The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  In late February 1888, Eadweard Muybridge gave a talk and show at the Orange Music Hall, a theater that sometimes sold uplift in the form of lectures but was not averse to comedians and singers wearing blackface. Muybridge brought the zoopraxiscope, the same brass and wood machine he’d built eight years earlier for his friend Stanford, the same two canisters of oxygen and hydrogen. As usual, Muybridge screened scenes of naked people jumping and running, including himself. The local paper complained about the “propriety of exhibiting nude human figures to a promiscuous assembly,” meaning men seated next to women in the audience.2 He drew a crowd, people fascinated by his pictures, and if Thomas Edison sat in the audience that Saturday night, the Wizard might have exercised his prerogative as an eminence and introduced himself. This would explain why, two days later, Muybridge went to visit Edison at his laboratory. The photographer took that meeting without flinching: he had experience handling a big man in industry. On Monday, February 27, Muybridge, at age fifty-eight an older man and the worse for wear, sat in Edison’s office to answer a stream of questions from the youngish tycoon.

  And in a gambling stroke, the inventor Muybridge made a proposal: he and Edison should collaborate. Why not combine Edison’s phonograph, a sound recording device, and the zoopraxiscope, a motion projector? They could make moving pictures with sound. Years later, Muybridge remembered, “We talked about the practicability of using the Zoopraxiscope in association with the phonograph, so as to combine, and reproduce simultaneously, in the presence of an audience, visible actions and audible words.” They talked about, in other words, a recipe for sound movies.3

  Muybridge knew he lacked the money to develop his own machines beyond what he had already done. (He might have known he also lacked the business skills.) He did not know that in throwing his idea on the table, he had handed a notion to someone who would, in a few years, turn it into an industry.

  A writer for the New York World got Edison’s take on the meeting, which matched Muybridge’s own. “Mr. Edison said that Prof. Eadweard Muybridge, the instantaneous photographer, had visited him and had proposed to him a scheme which, if carried to completion, will afford an almost endless field of instruction and amusement,” he wrote. “The photographer said that he … had almost perfected a photographic appliance by which he would be able to accurately reproduce the gestures and the facial expression of [an actor] making a speech. And he proposed to Mr. Edison that the phonograph should be used in connection with this invention.” In this little scene I see the hazy but recognizable foundations of a media-made world. Especially in the reporter’s last line: “This scheme met with the approval of Mr. Edison, and he intended to perfect it at his leisure.”4 Curiously Muybridge had never patented the zoopraxiscope. He had taken out patents on his apparatus for photographing motion and on several other devices, but not on the projector.

  Edison, a businessman not shy about taking ideas from others and writing his name on them, saw in Muybridge a new vein of gold. He had what he wanted, and he sent the photographer on his way. And although the two corresponded, they never saw each other again.

  Within a short time, Edison assigned staff to start work on something like a movie device, a machine that would exceed the zoopraxiscope. He had little incentive to add Muybridge to the project, and every reason to leave him out. (The photographer, who was not an employee, could not be chained to Edison patents.) Three months after their brainstorm session, in May 1888, Thomas Edison opened his mail and found a fat pamphlet from Muybridge, the catalog he had asked the photographer to send, which listed the series from Animal Locomotion. Edison was not really interested in individual photos, but in how to throw numbers of them on a screen. He sent a note to his assistant, “Tell him to make the selection for me,” meaning, tell Muybridge to pick out fifty plates.5 When those pictures arrived, big sheets with twenty-four images of people sweeping this or jumping that, they were placed conspicuously in the company library, a room on the second floor of the main building. Every week, all of Edison’s technicians came through the library to look at patent filings and to do their correspondence—Edison wanted everyone to see the pictures and figure out how to copy them.

