by Edward Ball
PRESTIDIGITATOR
Sometime after the last horse tripped the cameras, after the last acrobat somersaulted and the skeleton ran, Muybridge went home to his studio on Montgomery Street and took out his magic lantern. He owned a fancy one, a projector of the kind used by the lantern showmen who made a living in theaters and lecture halls. He owned a decent projector because he wanted to show his awfully impressive pictures. He wasn’t a “lanternist,” an impresario who screened little dramas made from slide shows. He didn’t carry stacks of painted glass slides and doctored photographs, slides to turn into ghost stories and slapstick, pictures that jiggled when you pushed them in and out of the projector to make them more watchable, as such people did. He knew that type. He had seen plenty of lantern shows ever since he was a boy in London, where the most famous screen tricksters did shows in theaters around Leicester Square. And he probably saw more of the same after moving to New York. Then in San Francisco he had gotten together a lantern show of his own, as a kind of brand extension. People would pay to see his Yosemite pictures, which looked shockingly good on a screen, blown up to eight by twelve feet (so did everything else look good—lighthouses, Alaska, the panoramas). When he gave his first shows of the horse pictures, he threw in some from Guatemala for variety.
He brought out the projector this time to try something nobody had done. He would take his weird new invention—two seconds of stop-motion photography—and bring it back to life. He had stopped time, and now he would restart it.
Muybridge cut a piece of glass into the shape of a disk about sixteen inches in diameter and put it on a spindle so it could turn. The idea was to take a magic lantern, which everyone used to project one image at a time, and make it throw twelve or twenty-four pictures up in succession on a screen. To make a kind of zoetrope, but to toss the movement out to an audience.
At Stanford University, in the vault of the art museum, there is a set of seventeen glass slides, each a centimeter square, each depicting a step in the stride of a horse photographed at Palo Alto. The glass chips look to be one of Muybridge’s first moving picture experiments: they fit perfectly, with a few missing, around the edges of a disk the size of the ones Muybridge tinkered with on his modified lantern in the fall of 1879.
Muybridge altered his slide projector, putting the disk with pictures around the edge on a wheel in front of the light and lens, and now the lantern behaved differently. He gave the projector a name: the zoogyroscope (combining zoetrope and gyroscope). A few months later, he changed the label to zoopraxiscope (zoetrope plus praxinoscope, the unlovely name of another device, made in France by a lanternist called Émile Reynaud). Muybridge was good at naming things as confusingly as possible.1 Whatever the label, it was the “Muybridge projector,” because it made pictures move.
Muybridge, Nimrod Pacing, ca. 1879. Maquette for a zoopraxiscope disk. This set of tiny slides arranged around a disk to fit his invention, the zoopraxiscope, appears to have been an early attempt by Muybridge to project movement. (Illustration Credit c19.1)
Here and there a lanternist had hammered together a tabletop machine to make an image jiggle, but as far as anyone can tell, Muybridge built the first moving picture projector. During the years before cinema, several “science toys” available in Europe and in the eastern cities of America could fake a moving image. They had tongue-twisting names: the phasmatrope, the phenakistoscope, the choreutoscope, the praxinoscope. Some of these tools point in the direction of Muybridge’s device, but none used photography as its basis, and none involved a light source and screen. These are what give the Muybridge invention its originality and its place as first in line, if you like, of the media.
The zoopraxiscope threw pictures on a wall, but they ran together and blurred. What it needed was a shutter to separate the individual frames—a glimpse of one, a black screen, a glimpse of the next, a black screen, and so on. Muybridge cut a disk the size of a dinner plate out of a piece of tin and then cut twelve slots into it, radiating from the center. He mounted the disk on an axle, so that it could spin like a wheel, and placed it in front of the light source of the projector. The light would be released through a slot as the disk turned, then blacked out, then released through the next slot, giving a fraction of a second of time for the pictures to move ahead without blurring. A last problem with the half-rigged lantern was the compression of the image. As pictures wheeled past the light, they seemed by optical illusion to narrow—a horse with a leg stretched out ahead seemed foreshortened.
