The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  Muybridge took pictures by the bargeload. I looked at one notebook from the fall of 1885, after he had been shooting for a year. During a period of twenty-four days, from September 15 to October 28, the photographer and his helpers shot 218 subjects, producing 5,837 negatives. A man called Henry Bell developed most of the Penn material, and he remembered later that he had processed about 21,600 photographs over a two-year span. (If one minute of film, at twenty-four frames per second, amounts to 1,440 frames, this added up to fifteen minutes of projected “footage.”) It is hard to imagine that anyone, before this, had exposed so much to the camera. The mass of images might be seen as the first media flood: Muybridge generated an initial stream of pictures that anticipated the river of images in which later generations would bathe.

  He still smoked a pipe (although he had given up the corncob as too rustic). He was aging, but his face kept the glow of desire. “Mr. Muybridge looks and talks like a philosopher,” said a writer who met him about this time. “He is a genial gentleman in the prime of life, and, although his beard is long and white, and hair and eyebrows shaggy, his countenance is ruddy, clean-cut, and intellectual.” Where one reporter called him “intensely enthusiastic,” a later generation might call him obsessed.13 One of his workers, Erwin Faber, said Muybridge had a manic appetite for work, but he lived like an ascetic. “While working with him I had occasion to go to his room in the second floor of a house on 33rd Street,” Faber remembered. “He lived modestly, cooking most of his very simple meals. He had one curious idea, that lemons were good for him, and he consumed them by the dozen.”14

  He sorted and edited his photographs, selecting 781 plates, each plate having from twelve to twenty-four photos. The 781 included some 561 with photos of people, 100 with horses, and 120 with other animals. He planned to sell them in several forms—a complete edition in eleven big volumes, in selections of one hundred, or in folios of twenty. Penn produced a book, Animal Locomotion, the Muybridge Work at the University of Pennsylvania, with essays that spun the business as both science-for-art and the reverse. A catalog that listed the plates appeared, and Penn sent it around.

  The Stanfords took a train from Italy to France, hauling a casket with the body of their son. In Paris, they met with a Reverend Augustus Beard, a minister from New York who ran the American Church on the Rue de Berri. Leland Jr.’s body went into the chapel, and every day the parents visited the bier. Beard wrote down what Stanford said to him, or something close to it. “This bereavement has so entirely changed my thoughts and plans of life that I do not see the way in front of me,” Stanford told the cleric, whom he barely knew. As always, Stanford spoke slowly. “I have been successful in the accumulation of property, and all of my thoughts of the future were associated with my son. I was living for him and his future—this was the reason for our travel abroad, for his education.”

  Grasping after their loss, Jenny and Leland tried to communicate with their son. Spiritual mediums occupied a high berth in the cultural firmament of the late nineteenth century, and in Paris the Stanfords took part in the first of many séances directed at the boy’s ghost. Divines promised to lead them to the speaking soul of Leland Jr., and saw in the parents two clients who could really pay. The hocus-pocus, which began in Paris, continued for years, long pursued by Jenny Stanford.15

  With the blandishments of mediums still in their ears, Leland and Jenny talked about starting a school. “Since I can do no more for my boy, I might do something for other people’s boys, in Leland’s name,” Stanford told Reverend Beard. The rich man, who had no diplomas of his own, translated his grief into the idea of educating people. Beard, who took the Stanfords to mean what they said, suggested they talk to a man he knew back in America, Andrew Dickson White, the president of Cornell University. A few days later Beard went to the Stanfords’ hotel to act as witness to a new will the couple had written. An earlier will, organized around their son, was moot, and in its place they had sketched a bequest for a college of some kind to be set up on the horse farm. The unnamed school was to be a “technological institution,” the will said, that stressed science and engineering.16

  In late April, Leland, Jenny, servants, and the casket sailed from France, arriving in America on May 4. The couple stayed on the East Coast until November. In New York, Leland and Collis Huntington, Stanford’s partner in the Octopus, worked on a design for the legal entity of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the company that held most of the monopoly’s assets. That was during the day. At night, Leland and Jenny met for séances with Maud Lord Drake, a famed spiritualist to rich clients, who attempted to contact the dead boy in the afterlife. Years later, Maud Lord Drake, the medium, took credit for the launch of Stanford University—she told newspapers that she guided Leland and Jenny, telling them how best to memorialize their son: with an engineering school.

