The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  The small painting that emerged, just twelve by seventeen inches, shows a corpulent Stanford, seated in a U-shaped Empire chair, dressed in his habitual three-piece suit, a gold watch on the vest, leaning on an armrest and inspecting the viewer. On the man’s face Meissonier painted the blankness of affect that everyone who met Stanford commented upon (but a dignified blankness).5 Under his left arm in the picture is the copy of Muybridge’s album, open to a page showing a horse in mid-trot. It almost looked as though Muybridge’s fame had elbowed out that of the railroad man.

  Time was made for more spending. Jenny wanted diamonds, so she and Leland went to a jeweler, Debut & Coulon, where among other trinkets they bought a thirty-carat diamond broach, for 62,000 francs, or about $270,000 in 2010 dollars.6

  In July 1881, by telegraph from France, Stanford told his lawyers to transfer patent interest in Muybridge’s photographs and equipment to the photographer. The two had agreed on a price: one dollar, and the deal was done.7

  From San Francisco, Muybridge wrote his admiring friend Étienne-Jules Marey in Paris, sending Marey a plan for a new kind of camera, a kind of photo-gun. Marey wanted to photograph birds in flight, and in March 1881 Muybridge drew a design for a camera that looked like a rifle with a disk embedded in the barrel, enclosing drawings and an explanation. The idea was to photograph the birds by following them, as though with a gun. (The same year, Marey would build a gun-camera close to Muybridge’s designs, and it would become one of his lasting creations.)8 Marey encouraged Muybridge to come to France so he could widen his audience.

  In August Muybridge set off for France—a week by train from San Francisco to New York (no private car), a steamship across the Atlantic (second class). His trip would not be a buying tour, but something closer to a victory lap. He had been getting favorable press in France and Germany, and his name had become known in both art and science circles. He brought his projector and a desire to spread the astonishment the machine created. One thing made Muybridge’s new European fame a pleasure for him: the murder didn’t distort his story. In France, if anyone knew about the crime, it was a sentence or two, and the strangeness of it might even have imparted a mystique. Muybridge could play, at least in France, the part of a brilliant experimenter, a man with an interestingly deviant past.

  Whereas Stanford was received like a walking dollar sign in Paris, Muybridge met with the welcome given an intellectual star. His dealings with Marey probably helped. Marey belonged to the science establishment; he admired Muybridge and wanted to bring him on board. A party seemed the natural thing, so on September 26, Marey gave a reception for the inventor at his house on Boulevard Delessert. Several eminences turned up, including the physicists Hermann von Helmholtz of Germany and Carl Bjerknes of Norway. The photographer and showman Félix Nadar came. As the guest of honor, Muybridge was asked to perform for the crowd of 150. He brought out the zoopraxiscope and gave the party a glimpse of the world he had conjured. Newspapers reported a general astonishment. Le Globe said, “We see pass before our eyes long rows of horses galloping, coming together, moving apart, with the most surprising suppleness. It is a diabolical parade, an infernal chase. We cannot say enough about it: the gallery of Muybridge is limitless.”9

  Although he was just across town, Stanford kept his distance from all this. The more Muybridge’s name got around, the more Stanford seemed to cool toward his friend. Although their time in Paris overlapped for at least a month, the two never saw each other during that time.

  It could not have helped that Muybridge pulled in attention from people Stanford considered his own to influence, including the portraitist Meissonier. Stanford’s hired flatterer admired Muybridge more than he did the railroad builder, and Meissonier’s own influence stretched far and wide. As Marey was to the cadres of science, Meissonier was to the cliques of Parisian art. The month after Marey’s party for Muybridge, Meissonier threw not one, but two parties for the photographer, with guest lists drawn from the high ateliers. On Friday, November 3, Muybridge accepted toasts from a few dozen members of the art establishment gathered in Meissonier’s house at 131 Boulevard Malesherbes. Apparently the event stirred gossip, because the painter threw a much bigger party three weeks later. On November 26, according to the paper Le Figaro, two hundred came to Meissonier’s house to pay homage and witness the marvel of the zoopraxiscope. (This time Muybridge hired a projectionist so that he could talk without standing next to the machine.)10 Well-known artists filled seats in the screening room: the writer Alexandre Dumas (fils), Léon Bonnat (who had just finished a portrait of Jane Stanford), history painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, sculptor Aimé Millet, and the academic painters Alexandre Cabanel, Jules Lefebvre, Édouard Detaille, and Alphonse de Neuville. Whereas at Marey’s, Muybridge the chameleon took the part of a scientist, at Meissonier’s he was the consummate artist.

