The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  Louis and Auguste Lumière returned to Lyon and began work on a camera the size of a shoebox, with a crank, which could shoot film of what it saw. They wanted to be able to use the same machine, after the pictures were developed, as a projector in the Muybridge fashion. On February 13, 1895, the brothers took out a patent on the device, which they called the cinématographe, a name copied from the Edison machine, the kinetograph.24

  A near-cube of wood that measured only twelve inches in length, the cinématographe shot film more slowly than the Edison machine, sixteen pictures per second instead of forty, but it weighed ten pounds, rather than 150. A month after taking out the patent, the Lumières brought their device to the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale in Paris, where they used it to show on a screen a thirty-second movie, La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers leaving the Lumière factory at Lyon), in which the family’s assembly-line crew, most of them women, streamed out of a barnlike factory door. Nine months later, on December 28, the brothers gave their first public show of the cinématographe to a paying audience, screening ten strips of film in a big room in a restaurant in Paris, the Grand Café, at 14 Boulevard des Capucines. Among the subjects: a man spraying a garden hose, a woman feeding a baby, and (what since Muybridge had become a staple) a pair of blacksmiths hammering at an anvil.

  The show at the Grand Café, a block from the Paris Opéra and on a Saturday night, is usually singled out by historians of media as a kind of official birthday for moving pictures. Other birthdays can be found, of course, including one nearly sixteen years earlier: the night at the Stanford house in San Francisco, on January 16, 1880, when Muybridge, for an audience of Stanford’s friends, put his horses in motion on a screen.

  Back in America, Edison’s kinetoscope turned out to be a fad—after two years, the machine lost its appeal, and traffic at the parlors thinned. The problem seemed to be both physical and psychological. The Edison arrangement for looking at movies involved one viewer bent over a tall box and squinting into two eyeholes. It seemed people preferred something closer to the Muybridge experience—a room full of spectators, everyone seated, and a communal gaze.

  Edison learned about the Lumières and moved to outflank them. In late 1895, two engineers from Washington, D.C., Thomas Armat and Francis Jenkins, brought their design for a compact projector, which they called a “phantascope,” to Edison. The machine used an intermediate step, stopping and fixing the film for an instant on each image before pushing it to the next frame. The change eliminated much of the flickering light that viewers complained about in moving pictures. In January 1896, Edison committed to building the phantascope and claimed it as his own device, renaming it the “vitascope.”

  By spring that year, three months after the Lumières made their machine public in Paris, Edison had a marketable projector. Screenings started in New York in Herald Square, at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, on April 23. In one feature, a woman did an “Umbrella Dance,” and in another, waves crashed on a beach. By this time Edison’s engineers had also built a portable camera that resembled the Lumières’ cinématographe. In May, that camera went out for a test, filming crowds that streamed along Broadway. And in a technique the Lumière brothers had used in France, which astonished audiences, the Broadway shots were shown the same night at Koster & Bial’s.

  In June, the cinématographe came to New York for its first American screenings. Soon, in big eastern cities, a dozen cinématographe cameramen were shooting during the day and giving shows at night. Things moved quickly. By this time Edison engineer William Dickson had quit in disgust over receiving so little money and credit for his work. Dickson founded another company, American Mutoscope, which showed moving pictures in vaudeville theaters. It was with Dickson, and at this point, that movies broke through from storefronts to the mainstay of American popular culture, vaudeville. Variety theaters and music halls around the country now showed film shorts as warm-ups for live acts. Another pair of Edison employees left to form a third competing outfit, the International Film Company. All the while, projectors of different design came into the market from other American engineers, and from Europe.25

  Muybridge was sixty-five. He knew he had missed the last turn. He knew his product, two seconds of animals jogging, no longer held anyone’s attention. Between Edison and the Lumières, it looked clear that the future belonged to movies on celluloid.

  In 1895—a year or so after he shut down the Zoopraxographical Hall at the Chicago World’s Fair and a few months after Edison opened the first kinetoscope parlors—Muybridge left America and moved home to England, permanently. He landed in his hometown, Kingston, southwest of London, as an elder adrift. He had not lived in England for an extended length of time in forty-five years. A few in his family, proud of what he’d done in America, put him up, and after a period of borrowing rooms he moved into a handsome house on Kingston’s Liverpool Road. The single-family had four bedrooms, Gothic detail, and a garden in the back. To share expenses, Muybridge had two cousins move in with him, and because after a solitary life, he wanted company. His roommates were George Lawrence, a fortyish cousin by marriage, and Catherine Plow Smith, a twenty-year-old grandniece of his mother. The three hired a live-in servant, a woman named Florence Gibbs, to round out the house at four.26

  Muybridge did more talks and screenings here and there in England, but the zoopraxiscope looked to audiences like old shtick. He gave his last show at the Artists’ Society, in the town of St. Ives, in Cornwall, in summer 1896.