  From New York the Stanfords went up to Boston to see Charles Eliot, president of Harvard University. In that meeting, Leland asked Eliot how much they should spend to start things going with their school. Eliot deflected the question, whereupon Leland asked the dollar value attached to Harvard—the physical plant, assets, and endowment. “About five million dollars” was the reply. Eliot remembered Stanford’s answer. “Well, Jenny, we can manage that, can’t we?”

  Stanford University was born in the library of the mansion at 901 California Street, in a ceremony that must have felt like a wake, in November 1885. The couple had set up a trust, granting the would-be school big tracts of land and naming a board of trustees. (Money would come later, they promised.) Leland walked up and down the rug, talking about his son, explaining the land grant—in effect, the school was the horse farm, plus some thousands of acres more. Lawyers and trustees sat around, listening gravely. In the same house where Muybridge invented moving pictures, Stanford created a university.

  Few schools admitted women, but Leland and Jenny wanted theirs to differ. Leland had gone to school with women in the liberal academies he attended in upstate New York, and now he took a progressive view, not to say a radical one. “We deem it of the first importance that the education of both sexes shall be equally full and complete,” Stanford told the room, the politician in him coming out. “The rights of one sex, political and otherwise, are the same as those of the other sex, and this equality of rights ought to be fully recognized.” Stanford then ritually handed over the grant of endowment, including deeds for the land and the stipulation that the school should carry his son’s name—Leland Stanford Junior University.

  The land was worth about $5 million, and the Stanfords promised an endowment when they died. The total for the school (at least, the number that went around in the press) came to $20 million. Newspapers from coast to coast and overseas mentioned the figure in hushed tones, with amazement.

  Back in Philadelphia, Muybridge’s nudes stayed in the inventory. (They made up more than half the pictures, and the trustees couldn’t figure out how to remove them.) The photographer chose the Photogravure Company, in New York, to make the reproductions. At some point in 1886 he moved to New York, renting rooms at 42 East Fourteenth Street, in order to monitor the project of turning his glass negatives into prints. Photogravure, the main technique at the time for publishing photographs in quantity, involved a painstaking process of transferring an image from its glass original to an etched copper plate, inking the plate, and turning out paper reproductions on a hand-operated press. Once the photogravures were done, Muybridge took them back to Philadelphia and turned them over to his publisher, J. B. Lippincott Company. Lippincott would bind the pictures in a portfolio or deliver them loose, as the customer preferred. “We have ready, awaiting your orders, 1200 copies in cloth; 250 half-morocco; and 50 in seal,” Joshua Lippincott wrote Muybridge after the job went through.17 The leather (so-called morocco) and sealskin jackets meant the photographer aimed at collectors with deep pockets. Showing again his pleasure in awkward names, he chose a title for the extravaganza: Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic In
vestigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872–1885. Although he photographed mostly people, he used the word “animal” in the broad, Darwinian sense.

  Muybridge had to sell a lot of books and folios to have any hope of recouping money for Penn. He told a reporter that he needed five hundred subscriptions at $100 apiece to make things pay—or $50,000 (the same amount Stanford had spent on him in Palo Alto).18 Only a handful of libraries could afford the eleven-volume encyclopedia version, and midsized orders were slow in coming. Most people wanted just a few of his unusual plates, a little dollop of his sexy photos.

