The Inventor and the Tycoon

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, this book is the riveting true story of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads. Edward Ball's ability to mine history and draw out its secrets has earned him a significant critical reputation as a best-selling nonfiction writer. In The Inventor and the Tycoon, he enthralls us again with the compelling saga of an artistic genius, a ruthless railroad tycoon, and a sordid crime of passion. In frontier California 130 years ago, English immigrant Eadweard Muybridge managed to capture time and play it back on the screen, inventing stop-motion photography and moving pictures, breakthrough technologies that ushered in our age of visual media. Bankrolling his endeavor was tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad and personally drove in the last golden spike. Stanford's particular obsession was whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once, and with Muybridge he finally found an answer. But personal disaster overshadowed Muybridge's remarkable achievement. A visionary artist, and technically brilliant, he was also a murderer, and his search for the secrets of motion through photography is inseparable from his gripping true-crime story. Muybridge produced a stunning body of work that celebrated the Savage beauty of the American West. Yet when he discovered that the child recently borne by his young wife was not, in fact, his, he turned into a remorseless killer. The dark from a of one night changed the course of his life, and his trial -- which turned on questions of justifiable homicide, sexual rivalry, and the artist's insanity -- became a media sensation. He killed a man, and then invented the movies. Unfolding on the stage of the Old West, The Inventor and the Tycoon tells the story of an unlikely patron-artist collaboration that launched the age of images, changing the world. With style and scholarship, Edward Ball explores the collaboration between and eccentric, wondering visionary and an industrial magnate. He gives us a troubled hero with a conflicted legacy of genius and scandal and brings to life the preposterously rich pioneer Californian and founder of Stanford University. The sweeping narrative transports us from Muybridge's birthplace in England to the harsh Western frontier to the extravagant opulence of America's ruling elite. It is a story of passion, money, and sinister ingenuity that puts on display the virtues and vices of the Gilded Age. - Jacket flap.