The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  Muybridge’s life in show business crested at a world’s fair. In 1893 in Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan, a cluster of mostly white buildings went up, gorgeous and ephemeral. The stage set had an official name, the World’s Columbian Exposition, but everyone knew it as the Chicago World’s Fair, or just “the White City.” Science and art went on display in a six-month exhibit, and before it was done twenty-seven million had toured the grounds. Among the pavilions stood a theater devoted to one artist, Eadweard Muybridge, the motion studies man. His was not a name like Edison, but it had resonance nevertheless.

  One writer called the Muybridge auditorium in Chicago “the world’s first commercial motion picture theater,” and I don’t think this is overstatement.15

  The Muybridge pavilion was brown and columned, its plaster facade etched with grooves to make it look like stone. Pamphlets said the photographer’s show “may not be unworthy of the attention of the Philosopher,” but will also “entertain popular and juvenile audiences.” Between March and October, ticket buyers paid for a seat to watch “Professor Muybridge,” age sixty-three, white-haired and tweedy, flickering his scenes on a big screen. From a gift stand at the entrance, a clerk sold photos and other Muybridgiana, as well as a short book with a choking title, Descriptive Zoopraxography, which the photographer had written for the fair.

  Muybridge’s pavilion, which he called Zoopraxographical Hall, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (Illustration Credit c21.4)

  He called his theater Zoopraxographical Hall, which did not siphon in many strollers walking by on the boulevard. The name said, in effect, “this is high science,” especially to crowds that walked the Midway.

  The typical layout of world’s fairs, well honed by this time, forty years after the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, divided grounds into a “serious” section, with a dignified cluster of pavilions, and an amusement park, where impresarios put up attractions. At Chicago the Muybridge building went up with the amusements, on the so-called Midway, a walking strip three hundred feet wide and a mile long, lined with follies. Muybridge had polished his act at universities and lecture halls, and it didn’t quite lock into place at a theme park. Two doors down from the Zoopraxographical Hall stood a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, and next to that a Ferris wheel. Just behind the Muybridge show, a huckster had built an alley modeled on old Cairo (“reproducing the street Bein el Kasrein in the city of the Khalifs, with mosques and bazaars, donkeys and camels,” according to a printed guide). Across the road stood the Moorish Palace and the “Turkish Village, with a street of Constantinople.” In other words, the inventor found himself in an Orientalist playground, where people paid to see belly dancers, jugglers, and acrobats.16 In the middle of the kitsch, Muybridge put on a different kind of show, one that had played well in Europe, a high-minded talk broken up with bursts of pictures.

  The show flopped, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Attendance was not large,” and Muybridge often “talked to empty seats.” Ticket prices might have been high, but there were other reasons why few wanted to pay for the inventor’s stand-up. One might have been sexual: boxed in by the fair’s standards, he showed no naked pictures. For the family-keyed White City, all of his dancing and jumping models wore loincloths or gowns and covered their nipples. Another problem was that Muybridge seemed too familiar. Since the last motion studies in Philadelphia, now seven years back, the appetite for the inventor’s brand of entertainment had faded, and he was selling a dimming novelty. When he photographed Occident at Palo Alto for the first time (and that was fifteen years before), Muybridge had stood in the vanguard. The Chicago World’s Fair told him his influence had dribbled away.

  Leland and Jenny Stanford paid a visit to Chicago for a few days in April. Age sixty-nine and weak, Leland rolled around in a wheelchair pushed by a minder. He and Jenny stayed with the main attractions, avoiding the Midway and making no attempt to see their old friend Muybridge. Stanford’s every move made headlines, which means the photographer in his empty pavilion must have heard about the visit. The snub added a poisoned flower to his memory of the days when they were close.

  In May 1893, Stanford went home to Palo Alto from Chicago, wheelchair bound, his breathing heavy. Dr. Jacob Stillman, Muybridge’s enemy and Stanford’s friend, put him up to convalesce. On the night of June 20, Leland’s gasping woke Jenny, who sent one of the servants for a doctor in the town of Menlo Park. Stanford was dead by the time the doctor reached the house. In the aftermath, Jenny, whose son had also died and left her, could not relinquish her husband to an undertaker, and for the next three days Leland’s body stayed in the bed where he died.

