have seen the grounds along the river teeming with gardeners and retainers. The people of Kingston were keenly aware of Hampton Court—many worked there as servants and factotums. Ted, like the rest, would have felt the radiating heat that comes from living near a place of power, the sense that important people are at hand and in some way difficult to express they have you in their grasp.

  The year Ted Muggeridge was born, the first trains in England started service—the Liverpool and Manchester Railway—and when he was eight years old a second train system, which came directly to Kingston, went into service. This was the Great Western Railway, which ran from Waterloo Station in London to southwest England, with Ted’s town one of its brand-new stations. The advent of the rail stirred excitement and fear. It represented the future, and speed, but also something dangerous, filthy, and loud. To placate opposition, the company was forced to put the Kingston rail station outside of town. (It was later moved to the center.) From a clue in later life, it is likely Ted Muggeridge, the boy, paid close attention to the train. The Great Western was the feat of an engineer named Isambard Brunel, a man featured in the newspapers as a hero, a machine-age impresario. Years later, as a photographer, Ted would publish pictures of Brunel’s other engineering work, showing that he never forgot the man who brought the train to Kingston. It seems likely that after the rail service began, in 1838, Ted Muggeridge traded his barge rides to London for train rides.