  Members of the artistic elite were fascinated, perhaps, because they saw the outlines of a new medium. Painting had already withstood an assault on its terrain from photography, as the camera effortlessly took over the role of representing the experience of the glimpse. In moving pictures, the art world recognized an even stronger claim on the eye—and where would it lead?

  “Happily I have strong nerves,” Muybridge wrote home to California after his round of parties, “or I should have blushed with the lavishness of the praise.”11

  Stanford remained absent. He could have been preoccupied with finding just the right gold watch. It’s more likely he wondered why no one threw plaudits at him. It cannot have been a coincidence that Stanford and family left Paris a few hours before Muybridge’s big social triumph, at the second Meissonier party. Muybridge saw the Stanfords off at the train station, the only time they crossed paths, in a chilly bon voyage. “The governor did not look well today,” he wrote home before heading over to the Boulevard Malesherbes.

  Back in San Francisco, Stanford got in touch with his physician and friend Jacob Stillman. The two had known each other for twenty-five years, since the pioneer days. Jacob Stillman, age sixty-two, was no provincial. He had published a memoir, Seeking the Golden Fleece, about his years during the Gold Rush, and he had written two other manuscripts about traveling the continent (though these hadn’t found their way into print). Stanford and Stillman thought, separately and together, that if Muybridge could make a name for himself with the sensational horse pictures, they could do the same. At Stanford’s encouragement, Stillman had been working up a book based on Muybridge’s photographs. He planned to reprint dozens of them by adapting them as lithographs and adding a text of his own. The book had a working title, “The Horse in Motion,” the name of a photo series Muybridge had made four years before. Stanford, when he got back to San Francisco, still stinging from Muybridge’s French celebrity, immediately hired a publisher, Osgood & Company, out of Boston. The company agreed to print the picture book, lavishly, for Stanford’s cash in hand.

  Still in Paris, Muybridge thought things were all right, if a little rocky, between Stanford and himself. In fact, the photographer sent a stream of letters to the railroad president about a new project he was trying to get off the ground. Muybridge, hoping to recruit him again to the patronage that had worked so well, wanted Stanford to bankroll a bigger round of motion studies, one that would include people, animals, and dozens more cameras. Stanford ignored the mail.

  In February 1882, in Boston, Osgood & Company published The Horse in Motion, with Muybridge’s pictures. It contained five reproductions of the horse photographs, as well as ninety-one photolithographs based on Muybridge’s prints. These words appeared on the title page: “The Horse in Motion, as shown by instantaneous photography—by J. D. B. Stillman.” And: “Executed and published under the auspices of Leland Stanford.” Muybridge’s name did not show up. Stanford wrote a preface to the book in which he remembered, somewhat vaguely, that he had found a photographer to take pictures of his animals, like a hired hand. He mentioned Muybridge’s name once.12

  It was i
n Paris, apparently, that Muybridge had learned to use a camera and had borrowed his first nom de plume, Helios. In 1882, he decided that France was, once again, the place to change his name. With this visit, he stopped calling himself Edward Muybridge and became instead Eadweard Muybridge. The name appears initially in his letters from this time, as well as some announcements, printed up for his talks. A weird name, difficult to spell. It would be the last occasion when he changed his name. He was fifty-two.

  In February, after six months in France, Muybridge left Paris for London, hoping to extend his victory lap from Europe into his home country. He had not returned to England in sixteen years. He had not been home since he started as a photographer, since the murder, and all the rest of it. Back in London, he took a train out to his hometown, Kingston, to pay visits. (His parents were dead, but he had cousins, aunts, and uncles there.) Then he rented rooms in London, because this was to be a stay of several months.