Muybridge wanted the glory of motion, so he hired a painter named Erwin Faber, who worked with magic lantern slides, to paint facsimiles of the photographs on the glass disks. He told Faber to give the horses elongated legs and torsos, counteracting the optical distortion. Faber painted, in color, around the edges of the disks, replicas of the photos of Occident, Sallie Gardner, and the rest. When projected, the pictures looked like the horses themselves, running, cantering, and trotting.
He believed he had left art behind and become a scientist, but what he really became was a kind of prestidigitator. At the start of this book we witnessed the night in January 1880 that Stanford asked Muybridge to give a demonstration, a show for ten tuxedoed moneymen and politicians and their wives, at the California Street mansion. With this the photographer satisfied his patron by rolling out the Muybridge projector for its debut appearance. Afterward, he set up its public debut, renting the lecture hall at the San Francisco Art Association, downtown on Clay Street, for several nights of talks and shows. No one scribbled box office numbers, but it was a Tuesday night when pictures moved for a paying audience for the first time, the night a roomful of viewers felt transfixed by life on a screen.
In fall 1879 Muybridge modified a magic lantern, which threw still images on a screen, into a moving picture projector. (Illustration Credit c19.2)
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a news item headlined “Moving Shadows,” but the writer said the images were more than dim shade. “The effect was precisely that of an animal running,” the reporter wrote.2
The Art Association stood next door to the Bohemian Club, a clique of writers and artists, very much in an artist’s, and not a scientist’s, part of town. It was here that Muybridge chose to do what an artist does, to make the world strange, to make it new. In three nights of shows, moving pictures ceased to be a private trick paid up by a rich patron, and they became a public commodity on the market for anyone.
The verisimilitude of Muybridge’s moving pictures turned into news on the light-quick telegraph, and items about the photographer appeared in papers and journals. “The simulation was admirable, even to the motion of the tail as the animal gathered for the jump, the raising of the head—all were there,” said the New York Times.3 A piece reporting on the projection ran in Scientific American. Newspapers picked up the story around the country, and Muybridge again became a famous person. This time his crime went unmentioned. He was treated as a magician with a camera, not a killer with an obsession.
The only way the photographer had to share his invention was to carry it from audience to audience. In 1880, Muybridge acquired a new renown as well as a kind of rebirth: he made himself into a showman with a fresh performance, a lantern operator with a moving picture act. Show followed show, and news stories came in clusters. Stanford had in hand the motion studies, the proof of his ideas about the gait of the animal, and he had another spurt of fame, vicarious this time, through his hired camera hand. But how strange, the railroad man might have thought, that the photographer drew more attention than his boss.
In May 1881, Muybridge put together the results of the Palo Alto experiments into a handmade book that he called The Attitudes of Animals in Motion. The album contained series photos of most of the animals, along with some of the people he’d photographed. He made five copies, giving one to Stanford, keeping the rest. Muybridge didn’t know it at the time, but before long he would need to sell the other copies, like exotic consumables, merely to have an income.
Stanford and Muybridge had started the horse pictures in 1872, but in eight years, the patron had never paid his photographer. The artist quit the project from 1874 through 1876 (the years of the murder and trial), but he came back and spent much of the years 1877–80 at Stanford’s beck and call. Yes, Stanford had paid for the gear—cameras, lenses, buildings, a supporting cast of horse handlers and camera assistants, and of course the animals. Altogether it was a giant investment, but no money was forthcoming for Muybridge. (Stanford later claimed the photographer told him he would work without pay, just for expenses.) I suspect Muybridge played a ruse, expecting Stanford would pay him a big chunk out of gratitude if he succeeded and if the giant scheme ever wound down.