  Thomas A. Edison in a lab at his West Orange, New Jersey, compound, ca. 1890 (Illustration Credit c21.1)

  In October, Edison wrote a two-page statement called a “caveat,” an announcement of research plans, and submitted it to the U.S. Patent Office. A caveat was like a flag planted on new ground, a claim by an inventor that he or she had come very close to some discovery or apparatus. A patent, on the other hand, like a title to a piece of land, affirmed the thing was done. The Patent Office had a policy of informing the writer of a caveat when another company made a claim that might interfere with it. By filing one, Edison marked out turf and made it difficult for others to operate without his knowing.

  “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both Cheap, practical, and convenient,” said the moving picture caveat of October 8, 1888.6 At the time, Edison possessed no such “instrument.” The description of the device (“which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”) covered what Muybridge had already created but linked Edison’s nonexistent version of the technology with the phonograph, one of his big publicity coups.

  Edison assigned to the project a twenty-eight-year-old engineer, William L. Dickson, an immigrant from Scotland. A slender man with wavy dark hair and a handlebar mustache, Dickson recruited as helpers two other tinkerers from the technical pool (one the superbly named Fred Ott), and the team went to work. They looked first at in-house options. The Edison phonograph, now ten years old, worked by means of cylinders. A sound recording consisted of a little scroll, twelve inches long, two inches thick, with the sound etched on a metal sheet wrapped around the cylinder and a needle following the groove as the thing turned. Dickson thought that instead of sound modulations, he might put rows of pictures on a similar scroll. Dickson had his team paint photography emulsion directly on phonograph cylinders and devised a way to expose tiny pictures, each a quarter of an inch square, as the tubes turned. To play back the scene, the viewer looked through a microscope at the pictures on the spinning tube. One of the few cylinders that survives from this period shows an Edison employee dressed in white and making faces. Dickson called it Monkeyshines.7

  In summer 1889, Edison went to France for the Paris Exposition, a world’s fair where hundreds of engineers showed off their inventions and tried to sell ideas. (Among the strange structures that went up at the fair was the Eiffel Tower, which drew hordes.) Edison’s own company display covered nearly an acre inside the main glass-covered pavilion. In Paris, Edison looked up Muybridge’s admirer Étienne-Jules Marey, who showed the American inventor some of his own stop-motion pictures. The rendezvous with Marey hastened the Wizard’s competitive sprint, and, returning to New Jersey in the fall, Edison wrote another caveat that made a broad claim on motion pictures as his invention and his alone. He sent this, too, to the Patent Office.

  In 1889, Edison engineer William Dickson and team photographed one of their earliest short subjects, a man dressed in white, goofing around, which they called Monkeyshines. (Illustration Credit c21.2)

  Click here to view a larger version of this image.

  The cylinder idea didn’t work, in part because squinting through a microscope lens made viewers feel as though they were viewing a biological specimen. Disappointed, Edison took Dickson and his team off the project and assigned them to something different for a year. Then, in fall 1890, Dickson and his assistants went back to the “movie” scheme. A new material had turned up that promised to change everything—a substance known as celluloid.

  Muybridge took his show to Europe, hoping to sell pictures from Animal Locomotion and placate his printers, the Photogravure Company, who threatened a lawsuit for nonpayment. In February 1889 he arrived
in London to begin a year of meandering about his home country, screening and hustling. After the dustup over the Stillman book, Horse in Motion, seven years before, the science coterie in England had shunned Muybridge, but by now his claim had been vindicated. On this trip he found all scores evened and every auditorium with an open door. He hired a projectionist to run the equipment, a man called Ernest Webster, so he could walk and talk around the screen. The pair started with a screening at the Royal Institution in London, where he had appeared once before. This time, according to one paper, “Mr. Muybridge, when the animals were thrown on the screen in actual motion, brought down the house.”8 Muybridge and Webster did all of the “royals”: the Royal Institution, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society. Praise flowed in the press, but sales of the photos could have been better.