  A period of summing up followed. In 1897 Muybridge made a deal with a London publisher, Chapman and Hall, to write two books that pulled together what he had done. The first, Animals in Motion, came out in 1899. At 264 pages it was a relatively short thing (compared to his previous output), but it had half-tone photographs, a technical advance over photogravure, the older image standard. In an essay with the pictures, Muybridge claimed (gently, no bitterness) to have been the originator of movie technology. Although no film industry yet existed, by this time hundreds of theaters ran shows of short subjects based on Muybridge-like excerpts, and talk in the press promised a world of bigger things to come. “My zoopraxiscope,” Muybridge wrote, “was the prototype of all the various instruments which, under a variety of names, accomplish a similar purpose at the present day.” He was right. In 1901 Muybridge published The Human Figure in Motion, another short book with a few dozen photographs, plus an essay that said his inventions should rank first in the story of movies, because they made movies possible.27

  THE FLOOD

  The question of who launched moving pictures and with them the visual media that hold us captive is not an idle enigma. Media are the addiction no one goes without, and we live by creation myths. What wove the fabric of invented dreams? Who stands at the headwaters of the image flood?

  Historians of media look for ancestors of cinema and find a dozen. Magic lantern, zoetrope, camera obscura. Impresarios did part of the job, like Louis Le Prince and William Friese-Greene (in England), Muybridge’s friend and rival Étienne-Jules Marey (France), and Ottomar Anschütz (Germany). But it was Muybridge who carried out the assignment, throwing a bridge from photography to projection, turning himself into a showman with a river of pictures on five hundred screens. After Muybridge, the quantity of images overwhelms and sweeps away the dams of memory.

  The photographs he made possess “the trauma, strangeness, the uncanniness of the impossible instant,” in the phrase of film writer Mary Ann Doane. You feel the unease in the runner immobilized at half step and the horse stopped in a freak pose. But Muybridge put his frozen instants back into the natural clothing of real-time vision. When the images were replayed on screen, the zoopraxiscope made his weird hijacking of time appear as normal as the drift of seconds and minutes.

  When he projected his running animals, Muybridge stunned people with the little screen dramas. (So much pleasure! Show it again!) But twenty years passed before
his kind of exquisite shock became widespread, thanks to celluloid, and another ten years before millions of people rose up from their living rooms, found seats in the new cinemas, and locked their eyes onto the big screen, giving themselves up to Muybridge’s creation.

  Thomas Edison knew that recorded movement would fix the eye on it, and audiences would rush to pay—thus the endless dancers and acrobats in the Black Maria. After the cinématographe, the Lumière brothers employed a team of cameramen who traveled Europe and America, shooting during the day and screening reels at night. They made “actualities,” in the jargon, street scenes with trolleys, movies of zeppelins landing, ships launching, water crashing. The opening moment in a Lumière show was a trick the brothers learned from Muybridge: project a motionless frame on the screen, and then kick it into action. Muybridge set it all up for followers to exploit—he was the advance man for the businesspeople, who turned his little spectacle into real revenue.

  By the year 1900, three machines in three countries did, with celluloid, what our hero, the murderer, did with glass plates: the cinématographe, in France; the vitascope, in the United States; and, in Germany, a projector called the Bioscope, built by engineer Max Skladanowsky. In 1901 Edison opened a production office at 41 East Twenty-first Street in New York and hired a movie exhibitor named Edwin Porter to staff it. A glassed-in stage was built on the roof, and that became the studio (like the Muybridge camera house), with lab work for the film sent to West Orange. Edison ramped up output. He wanted to become the dominant maker of movies and refiled patents claiming most of the technology as his personal creation. Beginning in 1902, he sued every movie producer in sight for patent infringement.

  Edwin Porter liked the reels made by Georges Meliès, a former magician in Paris, which included shots that would enter film vocabulary—close-ups, cutaways, and special effects. Actualities faded and storytelling seeped in to occupy the place vacated by the real. Edwin Porter copied Meliès’s methods and in 1903 made Life of an American Fireman, a twelve-minute reel in which a fireman rescues a mother and child. (Edison raised Porter’s salary to thirty-five dollars a week, hoping he wouldn’t follow Dickson and quit.) In November, Porter started a bigger project, The Great Train Robbery. Shot in New Jersey, the movie told the story of a train holdup in the Old West, plus a shootout that kills the robbers. (It would have appealed to Stanford, had he lived.) The reel went into every vaudeville house to become the most popular show of the day.

  At the Edison film studio in the Bronx, New York, Edwin S. Porter directs A Country Girl’s Seminary Life and Experiences, 1908. (Illustration Credit c22.1)

  He was seventy-four years old in spring 1904, and Muybridge’s stake in the visual culture had shrunk to nothing. He hadn’t shot a photograph since 1886. Occasionally he sent letters to magazine editors about a museum show or a scientific discovery. He tended his reputation in an old-fashioned, reference-book way, making sure the word zoopraxiscope appeared in dictionaries. He lived with his cousins, went to hometown events, and befriended the local librarians, who helped him put his papers in order. And he gardened.

