The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  “And the defendant—this poor, wronged, and maddened man—is asked by the prosecution to keep perfectly cool? He is asked perhaps to bring a lawsuit against Larkyns for criminal conduct? Under the law, if Larkyns, after being warned away from the defendant’s property—as Muybridge warned him away from his wife—had wrenched just one shingle from the roof of the defendant’s house, my client would have been justified in shooting him dead. But when this defiler takes the wife of a man’s bosom, writes the word ‘prostitute’ upon her brow, blackens the name of his child, and dishonors and ruins the happiness of his home, what is that husband to do? He is to ask the law merely to protect him from the repetition of such conduct? As if it could be repeated! This debaucher, this libertine, holds a man’s wife in his arms on the night of the birth of the child, kisses her lips, calls her his baby, intrudes himself into the sacred precincts of the birth-chamber, and afterward exchanges with her ribald jokes at the expense of the man whom they had wronged!

  “You, gentlemen of the jury—you who have wives whom you love, daughters whom you cherish, and mothers whom you reverence, will not condone Larkyns’s crime. I cannot ask you to send this man back to his happy home. The destroyer has been there, and has written all over it, from foundation-stone to roof-top, the words, ‘Desolation, desolation!’ His wife’s name has been smirched, his child bastardized, and his earthly happiness so utterly destroyed that no hope exists of its reconstruction. But let him go forth from here again—let him go once more among the wild and grand beauties of nature, in the pursuit of his loved profession. Let him go where he may perhaps pick up again a few of the broken threads of his life and attain such comparative peace as may be attained by one so cruelly stricken through the very excess of his love for his wife.”

  Pendegast spoke for two hours, and when he sat down the courtroom shook with applause. The yelling and whistling annoyed the judge, William Wallace, who told the sheriff to arrest the loudest cheerers. The sheriff seized one man, a Napa landlord called Dan McCarthy, but when McCarthy protested that he had only done the same as everyone else, Wallace relented. He scolded McCarthy for shouting, told the bailiff to release him, and announced that he would clear the courtroom if any more demonstrations of sympathy were made.

  Judge Wallace gave his instructions to the jury. He told the men that they could render one of four different verdicts: guilty in the first degree, and death; guilty and imprisonment for life; not guilty; or not guilty by reason of insanity. (Wallace left off another option, not guilty with justifiable homicide. He banned that verdict outright.) Insanity, he said, “must be proved affirmatively and conclusively.” If Muybridge believed he was justified in shooting Larkyns, it didn’t matter, “unless his belief arose from his insanity.” Further, if the victim of the murder seduced the defendant’s wife, “that was no justification for the homicide, because the defendant was not warranted in taking the law into his own hands.” The judge gave the jury foreman a written description of each verdict he would accept, and at 9:30 p.m., after the jury left to deliberate, Judge Wallace adjourned the court.8

  The feeling in the crowd was that the jury would come back quickly with an acquittal—even Stoney, the prosecutor, thought he had lost the case. The courtroom stayed full until midnight. Muybridge drifted here and there; he felt gregarious, a social reflex he rarely had, although his bonhomie had a manic tinge. He had acquired an entourage, and as friends and sympathizers crowded around him, everyone’s talk rose high and loud. One reporter said that Muybridge “joined in jokes, raillery and laughter,” talking about his travels and adventures.

  Muybridge and his group moved their drama into the office of the defense lawyer. Wirt Pendegast worked at the center of the tiny Napa legal world: his law firm rented rooms in the courthouse, on the same hallway as the courtroom, only two doors down. He and his partner, Cameron King, felt none of the elation around them and sat grimly in the office. One reporter said they “chafed with anxiety,” whereas Muybridge, flanked with admirers, seemed “perfectly cool and collected.”

  At 12:00 a.m., Sheriff Corwin approached Muybridge to return him to jail for the night. The photographer said good-bye to the crowd, and the two climbed the stairs. As he walked into his cell, his home for the previous three months, Muybridge stopped at the iron door.

  “This is too bad, I thought last night was my last in prison,” he said.

  The crowds milled in the courtroom until 1:00 a.m., when some realized a verdict might not come. There was a dwindling in twos and threes, but at 3:00 a.m. many remained.

  * * *

  aA reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle added, after referring to Flora’s breasts, “Much more of this kind of testimony is omitted as unfit for publication.”

  THE SPECULATOR

  He used to be vigorous, now he felt disabled, at age thirty. Muygridge could not taste anything, couldn’t smell, and he saw double. “If I looked at you,” he said, “there were two of you.”

  He left New York for London around the time of the presidential election—whether by coincidence or design, a good time to get out of America. The victory of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 would lead to the secession of the South and the War of Rebellion. By leaving, Muygridge escaped the draft in the North that would soon snare most men under forty, both immigrant and native born. It may not have been an accident that Muygridge got out just as the Civil War began and stayed away until a bit after it ended, in 1865. His writings say nothing about politics, but the timing has the fingerprints of self-preservation.