  An influential photographer of the day, C. H. Bothamley, heard Muybridge talk in Leeds, in north England, and published his reaction. When the projector showed the flight of a bird, “a cockatoo, I believe,” Bothamley wrote, “a murmur of astonishment and pleasure went through the whole audience, and the persistent demands for the repetition of what was as beautiful a picture as I have ever seen on a screen.”9

  The projectionist Ernest Webster remembered these days. “I operated the Zoopraxiscope for him,” Webster wrote, years later. “Muybridge was extremely vain and intolerant of contradiction, very impatient if everything was not exactly to his previous instructions by post, and he was very dictatorial to porters and caretakers. Muybridge during the show walked about the stage with a little steel ‘clicker’ in his hand, and this he used as a signal when he wanted a change in the picture. He was a very voluble speaker and he told me that he never suffered from nervousness. He was always announced as ‘Professor Eadweard Muybridge,’ and woe betide anyone who spelled his Christian name ‘Edward.’ ” Eadweard was never “Edward” again, apparently, except by mistake.

  Webster had this to say about his employer’s criminal past. “The secretary of one of the societies we visited told me that Muybridge had killed a man. Although we sat side by side on our long railway journeys, and also at meals at hotels, Muybridge never told me anything of his private affairs. I never heard any details or any other reference to the murder.”10 The photographer must have been relieved to travel and bow to applause as an artist and technician, and not a killer who had made good.

  Muybridge did shows in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and in 1891 he crossed the Channel to the Continent to keep touring. March found him in Berlin, putting on screenings at the Kunstgenossenschaft (Art Association) and at the Urania Theater, to an audience of five hundred. From there he took his show to Bavaria for screenings in Munich. The Neueste Nachrichten newspaper, uncharacteristically excited, said, “The room was filled to the last corner, and nearly all the royal family and the ministers were present.”11 He went on to Italy, where he wrote to a friend at Penn from Rome (“to my surprise I found but few painters of any great distinction in this city”). The photographer gave shows at two theaters in the capital before going to Naples for more screenings and pitches. Taking a day off, Muybridge looked at the ruins of Pompeii, walking up and down Mt. Vesuvius and around the first-century town (“I wandered through the once animated streets of Pompeii, but my experiences were probably the same as those of most visitors”). He zigzagged Europe—Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France. (After two months, he wrote, “I now speak Italian, German, and French with equal fluency,” happily exaggerating.) In a jumbled list, he wrote down the places where he gave his talks and showed his spinning images: “Berlin, Paris, Munich, Naples, Leipzig, Rome, Bologna, Turin, Bern, Tübingen, Wurzburg, Geneva, Freiburg, Basel, Halle, Jena, Göttingen, Bonn, Strasbourg, Vienna, Heidelberg, Prague, Genoa, Zurich, Pisa, Innsbruck, Budapest, Florence, and Padua.” On another list he named “the royal and other academies” that had given him a stage and a screen.12

  Then it was back to England for more shows. All the touring gave Muybridge a strong drink of fame: everywhere, audiences gasped and laughed, and their praise washed over him. But in August 1891, when he was in Britain, Muybridge might have seen an item in the London magazine The Leisure Hour about some doings back in the States.

  “Mr. Thomas A. Edison, the famous American inventor, has just launched upon the world a description of the highly sensational feat he believes he has accomplished in reproducing sights,” a reporter wrote. The magazine quoted Edison, “ ‘My idea was to take a series of instantaneous photographs of motions so rapidly that in the reproduction photographic representations would become dissolved in pure motion.’ ” But the editors were skeptical. “So far we are told nothing new,” the feature said. “By the visits of Mr. Muybridge to England, large audiences in all our great towns have been familiarized with the same kind of phenomena. His pictures are perfectly successful and give absolutely correct representations. Edison’s machine adds nothing to our knowledge of the production of moving pictures, next to the system familiarized to us by Muybridge.”13 At least in London, Muybridge kept his reputation as the inventor.

  He sailed back to America on November 25, on the steamship Ohio, from Liverpool.

