The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
by Edward Ball (464 pages)
From Google:
One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion
photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was
the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth
to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist
and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and
meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media
sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California
governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four
hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired
Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the
murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.
Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor
interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through
photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of
an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great
American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth,
and sinister ingenuity.
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