  In London, Muygridge found a Dr. William Gull in a clinic on Harley Street, a prestige medical address. Gull’s clients included Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, a fact he was loath to let people forget, and likely the reason Muygridge came around. Gull has a deathless place in medical history: he published the original study of anorexia nervosa (and named the eating disorder) in a paper that presented three women patients, the misses “A,” “B,” and “K,” whom he also claimed to have cured. That was after Muygridge saw him, however. (William Gull’s name also survives because he would eventually be attached to the case of Jack the Ripper, the unknown mass murderer who mutilated five women in East London in 1888. Gull was not the clinician in the case, but suspected as the possible killer, along with the artist Walter Sickert. He was implicated by Sickert’s son, who spun the tale after his father, and everyone else concerned, was long gone.) The famous and infamous Dr. Gull could not do much for head injuries, however, and told Muygridge his concussion had to mend itself.

  Having been out of England for ten years, Muygridge seems to have moved in with his mother, who was then living in London at St. John’s Wood, three miles northwest of Charing Cross. Susannah Muggeridge, fifty-four and widowed, her three remaining sons having gone to America, looks to have been quite alone. Muygridge had no doubt written her about his brother George, whose sudden death in California had left Susannah with two sons—Thomas, still in San Francisco, and Edward himself, recovering from a gruesome accident.

  His case against the stagecoach company would not come up in the American court for several months, so Muygridge set up house with his mother. He had been working on a pair of inventions, and he brought with him two sets of drawings. The date on one suggests he had made it while recovering from his accident in New York, where apparently his double vision didn’t affect his mind or hand. In March 1861 Muygridge would pay a visit with his inventor’s papers to the British patent office; six months later he would visit again, with a second folder, and the second invention. He had come back to England to remake himself.

  Sometime in 1861 Muygridge returned to New York to push his lawsuit. The Butterfield Overland Mail Company could outspend and outwait a plaintiff, and it had good connections in Washington. Muygridge seems to have realized this and decided to negotiate. In lieu of the $10,000 he had demanded, he took a $2,500 payout and went back to London with the cash in hand. It was the equivalent of the salary for one year of an upper-middl
e-class manager.

  With money to live on, Muygridge moved out of his mother’s place to new rooms in Covent Garden, at 16 Southampton Street, off the Strand, an address in a neighborhood given over to market halls and the trading of commodities—also a kind of inventors’ district that happened to be near the patent offices. The move says something about his motives, and about the man he hoped to become. Muygridge seems to have gone home to make money, to attempt a run up the social and class ladder. The bookseller had spent a decade as a salesman, lifting boxes of books and pushing someone else’s art and merchandise. Now he was looking for a way to climb. His sight and hearing having finally stabilized, the man with double vision focused his attention.

  He had two inventions. If he could get a pair of patents for them, if he could sell his own intellectual property, he might break from the salesman’s treadmill. Muygridge was aroused enough by what he had done with his drawings to brag about them. He sent the plans to an uncle who was living in Australia, Henry Selfe, and offered to give him a franchise on one of his machines. “These papers would enable any carpenter and machinist, upon reference, to construct such a device without difficulty,” he said. Muygridge urged his uncle to take out a patent on the device in Australia, but warned Selfe that if the thing took off, he might come around to collect money from him.

  On August 1, 1861, Muygridge walked into the Great Seal Patent Office in London, at 25 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. The name of the agency referred to the fat wax seal that dangled by a ribbon from the patent letters the office handed out. The seal represented the sovereign, Queen Victoria, and meant the head of state had indulged the patent holder with the right to exploit his intellectual property, which she would protect. As Muygridge made his way through the Great Seal building, he might have glanced in at two other agencies that shared a floor with the patent office, the offices of the Secretary of Bankrupts and the Secretary for Lunatics. Those two agencies ran prisons for debtors, on the one hand, and lockups for mental patients, on the other. Muygridge edged past Bankrupts and went by the door of Lunatics before arriving with his packet of materials at a large room dotted with desks—the patent bureaucracy.

  It was the start of Muygridge’s career in ingenuity, the end of his salesman’s life. From 1861 forward, he would make his living as an inventor, a photographer, and a lecturer. Eventually he would patent several things—a clock, a shutter for a high-speed camera, and an apparatus to generate stop-motion photography, which involved equipment that filled a barn. But on this visit, one of his first to the Great Seal office, he brought something more modest. The envelope of papers in his hands contained drawings for a machine Muygridge thought could turn him a quick profit—a tabletop, hand-crank clothes washer.1

  Muygridge exchanged words with the clerks, handed over his dossier, and left. Afterward, someone made a note on his file: the application had come from “Edward James Muygridge, of San Francisco.” A strange label. He was a native of metropolitan London, but a clerk had pigeonholed him as an American.

  By the mid-1800s, the “English inventor” was very much a type. Thousands of tinkerers and amateur chemists lived in and around London, and many of them shuffled to and from Chancery Lane, their papers and drawings falling out of folders. Inventors did not typically come from the gentry, nor were they professional scientists. They were usually lower-middle-class men who cobbled up gadgets in workshops set out in the backyard garden. Inventors had an acquaintance with chemistry, sometimes with metals. They were strivers, not necessarily educated, and not at all rich. But if they came up with the right patent for a process or a piece of equipment, and if they could get some capitalist who owned a factory to pay for it, they could get rich in a hurry. Two big “if”s, but Muygridge, at least for a while, put his faith in them.