  They called them “begging letters.” For many years Leland and Jenny had gotten streams of them. Everyone knew about the Stanford money, and hundreds wrote to ask for cash. Only the simplest address was necessary—“Leland Stanford, San Francisco”—and the letters always arrived.14

  An aging Leland Stanford, about 1890 (Illustration Credit c21.3)

  Rowena Geer, of Little River, Kansas, wrote, “It has been some years since I picked up a paper for the first time with the name Stanford (I do not remember the first name) as having an immense fortune. I have been wondering if you could be any relation to my Mother, her Maiden name was Stanford. If we are any relation I am glad you have the good fortune to have plenty of money whereby you can help the rest of us who is not so fortunate.”

  Lena Bailey, a student in New Hampshire, said, “I am a young girl of eighteen who has been for three years in the Stevens High School here in this town. I need about $100 dollars to complete my course, including graduation expenses. One hundred dollars would be to me what a million is to you. I shall anxiously await your reply, as it will decide my future.”

  S. J. Cox in Johnston, South Carolina, wrote:

  “I have two little children, one a boy and one a girl, who are motherless. I need help to patent and perfect a horseless vehicle. Can you help me?”

  A man in Iowa called A. D. Corbin sent this plea:

  “We, the Negro Business League of Davenport, Iowa beg leave to put before you for your consideration our struggle to secure for ourselves one large public building, which will cost about $10,000.”

  Leland and Jenny ignored most of this (although Leland sometimes had a secretary send a brief “I-can’t-spare-a-dollar” reply). Jenny, however, occasionally gave money to sick people. After sending a check to a young woman with tuberculosis, she told a secretary, “I received a thank-you letter from the mother. It was the most illiterate scrawl! She could not cross her T’s or dot the I’s. She used no paragraphs. But I suppose she wrote the letter many times before she mailed it. The poor, ignorant Irish woman.” For Jenny to loosen her grip on money seemed to ease the grip money had on her.

  In March 1889, the Stanfords went to the White House to attend the inaugural ball of President Benjamin Harrison. The incoming president was a Republican, like the Stanfords, and they struck up a friendship. Leland and Jenny sometimes found themselves at the White House for dinner with Harrison, and the president came to eat at the Stanfords’ house on Farragut Square. Although Senator Stanford played the part of a backbencher in Congress, his friendliness with Harrison, noticed by the press, lifted him to a prominent spot on the Washington stage.

  In May 1890 the Stanfords left for Europe to take the waters again at the Bad Kissingen spa in southern Germany. The railroad tycoon was falling into bad health. Leland, in his mid-sixties, struggled to g
et up from a chair and leaned on his showy gold-tipped cane when he walked. After several weeks in the mineral tubs, he and Jenny decamped to Vienna and after that to St. Petersburg, returning to California in October.

  At the minimum, the trip must have helped Leland’s appearance, because in January 1891, the California legislature voted him into another six-year term as senator.

  The friendship with President Benjamin Harrison deepened. That summer, Harrison took a train from Washington to California to visit the Stanfords at their mansion in San Francisco. Receptions were arranged, dinners staged. The friendship had a public side—it helped Stanford more than Harrison—and in the eyes of railroad skeptics there was something opportune to it. As it happened, a fight had been brewing in Washington around the figure of Stanford. The railroad bonds issued by the federal government thirty years earlier, the money that built the transcontinental tracks, would come due in two years. Neither Stanford nor his old partner, Collis Huntington, felt inclined to repay the big loans—to do so would clean out their fortunes. (The other two of the “Big Four,” Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, had died in the 1880s.) Litigation and an inquest by Congress looked likely. With a political squall gathering, Stanford knew it would be good to have the president around eating his food, riding his horses.

  But to distract him from anxiety, there was now something good on the Palo Alto farm, just a stone’s throw from the porch. Stanford University, a new quadrangle of buildings, looked like a medieval cloister in the crackling sun. The rusticated beige compound, Romanesque and stone, stood between the house and the horse tracks. On October 1, 1891, Leland and Jenny stepped off the porch and walked across the lawn to the opening day ceremony. Classes were to begin the following morning. A sizable audience—the first 555 students, a knot of well-wishers, a faculty of fifteen, the trustees—sat on the lawn in folding chairs for speeches and music. Senator Stanford, with the pride of ownership, leaned on his cane and gave the curtain-raiser.