After Stanford picked up his album, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, the Octopus had one of his assistants write a check to the photographer for $2,000 (in 2010 money, about $40,000). Muybridge did not record what he thought about this, but under the circumstances (obsessive work, the invention of a new way of seeing), the sum felt small. He took the check as a sign of Stanford’s condescension, and wrote him a polite thank-you note.4
Stanford might have been distracted, because about this time he was reminded that many people wanted him dead. One week after the public showing of the zoopraxiscope, Leland again had to leave behind the fun of moving pictures to respond to an uprising. This time the fight did not come to his door by torchlight with mobs shouting for him to hang; it came from among people out on the fringe of the railroad empire. The episode, in the central San Joaquin Valley, two hundred miles southeast of San Francisco, picked up a name—the Mussel Slough Massacre, a shooting spree named after a ditch called Mussel Slough near the town of Hanford, California, where state marshals, doing the bidding of the Octopus, killed a clutch of people who dared to defy the railroad.
Since the mid-1870s, the Central Pacific had surrendered its glory as transcontinental hero to become a subsidiary of one of the associates’ acquisitions, the Southern Pacific Railroad, a smaller California track. (The Central Pacific owed the federal government upward of $50 million for construction loans; the associates had the idea of subordinating the firm to another company and starving the Central of capital, so as to enable it to go bankrupt when the notes came due.) After 1875, the Southern Pacific, with Stanford as president, claimed the Central as one of its failing branches.
By the land grant deal with Washington, the railroad picked up mile-square tracts of land on alternating sides of the track that it built into the San Joaquin Valley, a 250-mile stretch in central California. The rich farmland had little agriculture as yet, but when the rail went down, ranchers and farmers moved onto it, expecting easy delivery to markets by grain cars and rising land values. Some squatted on land owned by the train, some leased at low rates, hoping to buy their way cheaply into tracts by making them productive and building settlements. The Southern Pacific first signaled that it would sell this homestead land at $2.50 an acre, but when sale contracts came out of the company’s legal department, they carried prices of $17 to $40 an acre. Ranchers at Hanford had built houses, barns, and schools, which they would have to surrender if they couldn’t meet the railroad’s terms, and most could not. Some tenants were former Confederate soldiers who had immigrated to California and who did not mind settling disagreements with guns. The squatters’ colony formed a militia led by a former Confederate Army major, Thomas Jefferson McQuiddy, and hundreds met in Hanford to plan their resistance to Stanford.
In March 1880, Leland took his private rail car to Hanford to meet with McQuiddy and other ranchers. There is no account of the meeting, but Stanford’s phlegmatic ways—his speechlessness and habit of bearing no opposition—suggest things went badly. In April, Stanford sent an agent to Hanford to start selling the land at the higher price.
About the same time as all this, Muybridge was showing off his projector at the Art Association in San Francisco. Stanford didn’t attend. The situation at Hanford had been heating up, and anyway, too many common people turned out at the auditorium on Clay Street. On May 11, one week after the Muybridge screening, Stanford sent a U.S. marshal to Hanford with eviction notices, and with an armed escort of four, the marshal went from house to house to kick families off the land. Some of McQuiddy’s militia appeared, and a gunfight ensued. Seven men were killed, six of them settlers, after which the marshals for the railroad fled for their lives.
The dead from the gunfight became martyrs to the railroad, and Stanford, blood on his hands, faced a public relations crisis. Newspapers called it a massacre and blamed the shootout on the greed of the Western oligarchs. A dozen land squatters were put on trial for manslaughter (they had been present but had not killed anyone), and when five received jail sentences, they, too, became heroes of a populist, anti-corporate cause.
The legend of the Octopus, the venal and avaricious corporate beast, grew from this point. The San Francisco Wasp newspaper ran a cartoon depicting Stanford and his partner Charles Crocker as grave robbers pilfering the cemetery at Mussel Slough, with the following lines appended to that image:
These mounds are green where lie the brave
Who fought and fell at Hanford;
O point me out I pray,
The grave of Leland Stanford.