  The funeral took place Saturday, June 24, in one of the quadrangles of the new school. “The casket was opened for all to look upon the man’s face,” one account said.17 A giant floral arrangement formed the shape of a locomotive in roses and lilies, with yellow pansies to represent brass bits around the engine. Some two hundred workers from the Palo Alto Stock Farm lined the path of the dirge walk, and the pallbearers were the eight engineers who had worked at the railroad for the longest time.

  Stanford’s will gave sums to his three surviving brothers (Thomas, Josiah, and Philip), as well as to the children of the three brothers who had already died. It also set aside money for the children of Jenny’s brothers, but none of the bequests cut deeply into the fortune. The will gave the biggest cache to the school, including stock in the railroad (32,873 shares Central Pacific, 24,468 shares Southern Pacific) and $2.5 million, or about $150 million in 2010 dollars.18

  The development of celluloid, the original plastic material, made possible the first movies, which everyone knew, even at the time, came directly from Eadweard Muybridge. The word celluloid derived from cellulose: the initial technique for making the tough synthetic involved soaking wood chips and plant fibers in nitric acid, along with solvent.19 Celluloid appeared during the 1880s as a cheap substitute for bone and rubber. It caught on quickly in all sorts of places—buttons, electrical insulation, billiard balls, shirt collars, false teeth, hair brushes—because everywhere people used it, celluloid cut costs to a fraction.

  Photography began to substitute stiff celluloid backings for the accustomed glass plate negatives about 1885 (just as Muybridge was taking his last pictures, on glass, in Philadelphia). George Eastman, a plate maker in Rochester, New York, used hard celluloid for his early negative products before he founded the Eastman Kodak Company near the end of the decade. The first Kodak camera—the people’s equipment, an amateur thing, not for professionals—which Eastman put to market in 1888, initially used paper as a backing for emulsion. It was wrapped around rolls mounted inside the boxy camera body. But the paper tore, so Eastman found a thin variety of celluloid that could be rolled like paper but was more flexible, firm, and transparent, and used it as a substitute. In September 1889, Eastman Kodak started selling celluloid roll film to be loaded in its patented cameras.

  The Edison team in New Jersey, working on a moving picture camera, copied the scheme almost immediately. Engineer William Dickson ordered flexible sheets of celluloid from the Keystone Dry Plate Company in Philadelphia and put aside the idea of painting emulsion onto phonograph cylinders. Dickson wondered how celluloid might work in a fast-moving roll: the challenge was to build a machine to expose hundreds of photographs in sequence rather than just twenty-four, the upper limit that Muybridge reached. In late 1889, Dickson made a prototype for a camera that would use celluloid film on a rapid-turning spool, in imitation of the Kodak camera. He widened the roll to a width of thirty-five millimeters, creating a larger picture surface, and introduced sprocket holes, perforations along the edge, where metal teeth could grab the film and yank it along. He also thickened the film, making it tough enough to run through a camera at high speed. Dickson began buying rolls of celluloid directly from Eastman Kodak, and when that company’s supply ran low, from another roll film maker, the Blair Camera Company in Boston.20

 
In the backyard of the Edison plant, using a camera the size of a desk, and rolls of film that careened through it at a rate of forty pictures per second, Dickson made his initial “movies.” He pointed the lens at boxers and gymnasts, and also at men smoking pipes. If his initial subjects were close to the ones picked by Muybridge years earlier, this was because Dickson had paged through Animal Locomotion in order to figure out what to photograph. Edison called the camera the kinetograph, a coinage from Greek meaning “movement writing.”21

  The playback machine went by a different name: the kinetoscope. A wooden box, it stood four feet tall and eighteen by twenty-eight inches at the base. Inside, celluloid strips were threaded into a loop around a batch of spools. To look at things, you bent your eyes to a pair of goggles on the top and turned a crank on the side to advance the film. The machine could fit a sixty-second scene before running out of room.