  The Stanfords entombed Leland Jr. in a marble mausoleum a short walk from the front door of the Palo Alto house: they could not come or go without seeing it. Jenny continued to float on despair and conduct the occasional séances, while her husband drifted back down to the secular. The boy’s death had one immediate effect: it detached Leland from the railroad and reattached him to politics. Twenty years had passed since he served as governor of California, but he remembered the time nostalgically. (He compelled everyone else to remember it, too. Just as the photographer was Professor Muybridge, the railroad man insisted people call him Governor Stanford.) But now he wouldn’t mind a stint in Washington, perhaps as a senator.

  At this time, before the idea of one man, one vote, state legislatures, and not a popular ballot, chose men to send to the U.S. Senate. Under such a system, would-be senators who possessed resources sometimes thought that a benign distribution of funds might influence the deliberations of the assembly. The term of one California senator was about to expire, and Leland put his name in the “race.” No one can say what precisely transpired, but within two months, without facing the public or having to address a single audience, he was picked by the California legislature. Despite an outcry in the papers (the Octopus!), Leland became Senator Stanford in January 1885.

  When Stanford became a U.S. senator in 1885, he and his wife, Jenny, mixed their entertaining with politics. On the lawn of their house at Palo Alto, Stanford (holding a top hat) welcomed a coterie from Washington that included former president Rutherford Hayes (right hand jammed in his coat) and former Union general William T. Sherman (fifth from left). (Illustration Credit c20.8)

  Jenny and Leland moved to Washington, D.C., and into a superb house at 1701 K Street, on Farragut Square. Stanford, a Republican, fitted himself into life on Capitol Hill, where Republicans dominated the Senate. (A Democrat, Grover Cleveland, occupied the White House.) But the couple continued their mourning; they wore black every day and did not make the rounds of political dinners. By the following year, 1886, the Stanfords lifted their show of grief and started to entertain, putting on extravagant parties and dinners like the ones they used to stage in California. The guests lists may have differed—rooms full of congressmen, drawn at least half by curiosity about the show of money—but the scenes looked familiar: truckloads of silver service, rivers of silk and gilt, French menus that few could read. President Grover Cleveland became a Stanford guest, and when Cleveland’s successor moved into the White House—Benjamin Harrison, a Republican—he turned into a good friend.19

  One ceremony pulled Leland and Jenny out of Washington. In spring 1887, the couple took a train home to Palo Alto when the cornerstone of Stanford University’s first building was laid on May 14, Leland Jr.’s birthday.

  Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion appeared that summer, to a mixed reception. The New York Times said the photographer showed the “wonders of the camera,” but the paper threw in a qualification, because of the naked skin. “Care is taken that the nude series cannot be bought by those who do not intend to use such work for serious study. None but known and responsible persons are permitted to subscribe.”20 The paper did not define the elusive class of people who might be “known and responsible.”

  The photographer sold some subscriptions and covered some expenses, but the bulk of the material did not move. Almost no one bought the complete set, few wanted the hundred-picture folios, and Lippincott was lucky to make sales of twenty-image packs. Muybridge’s patrons at Penn, seeing the underwhelming response, grew tired of him. He had cost them too much, and his pictures did not generate the sensation that the earlier motion studies did. In reaction, Muybridge pulled an old identity from his bag, that of traveling salesman. He went from city to city, taking the zoopraxiscope, putting on shows, talking to audiences, trying to drum up orders. Through charm from the lectern and dazzlement on the screen, he sold ten or twenty prints at a time. (If he could have sold them the way he showed them—moving pictures rather than prints—the inventory might have flown out the door.) From Pittsburgh, he wrote William Pepper, the Penn provost, to say that he had eaten a good dinner the previous night at the house of the governor of Pennsylvania, James Beaver, but that he’d sold only two small batches of pictures after his talk.21 In New York, after speaking at Cooper Union, he wrote that his hosts wanted to make sure he used the zoopraxiscope for another event, at the city’s Union League Club—it would bring more buyers.22 From Boston he wrote that “business has not been very lively,” and he was leaving Massachusetts for shows in Rhode Island.23