  Muybridge wrote home to California and the presumed author of the “Muybridge” book, Jacob Stillman. He had given Stanford’s friend a few photographs and thought the book, which he had heard about, would have the name “Muybridge” all over it. He asked Stillman the name of the publisher and when the book might be available, not knowing that The Horse in Motion was already in print.

  His first appearances in London, his first shows, came in March, at the Royal Institution. With its posh address, on Albemarle Street in London’s Mayfair, its decent age (eighty years), and its charter from the queen, the Royal Institution promised a grand entry into public life. The Royal Institution tilted toward hard science, usually inviting physicists or chemists to talk to its members. A lecture slot for Muybridge meant that science was allowing an artist-cum-scientist, and a curious man, through the door.

  The date of the talk came, March 13. The Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, age forty-one, heir to the throne of his mother, Queen Victoria, sat in the chair to call the event to order. In the rows of stiff oak seats sat other prime movers—Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh (“a distinguished photographer, it may be remembered,” said a newspaper); Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate at the time; William Gladstone, the future prime minister; the scientist Thomas Huxley; and a cast of hangers-on. It was as though Muybridge, the bargeman’s boy from the village, was applying for membership in a very restricted club. At least some in the room must have seen it this way.

  At one point Prince Albert spoke up. “I should like to see your boxing pictures,” he said. “I shall be very happy to show them, Your Royal Highness,” Muybridge answered, and then loaded a disk to show two athletes punching away at each other. The audience laughed in delight—more important, the prince laughed. “I don’t know that these pictures teach us anything useful,” Muybridge said, acting the professor, “but they are generally found amusing.” Waves of applause.

  The papers had a good time of it. The Illustrated London News said, “It would have been difficult to add to the éclat of such a first appearance,” and called Muybridge’s equipment “an astonishing apparatus.” Another writer gave a genuine welcome kiss to a new way of seeing. “Mr. Muybridge’s pleasing display was the essence of life and reality,” said the Photographic News. “A new world of sights and wonders was, indeed, opened by photography, which was not less astounding because it was truth itself.”13

  A dozen other shows in London followed. The Savage Club, in Covent Garden (four hundred comfortable members)…the Royal Society of Arts (by the Strand, central London)…the South Kensington Museum (which became the Victoria and Albert Museum)…the Royal Academy of Arts (the art school of choice, in Piccadilly)…He basked in the praise, and reporters put him under a magnifying glass. “With grey hair carelessly tossed back from an intellectual forehead, bright flashing eyes and a pleasant mouth,” one wrote, “Mr. Muybridge must himself make an interesting subject for a photograph, whether in motion or repose.”14

  Muybridge spent a couple of weeks writing a paper for the Royal Society, another science hub. Where the Royal Institution was more clubby, the Royal Society was more serious. Charles Darwin sat on its board, as did another eminence of the day, Francis Galton. The Royal Society accepted Muybridge’s paper, “On the Attitudes of Animals in Motion,” and scheduled it for publication. High prestige and high stakes were involved. The acceptance of the paper signaled that he had arrived at the heart of the science world.

  Muybridge looked like a phenomenon, until April. That month, a London publisher by the name of Trübner issued a British edition of the Stillman book, The Horse in Motion (Stanford spent a lot of money to get it out in two countries). Trübner sent the book to reviewers, and one copy came to the Royal Society, where it was handed around. Members of the board saw the book and failed to find Muybridge’s name all over the pictures. They became suspicious, turned against him, and speculated that he had plagiarized the work of others. “There is some dispute about the scientific proprietorship of the photographs,” Francis Galton complained, as he canceled the offer to publish Muybridge’s paper. The photographer’s would-be patrons now recoiled from him. Gossip followed Muybridge around town, and some saw him as an impostor.15

  Muybridge remembered the shock of it. “Altogether a brilliant and profitable career seemed opened to me in London,” he later wrote, describing his initial success. “This was then brought to a disastrous close.”16

  The lecture dates dried up, dinner invitations stopped. Within a few weeks, Muybridge ran low on money. He had brought with him four copies of Attitudes of Animals in Motion, the handmade books. He had to sell them for money to live on. (Buyers took him at his word that he was the inventor he claimed to be.) The books brought enough money for a steamship ticket back to America, and on June 13, feeling humiliated, he sailed from Liverpool to New York aboard the Republic.