  The kinetoscope provided a private, voyeuristic experience, whereas the Muybridge scenes involved shared public viewing—a big screen and a room of people. In spring 1893, Edison’s two machines, the kinetograph movie camera and the kinetoscope peep-show box, were almost finished. Edison wanted to introduce them at the Chicago World’s Fair and had arranged exhibition space, but Dickson and his team fell behind schedule, and when the fair opened, they possessed only prototypes of the devices. With more tinkering necessary before production—Edison tools always went to market—Dickson would not let the prototypes leave the West Orange plant. This meant, among other things, that the kinetoscope did not face off against the Zoopraxographical Hall in Chicago.

  Nevertheless, Muybridge knew something was going on. Edison was good at publicity, and the photographer would have seen an item or two. In the five years since they’d met, he’d never heard from Edison, and this grated on him. When, sometime later, he commented on this period, Muybridge took credit for giving Edison the idea to make pictures move. “The zoopraxiscope was the first instrument, and for many years it was the only apparatus,” he wrote. “It was not until 1893, or more than thirteen years after it was first used, that any improvement in its construction or in its effects on the screen were made—improvements due to the invention of celluloid.”22 Muybridge knew that plastic, and the Wizard, had made possible what he could not.

  William Dickson wanted a place to shoot his film. Just as Muybridge had once turned a shed in California into a camera house, Dickson, in early 1893, put up a little wooden structure in the yard of the plant. It functioned as a kind of movie studio, before such a thing existed. The building measured forty-eight by twelve feet, was taller at one end than the other, and was wrapped entirely in black tar paper. Edison workers gave it a name, the “Black Maria” (pronounced Mar-eye-uh, a Black Maria was a police van used for an arrest roundup, which looked like a black box on four wheels). The name pleased Dickson, because with his kinetograph camera, he thought he had made something very cool and strange.

  The roof on the Black Maria had a big, hinged panel that opened to the sky, letting sun fall directly onto a stage, built inside, where scenes could be “filmed.” Huge numbers in lumens, measurements of the quantity of light, were needed to get pictures on the fast-moving film. If you looked at the building from the side you could see that it stood a foot off the ground. Underneath, in the middle, it sat on a pivot, which made it into a kind of spinning platter. By pushing at its ends, a pair of men could rotate the building like a propeller, making the skylight face the light as the sun moved across the afternoon sky. The Black Maria functioned as the main location for Thomas Edison’s moviemaking, with some two hundred short subjects shot there over a period of seven years.

  Dickson shot a twenty-second short, Blacksmith Scene, which showed three men hammering at an anvil (another Muybridge subject, with two differences: the men wore clothes in the Dickson scene, and there was a coda, which showed the men drinking beer). The filmstrip was loaded into the kinetoscope, where it became one of the first “movies.” A month later, Edison okayed the final design for the kinetoscope, the viewer that would be the company’s main product. Contracts were signed and exhibitors brought on board. (Edison could do a dozen things Muybridge could not, most notably, improve and perfect his equipment, develop merchandise, and bring it to market.) In January 1894, Dickson shot another of the founding reels in film history, Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, a filmstrip showing a blast into a handkerchief by the engineer Fred Ott. Publicity for the sneeze went national: a few frames appeared in the magazine Harper’s Weekly as a stop-motion series.

  An early “film studio,” the so-called Black Maria, in the yard of the Edison plant in New Jersey, where, between 1893 and 1900, William Dickson and his crew shot some two hundred short subjects for distribution to kinetoscope parlors, music halls, and vaudeville theaters (Illustration Credit c21.5)

  Edison knew Muybridge would see the Harper’s story. Perhaps he wanted to explain himself to the photographer for having forgotten their handshake agreement to do something together. Having ignored him for years, Edison wrote Muybridge on February 14 to describe what he had been up to. “I have constructed a little instrument which I call a Kinetoscope,” Edison told Muybridge. “It has a nickel and slot attachment,” meaning a place to feed the money, “but I am very doubtful if there is any commercial feature in it and fear that the machines will not earn their cost.” Edison dissimulated, pretending to have dreamed up a dumb failure. “These devices are of too sentimental character to get the public interested,” he wrote, not telling the truth about his expectations, while also apprising Muybridge to keep away from his turf.23 Muybridge wrote back on February 26, suggesting another plan to work together. Edison didn’t answer this time, because he had nothing to gain.