After Mussel Slough, little could soften Stanford’s image, and California turned hard against the man. The story of the people the railroad evicted and killed launched at least three novels. In 1882, the novelist William Morrow, an Alabama native who had moved west, published Blood Money, a story of Stanford and his partners as an evil cabal. Josiah Royce, a philosopher who taught at Harvard, but was California born, wrote The Feud at Oakfield Creek, which portrayed the railroad men as a corrupt clique whose greed ran bottomless. And in 1901, writer Frank Norris published the most popular rendering of Mussel Slough, nicely exaggerated, in his novel The Octopus. The railroads “had been hated long and hard,” Norris wrote, because they operated like “a splash of blood and destruction, a monster.” Most had no trouble with the broad-brush hyperbole.
In 1881, a year after Mussel Slough, the Stanford family, their lives turned sour by the people’s distaste, decided to get away from the chorus of slander and take a long trip. Sometime that spring Leland and Jenny, plus twelve-year-old Leland Jr., fled California on a private train to New York, joined by two servants and a cook, a man called Homer Bishop. From there they sailed to Europe, the first trip to the Continent for all three in the family. They planned a buying expedition through the art districts of Italy and France—in search of jewelry, antiques, and paintings, things not plentiful in California, but which the Stanfords required to maintain their perch atop the class pyramid. Leland Jr., on this trip, would also be allowed to make acquisitions. A lifetime of private teachers and nannies had made the boy precocious, perhaps a little fey. Somehow he had developed a taste for antiquities, little statuary and oddments from Egypt, Rome, Mesopotamia. Fortunately, his parents had the buying power to satisfy it. Fortunately also, streams of relics flowed from looted sites in the ancient world into galleries in Europe—plaques, friezes, cuneiform tablets, bas-reliefs, stone figurines. As they set off from New York, the family had a shared agenda: visit a few Old World monuments and then hit the auction houses.
After the Mussel Slough shooting in May 1880, the San Francisco Wasp ran this cartoon showing Leland Stanford (locomotive in hand) and his partner Charles Crocker robbing the graves of those killed by railroad marshals, with a comet of retribution descending. (Illustration Credit c19.3)
The Stanfords, on this trip, also wanted to collect portraits of themselves. With their many previous commissions, they had nearly exhausted the pool of California painters, and a month in Paris, capital of the art world, could solve the problem. Bona fide French artists might provide a harvest of new pictures for the Palo Alto house. For her portrait, Jenny Stanford had in mind the painter Léon Bonnat, a forty-eight-year-old artist known for his severe realism and restrained palette. Leland Jr. h
ad been assigned to a different master. Leland Sr. wanted to sit for the most famous painter of the decade, a grandiose, long-haired maestro named Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. The choice might have touched a bit on horses, because Meissonier’s reputation for portraits was equaled by his fame for equestrian scenes. He painted, many times, the campaigns of Napoleon, crowding dozens of horses into the frame. Society figures went to Meissonier for his frosty realistic style, which made everyone look stately and pensive. Stanford wanted that appearance for his own picture, which he intended to hang in his study.
The trouble was that Meissonier did not paint just anybody, and he took pleasure in turning down supplicants who came for the glamorous touch of his brush. Stanford knew of Meissonier’s testiness, and his high fees, so as an insurance policy of sorts he packed for the trip his copy of Muybridge’s handmade album, Attitudes of Animals in Motion. The book had become his chief conversation piece—whenever it came out, guests browsed it with awe and envy. Stanford hoped the album would appeal to the horse connoisseur in Meissonier and raise the likelihood the artist would take on a new client.
May was spent in Italy, and in mid-June family and servants arrived in Paris. Sightseeing and shopping ensued, followed by one-on-one meetings with their chosen portrait artists. Meissonier received Stanford, who showed him the Muybridge book, which had the desired effect. The artist gave his fee at $10,000, five times what Stanford had paid Muybridge for his eight years on the horse photographs. The client agreed, and a dozen or more sittings followed.
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Leland Stanford, 1881. Oil on canvas (Illustration Credit c19.4)