  In the United States, Muybridge fell back on the customs of his adopted country: he sued, hiring the New York law firm of Allen, Hemenway, and Savage and accusing the publisher Osgood & Company of Boston of copyright infringement (he had, after all, bought the rights to the pictures from Stanford for a dollar), demanding $50,000 in damages. Because the publisher had offices in Boston, Muybridge brought suit in a federal circuit court in Massachusetts. A Boston paper threw sympathy his way. “The case will be interesting as casting some light on the question whether a poor scientific investigator has any rights that our plutocracy is bound to respect,” said the Evening Transcript.17

  The lawsuit meant a dead stop to all dealings between the tycoon and the inventor. “Muybridge wants damages and claims that the idea of taking photographs of horses in motion originated with him, and not with me, and that I set up that claim in the book,” Stanford told Stillman, his hired author. “When I first spoke to Muybridge about the matter, he said it could not be done.” Meaning, no one could take stop-motion pictures of horses at gallop. “I insisted, and he made his trials,” Stanford said. “I think there will be no difficulty in defeating his suit, and showing that his merit such as it is, was in carrying out my suggestions. I think the fame we have given him has turned his head.”18 Stanford disliked having handed away renown.

  The good doctor Stillman turned out to be a nasty man. “I believe Muybridge to be very unsafe and unscrupulous,” he wrote in a letter. “If he does not wear hay on his horn he does carry a pistol in his pocket and he did shoot a friend in the back and plead insanity.”19 (Muybridge shot a man, not quite his friend, in the chest.)

  The lawsuit soaked money from the impecunious photographer. His lawyers wanted fees, and the depositions seemed endless—Stillman, Stanford himself, plus several engineers from the Central Pacific. But the inventor had discovered a new revenue stream, showing off his projector.

  He took the zoopraxiscope around, hauling it on the train where invitations took him—to little theaters, to lecture halls, collecting fees for the novel bursts of life he could blast on screens. He hired a lecture agent—Kelley’s Musical and Literary Bureau, in Boston—and soon the talks c
ame, which were really shows featuring his moving picture machine. Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. The National Academy of Design and the Union League Club, in New York. “Mr. Muybridge gives lectures illustrated with his unique instrument, the zoopraxiscope,” said one paper, “by means of which horses, deer, oxen and anything you please are put through their paces, life-size and quite natural on the screen, before the astonished gaze of an audience.”20

  On one trip, he made a stop in Philadelphia, where he drew a crowd that included a well-known artist, Thomas Eakins. A realist painter with a sometimes flamboyant, sometimes erotic brush, Eakins taught at Philadelphia’s Academy of the Fine Arts. He had traded letters with Muybridge and counted himself among the photographer’s fans. And it seems to have been from Thomas Eakins, on this lecture tour, that Muybridge took the idea for a new project. He needed something to pull him out of the mess into which he’d fallen.

  It was early in 1883. The Stillman book with Muybridge’s pictures had cost Stanford a pile, and it wasn’t selling, but the paymaster did not mind terribly. “Don’t allow matters to worry you,” Stanford wrote Stillman. “If the people don’t buy the book it is their misfortune as well as ours.” What interested Stanford was not the book, but his vanity. “The Muybridge suit interests me,” he wrote. “I want to prove up the whole history. The actual facts are from beginning to the end he was an instrument to carry out my ideas.”21 Stanford wanted to lay claim to whatever he could.

  Muybridge lost the lawsuit when the judge dismissed the case. Copyright law, a weak legal plant, could not withstand the sucking strength of the Octopus.

  “Stanford is a man of contemptible tricks,” Muybridge wrote, feeling his old venom. “I thought he was a generous friend, but his liberality turns out to have been an instrument for his glorification.”22 The two men now detested each other.