Book type: History / True Crime
Summary: The byline of Ball’s book doesn’t say it all, but it’s definitely a good starting point for summarizing the story: “The Murderer Eadweard Muybridge, the Entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the Birth of Moving Pictures.” Edward Muggeridge (who would change his name the way celebrities change their hairstyles) tried his hand at several professions, none of them making him particularly successful until he cast his lot as a photographer. He took pictures of American landscapes, South American coffee plantations, and–once he met Leland Stanford–horses. Stanford (yes, like the university which he created in his son’s memory) loved horses more than almost anything. He was fascinated by them and, having heard of Edward Muybridge, he brought the photographer into his employ and the pair invested lots of money (Stanford) and lots of time and tinkering (Muybridge) into probing the question of whether all four feet of a horse leave the ground in a gallop. In the process of answering this riddle, Muybridge made the first moving pictures. The Inventor and the Tycoon recounts how a man who preferred life on the road taking pictures to spending time with his wife (but then murdered her lover) and a railroad mogul came together with the common goal of freezing time and succeeded.
Lessons:
- There were divas even in the nineteenth century. Before there was Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Britney Spears, or all those real housewives on Bravo, there was Eadweard Muybridge. This man went through so many names that he probably had a hard time remembering who he was at any given moment. (It appears he and my great-grandfather Nelson have a couple things in common at this point: Nelson spent much of his time with horses as well, but betting–and often losing–money on them, both had various aliases, like the character Nelson Van Alden from the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, and they both frequently changed professions, each man having a tendency at times to swindle people.)
This was nearly my fate one Thanksgiving. I told my brother his cat was fat and he threatened to stab me in the face with a fork. Evidently Nelson here told the wrong guy he had a fat pet at home.
Back to Eadweard being a diva. He changed his name from Muggeridge to Muggridge to Muygridge and finally to Muybridge. But somewhere in the middle he decided he needed a single name, like Prince. As Ball explains it, “At age thirty-seven, a time when most people surrender to whatever circumstances trap them, Muygridge had discarded his previous life as a businessman and nominated himself an artist, Helios. He had a stage name, like that of a diva” (34). Not even Muhammad Ali who was constantly telling everyone he was “The Greatest” fashioned himself to be the Greek God of the Sun. This crazy white dude took divadom to a whole new level before modern divas even existed.
- Beware of whom you piss off. I was recently telling a coworker of mine how I’ll never say anything to strangers who are really rude because you never know who’s an inch away of driving the train that is both of your lives straight to crazy town. She looked at me like I was needlessly afraid of people being crazy. But you can never know who might just snap and force an awful kind of terror on you, like Harry Larkyns did to a fellow business partner. Larkyns (who was later shot by Muybridge for fornicating with his wife while he was away) had figured out a sweet deal with a gentleman named Edward Ellis (diva name, Coppinger): Ellis would write theater reviews and Larkyns would publish them under his own name. Larkyns didn’t pay Ellis well enough, so he snitched to the newspaper he’d actually been writing for the whole time. “After losing his job, whenever Larkyns saw Ellis/Coppinger on the street, he extracted from his former protégé a strange, ritual punishment. Larkyns would grab Coppinger by the nose and jaw, pull open his mouth, and spit into it” (157-158). I am simply resolved to never piss anyone off who might decide to spit in my mouth. Your fate is now in your hands.
- Sometimes you should just shut up. This is completely unrelated to lesson number two, although it of course applies there as well. Leland Stanford was smart, savvy, and generally silent. Sometimes this made people uncomfortable as they babbled on about his living room draperies hoping he’d say something, anything back to them, but often it worked to his benefit. He figured this lesson out as a young man, “When he was twenty-five and starting work as a lawyer, Leland wrote his seventeen-year-old brother, Thomas, with advice about how to carry himself. ‘Do not be too ready to speak,’ he said. ‘Everyone is most inclined to hear himself talk. Everyone loves a good listener in conversation'” (201). Just make sure you contribute to the conversation here and there, otherwise people will assume you haven’t been listening at all.
- Your parents weren’t the first generation of hippies. We often think of the 1960s and 70s as being a time when several American social rules were broken for the very first time, particularly the idea that it’s ok to have copious amounts of sex with random people. Not so, you historical novice, you! When Leland Stanford was coming up as a young man outside of Albany, New York, there was flower power and free love too, even though the women probably weren’t burning their corsets. “Ministers in Stanford’s corner of America pushed radical causes like the abolition of slavery.” Not radical enough for you? Ready? Go! “Some even advocated ‘complex marriage,’ or mass adultery. Upper New York State was as radical as anyplace in America. A few years after Leland left, a few hundred utopian followers of Christ set up the Oneida Community, a proto-communist village that abolished private property and called for anywhere, anytime sex” (204). New York’s Woodstock over a century later isn’t so groundbreaking anymore, is it?
A final review/recommendation:
I recognize that this week’s lessons weren’t the most practical for everyday life (except for number three), but The Inventor and the Tycoon, while an excellent book, doesn’t really offer many transposable words of wisdom. Stanford was both awesome and awful at the same time. He was against slavery, was kind to his horses and made sure all his staff behaved the same way, and he donated the equivalent of $150 million to the school he named after his dead son (adjusted for inflation in 2010). At the same time he exploited his labor force when his company was building the railroads that would connect the west coast to the Midwest and was pretty racist when he wanted to be. He also milked the government for tons of money to build said railroads and had little intention of paying the funds back like he was expected to. He was, in a word, human. Nothing he did seems to follow a simple statement of “Do this like Leland and you’ll be rich/be famous/be the governor.” And Eadweard Muybridge has even less to offer in practical lessons. He was an eccentric, a murderer, a pervy wanker (he took tons of freeze frames of naked people jumping up and down so he could catch their genitals mid-flop) and he was only successful some of the time. But even if the book doesn’t contain the most applicable life lessons, it’s definitely a compelling and colorful read and jumps back and forth in time seamlessly. Also, it is absolutely filled with pictures, which breaks up the text nicely and adds a lot to the story itself. (Still not interested? Some of Muybridge’s nudie photos are in the book too, you pervy wanker, you.)
“You think it’s weird that I took photos of myself naked throwing a discus? Who doesn’t do that every Saturday afternoon in the summer?”
Photo credits:
Book cover: http://wpmedia.arts.nationalpost.com/2013/02/inventor-and-tycoon.jpg
Forktacular: http://fikklefame.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Van-Alden-fork.jpg
Quizzical Creeper Muybridge: http://ww4.hdnux.com/photos/07/61/47/2038243/5/628×471.jpg
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