  The hand-crank washing machine was a mechanical substitute for a servant. He had apparently built a model of it, and in any case he had paid an artist to make an engraving of the thing and hired Eyre and Spottiswoode, a fancy publisher, to print it. The washing machine was an oblong metal box, three feet long and a little less wide, and eighteen inches deep—big enough to stand on a table, but not so big that it took over the room. You put the clothes inside it, and soap and water, and closed the lid. The metal walls were corrugated on the inside “like a washboard,” Muygridge said, and the box made a big trough for sloshing. Instead of human arms to scrub, there were two upright metal poles, and at the end of each pole a metal “pounder,” like a hand, which beat the clothes against the washboard walls. “The pounders vibrate to and fro alternately, by means of rods connected to their arms, and to cranks upon a shaft, which is caused to revolve by the turning of a hand wheel,” said the description. Muygridge thought he could sell the machine to commercial laundries and maybe also make a smaller, domestic model. (He made another drawing for this kitchen version.)

  The Muygridge washer was about speed. It reduced the drudgery of cleaning clothes, a serial process. Speed and acceleration were themes he would come back to.

  The clothes washer was actually Muygridge’s second try at a patent—his first attempt had come the previous year. In September 1860, while convalescing in New York, recovering from the crash, he had come up with an invention that would change the technology for printing works of art, specifically, intaglios, a medium using engraved metal plates. (A washing machine and art prints—something low for the servants, something high for the salon.) Recumbent in bed, Muygridge had sent this design from New York to the office of a solicitor, one Augustus Frederick Sheppard, who did business from 38 Moorgate Street, off Finsbury Circus in London. Sheppard worked a mile and a half from the Great Seal patent office, a little far, but he still knew its ins and outs.2

  When he hired Sheppard, Muygridge revived his long-abandoned birth name, “E. Muggeridge,” to sign the patent application for his printing process. Attorney Sheppard, for his part, wrote a description of Muygridge’s scheme and brought it to the patent bureaucracy on his client’s behalf.

  Perhaps Muygridge had hired a patent solicitor because he knew the kind of gauntlet that awaited anyone trying to make it in London as an inventor. In America, a patent application cost fifteen dollars, a month’s worth of unskilled wages, and a single visit or even a mailing to the relevant office in Washington, D.C., sufficed. In England, however, inventors had to petition upward of seven government offices in person, and fees amounted to £100, about four times the average person’s annual income.3 In 1860, the U.S. Patent Office granted 4,819 patents, compared with 2,047 granted in Britain, with its richer and more mature economy.4

  Charles Dickens had satirized the cumbersome intellectual property laws of Britain in a short story, “A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent,” published in the magazine Household Words. In Dickens’s piece, written in the first person, a befuddled blacksmith named John tries to patent an invention he calls “the Model.” John takes his device through a labyrinth of government offices, paying fees at each station, encouraged by every clerk to go further into the government beast, up to the next office and down to more fees. “No man in England could get a Patent for an Indian-rubber band, or an iron-hoop, without fee-ing all of them,” says Dickens’s discouraged protagonist.

  The solicitor hired by Muygridge, Augustus Sheppard, ran the papers through the long labyrinth for his client, and sometime in 1861 succeeded in retrieving patent 2352, “an improved method of, and apparatus for, plate-printing”—Muygridge’s process for the intaglios.

  By the mid-1800s, lithographs and intaglios dominated the market for mass-produced art, and Muygridge had handled a lot of both as a bookseller. Color prints that depicted farm life, theater celebrities, or military exploits could hardly be kept off the walls of modest people, especially those who would have rather been born into the middle class. In California, Muygridge had stepped out of merely selling prints and into making them. He had used intaglio to print his portrait of James King of William, the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin who be
came a hero to vigilantes when he was shot in the street, and he had made good money from it. Art prints, the readymade decor in Victorian rooms, as common on the wall as lace on a table, looked to Muygridge as though they might become even more profitable, if only they could be made more quickly. With patent 2352, Muygridge thought he could accelerate the printing process.

  An intaglio was a print made using an etched copper or zinc plate that had been soaked with ink so that it penetrated into the grooves of the etching, wiped with a cloth to clean ink from the ridges, or relief, and pressed on paper. The trouble was that you had to ink the plate and wipe it clean for each impression. Muygridge guessed that he could speed up the process by cutting out the re-inking step. He added a reservoir of ink to the printing press that automatically fed onto the plate from below through perforations, thus dispensing with the step of re-inking by hand from above. Like the clothes washer, this invention, too, was about velocity, and about quickening a serial process.

  In early 1862, the Great Seal office approved the clothes washer, and on January 27, Muygridge went to 25 Southampton Buildings to retrieve his patent for “Improvements in Machinery or Apparatus for Washing Clothes and other Textile Articles,” a heavy sheet of cotton paper with a red wax seal dangling from the bottom of the page.5