  In March he seems to have been sick, because in the middle of that month Muybridge wrote a will. It left his cousin Catherine Smith his books and the income from a savings account (a tiny amount, not enough to live on); to his other housemate, George Lawrence, he left his cameras and equipment (they were out of date and might be sold for a small chunk). Two bequests went to his hometown: about £1,000 to the Kingston library to buy “artistic and scientific” books, and “my Zoopraxiscope, and negatives, and plates concerned with the investigation of animal locomotion” to a group planning a local museum.

  Eadweard Muybridge, ca. 1900 (Illustration Credit c22.2)

  The will made no mention of his son in California. Florado Helios Muybridge, the boy born to Flora, trigger for the crime that nearly sent Muybridge to the gallows, was now a thirty-year-old man. He hadn’t heard from his father since he was nine years old, since the photographer paid a last visit to him in 1883. Florado’s father had an unmatched record for burning bridges.

  On May 8, 1904, Muybridge was digging the ground behind his house, trying to cut out a model of the Great Lakes. A strange design for a den, except when you remember that the photographer once ran a building in Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan, dedicated to himself. The world’s fair, the lakes, the ocean-sized freshwater sea: the scale must have made an impression, and he wanted to remember them. He must have been stunned also by the scale of his own fifty-year detour in America, and he wanted to remember that. While shoveling in the backyard, carving out the shape of one of the lakes, Muybridge collapsed and died. The papers made no mention of the cause. He was cremated and buried in the town of Woking, twenty miles from Kingston, a fifteen-inch square slab of brown marble over his grave. The register of the crematorium called him “Eudweard Muybridge”: a clerk got the last name right but messed up the first. The gravestone reads EADWEARD MAYBRIDGE: the stonecutter got the first name right but messed up the last. All this continued a pattern set in motion by the deceased himself, who, whenever he changed his name, raised the bar in spelling.

  If you take the long view, you can think of media as a collision of railroads and photography, the accident that brought together Stanford and Muybridge. You can see media as the fusion of wealth with the arts, the first represented by a man who coined himself once, as a money maven, and the second by the strange, marginal man who coined himself repeatedly. The invention of media required two things: a pile of capital and a parallax view of art. Media and their make-believe worlds still work by that arrangement.

  One year after Muybridge died, the first movie house went up in America. Until that time, movies ran in vaudeville theaters and in music halls, as teasers before the live entertainment. But in 1905, the Nickelodeon Theater opened on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the original film theater, an auditorium where, from 8:00 a.m. to midnight, movies made the only attraction. The name of the theater came from the five cents charged for a reel, and “nickelodeon” turned into the generic label for all movie houses for years, until ticket prices rose.1

  The code Muybridge cracked, the crime he committed for which no one charged him, was the kidnapping of time. Before his camera, three media—writing, theater, and music—acted as vessels of time. Writing housed experience (reading let you relive life), and music and theater made two temporal arts, places where duration might be stored and retrieved. Muybridge added moving pictures to the list, another place to archive time. Movies hold the world in a perpetual present, bringing dead time (and the dead themselves) back to life. When he animated the running horse, Muybridge entered time into a retrievable file, made it a dataset, and on the foundation of that stolen second crafted the mechanism that led to the visual media and their vast sensorium of images. André Bazin, the French writer on film, said that moving pictures “embalm time.”2 Where photography makes possible the rescue of an instant, Muybridge made possible the rescue of any length of past, restoring it to the here and now.

  The Nickelodeon Theater, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ca. 1905 (Illustration Credit c22.3)

  He uncovered the miraculous in moving pictures, whose marvelousness is linked with death. By restoring motion, some visual media bring dead events back to life. (An early name for the movies was “animated pictures.”) “The ghost will walk,” said a French reporter who had seen a Muybridge show in 1881, “and science will succeed in abolishing death, its sole obstacle and only enemy.”

  I don’t want to say that Muybridge is the point of origin for the frenzy of looking that characterizes our own screen behavior in the twenty-first century. He is more like a railroad switch in the development of vision. After his camera, the media become possible, because all media came to rely on the template he designed. And more media to come, I would think, will grow from the same model.

  Leland Stanford, despite the turbulence of time, would recognize Stanford University as his latter-d
ay offspring. The school whose leaders turned it into a driver of innovation in technology remains faithful to its founder as a huge formation of capital and a safe redoubt for the grooming of managers. Stanford the man was above much else an executive, and the university that carries his name carries also his love for engineering, for organizations, the promise that lies in money and an unquesting belief in machines.

  Following in the steps of Stanford and the railroads, Thomas Edison began a long reign as the monopolist of early film. For more than a decade his Motion Picture Patents Company and its licensed producers controlled over 75 percent of the market for filmmaking and distribution—that is, until the year 1915, when a federal court, enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act, took the company apart. Disappointed, Edison sold his movie interests and got out of the media business. He died in 1931.

  A camera was not on hand to record his death, or for that matter the death of Florado Muybridge. On January 28, 1944, in Sacramento, at the corner of Twenty-fifth and I Streets, Florado Helios, age sixty-nine and a part-time gardener, was hit by a car. He died in a hospital four days later. Florado’s father came to time too early. The driver of the car that killed his son, a man called Ernest Tulgham, age forty-two, said he was driving eastbound and did not see the man in the intersection until the time was too late.3