  William K. Dickson, Edison’s Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (Fred Ott’s Sneeze), 1894. A stop-motion sequence published in Harper’s Weekly (Illustration Credit c21.6)

  Click here to view a larger version of this image.

  Later that year Edison went into business as a “filmmaker,” a new job description he had just created. He hired a manager named William Gilmore, who would help integrate production (sixty-second reels shot in the Black Maria) and distribution (viewing parlors full of kinetoscopes). The Edison Company opened its first kinetoscope parlor in April 1894, installing ten kinetoscopes in a big storefront in New York, in the Holland Brothers emporium at 1155 Broadway, near Twenty-seventh Street. The machines stood like iceboxes lined against the walls, with ushers in suits to show you how to use them. It cost a nickel to see a one-minute “show,” twenty-five cents for five. (No volume discount—the movies were bite-sized, and customers ate a lot of them.) The company delivered novelty scenes, removed by a good distance from both science and art. One kinetoscope might crank up roosters fighting. Another, trained bears leaping. There was no sound, just pictures. (Although Muybridge had wanted Edison to link sound to the movies, Dickson and his team had trouble synchronizing the phonograph to the picture. Sound would not come into wide use in film until 1927, more than thirty years later.)

  Edison took credit for everything, but he tipped his hat to Muybridge at least once. “I believe that in coming years by my own work and that of Muybridge,” he said, talking to a writer for Century magazine in June 1894, “that a show can be given at the Metropolitan at New York without any material change from the original and with artists long since dead.”

  When the Wizard formed the Kinetoscope Company to distribute his machines, dozens of theater producers opened coin-operated parlors, and from the compound in New Jersey, Edison produced content to feed his hardware. Among the talent brought to the Black Maria to shoot reels for the chain: a strongman called Eugene Sandow (who flexed his muscles), a dancer named Annabelle Whitford (who undulated), and a tightrope walker named Juan Caicedo (who teetered on his cable). Buffalo Bill did a few seconds of his Wild West Show, and Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter, fired her gun. Nickels and quarters dropped, until Edison was making a good sum—$89,000 profit for the year 1
894, or about $2.5 million in 2010 dollars.

  A kinetoscope parlor in San Francisco in 1894, where men in suits showed customers how to use the viewing apparatus that imitated moving picture effects devised by Muybridge (Illustration Credit c21.7)

  Jenny Stanford, still sifting through her late husband’s papers, was compelled to think about Edison and Muybridge when she opened a letter from William Berry, in upstate New York. “I am a married man, forty years old,” said the begging letter. “A few years ago I lost my left hand while working at my trade as a machinist, and it deprives me a great deal in finding employment. I have come to the conclusion that one of Edison’s Kinetoscopes, with its first-class moving pictures, would bring in enough money to take care of my family. I wish to hire from you money to buy one, on two years time, with interest. Please consider this.”

  Two impresarios, Frank Maguire and Joseph Baucus, bought the rights to sell the Kinetoscope abroad and took the device to Paris in October 1894. They arranged a demonstration at a shop on the Boulevard Poissonnière, where among the many curious spectators were two brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumière. The Lumière brothers, ages thirty and thirty-two, came from the city of Lyon, in the south, where they ran a factory, the largest manufacturer of photographic plates in France. Their father, Antoine Lumière, had started the business—the brothers were his princely heirs—and the Lumière family employed some one hundred workers. Not incidentally, their factory relied heavily on celluloid. Rich and comfortable from the photography trade, the Lumières wanted to diversify. They found themselves fascinated by what Edison’s equipment did but disappointed that you had to squint into a box to see it. Would it be possible to put the minute-long pictures on a screen instead of peering into a box? The Lumières knew the answer because they were familiar with Muybridge and his French counterpart, Étienne-Jules Marey, who had done exactly that.