  No one quite understood how to project moving pictures, so Muybridge sent word ahead telling them what to prepare. “I write to ask you if you will be kind enough to attend to the following particulars, necessary for the successful exhibition of the Zoopraxiscope,” said a standard letter.24 “Have delivered … 2 pairs of Cylinders (2 oxygen, 2 Hydrogen) each pair capable of running full headway for 3 hours; furnish 2 capable and handy men to attend to the lanterns [and] receive instructions; and have a table constructed.” The custom-built table measured six feet by four feet. It was to stand on a platform three feet high, placed forty-five feet from the screen—the projection booth. The screen had to measure sixteen feet square, hang two feet from the wall and “not less than four feet from the ground.” From his specifications, it could be said that Muybridge established some of the basic viewing conditions for the movies.

  Still touring, he wrote to Penn, chagrined, “It may surprise you that in Boston I met people who had no idea who ‘Muybridge’ was [or] even that there was a University of Pennsylvania.” The situation felt grim. He took a train to Wisconsin to speak in Milwaukee and Madison, then went to Illinois, where he wrote, relieved, “I did pretty well in Chicago, bringing on fourteen $100 subscribers, and two complete series at $600 each.” He took trains to St. Paul, Denver, and Cincinnati.25 All the way, he polished his act—half sales pitch for the pictures, half screen entertainment. Muybridge crisscrossed the country, by his count doing two hundred appearances, but it wasn’t enough: audiences liked the show but thought the pictures too expensive. The publisher, J. B. Lippincott Company, sent him caustic letters about thirty thousand unsold prints. The press kept paying him homage, but the Philadelphia project looked like an albatross.

  Then, something strange happened (something promising—or at least, so he thought). In January 1888, the weekly Nation magazine ran a story. The unsigned item speculated about a new invention, “one that could join Muybridge’s photographs to Edison’s phonograph.”26 It might have been that the photographer talked to the Nation’s editors on one of his stops in New York, planting the item; or it might have been that Thomas Edison, well known for his work on electricity, not to say his invention of the phonograph, had whispered the idea to some journalist. However it came about, the Nation story kicked a chain of events into motion.

  Thomas Alva Edison, as an inventor and businessman, stood head and shoulders above Muybridge. At age forty-one, he already possessed more than four hundred patents. He or his employees had designed things from lightbulbs to telephones, and the Edison Company operated little power stations that delivered the newfangled juice of electricity to tens of thousands of customers. Where Muybridge lived small, Edison lived large. Edison worked out of a complex of labs and offices in central New Jersey, occupied a mansion, and vacationed at a winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida.r />
  One month after the Nation item ran, Muybridge gave a talk and screening in the town of Orange, New Jersey, five miles from Edison’s lab. It was a Saturday night, February 25, at the Orange Music Hall, when he showed off the projector for the umpteenth time to an audience pulled together by a local club. Edison might have attended, or he might have sent someone to report on things.

  Unfortunately, Muybridge didn’t seem to know about the reputation Edison had among engineers. He did not know that the American inventor had a habit of borrowing the work of others and not returning it. And so perhaps what happened next could have been avoided. At the minimum, the story of who would get credit for the invention of visual media might have turned out differently.

  CELLULOID

  Thomas Edison didn’t mind that they thought of him as a sorcerer, the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” Like a magician, he had conjured up an electricity network, a better telegraph, and an uncanny device that recorded sound, the phonograph—all of it in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His inventions gave him riches and made his name one of the most familiar in America before he turned forty. But the Edison Company outgrew its first home, and in 1887, Edison moved his operation to a new plant in the town of West Orange, New Jersey, twenty miles west of New York City. That year the new Edison laboratory rose like a village in a field. Its main building, red brick, 150 by 50 feet, four stories, had a skirt of smaller structures around it, plus two hundred employees. By putting his plant in West Orange, Edison instantly became that town’s leading citizen. He housed his family in an enormous house near the plant—the kind with a name, in this case, Glenmont. (Jigsaw-Victorian in style, it had twenty-five rooms, half the size of the Stanford place, but still impressive.)1