The Inventor and the Tycoon

November 5, 2012
Uncovering an enigmatic figure whose complicated relationship with a railroad tycoon helped to usher in the proto-motion picture industry, Ball, a National Book Award-winner for 1998's Slaves in the Family, constructs a readable, dual biography rife with ambition, greed, corruption, and murder. Concentrating on each man's ascendance in their respective fields, Ball gracefully guides readers toward the confluence of these two disparate individuals' lives. Leland Stanford, former California governor and president of the Southern Pacific railroad, hired Edward Muybridge, famed photographer and eccentric, to document the former's mansion in Sacramento. However, it was not until 1872, when Muybridge captured Stanford's prized horses in motion (the mogul was interested in whether all four of a horse's legs ever simultaneously left the ground), that their relationship took on any lasting significance. While the author's research and passion for the subject reaffirm Muybridge's place as a pioneer of 19th-century photography and motion pictures, Ball's emphasis on Muybridge's 1874 murder of his wife's lover and his eventual acquittalâbrought about by a defense team arranged by Stanfordâfalls short of scandalous drama. It is a minor default in an otherwise enlightening tale of power, the wedding of art and technology, and tragedy. Photos & illus. Agent: Kris Dahl, International Creative Management.

November 15, 2012
National Book Award winner Ball (Writing/Yale Univ.; The Genetic Strand: Exploring a Family History Through DNA, 2007, etc.) returns with a complex story about railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and the murdering man who for a time was his protege, pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge, as he writes, altered the spelling of his name about as often as a bored high school student. He sometimes went by "Helios." (One name he didn't use, but would have fit, was Edweird.) Ball fractures conventional chronology like a dry twig, rearranging the pieces into an appealing display. He begins on January 16, 1880, the day that Muybridge first displayed for Stanford and his guests the moving pictures of a running horse on a device Muybridge called a zoogyroscope, a device that projected images on a revolving disc. Ball tells the stories of Stanford (who rose from grocer to railroad magnate), the multiple careers of Muybridge, the technology of moving images--and, of course, the murder. Muybridge married Flora Downs in 1870, but his photography business took him away for lengthy periods, and Flora, back home, had needs--which she satisfied with Harry Larkyns (whose story Ball also relates), a handsome womanizer whom the jealous husband shot in 1874. Muybridge went on trial, but a sympathetic jury found him not guilty--despite witnesses and his confession. Ball charts Muybridge's subsequent return to favor with Stanford, who hired him to photograph his new San Francisco mansion and who endowed his research into the science of the motion picture. But they eventually fell out (two large egos), and Muybridge tumbled into obscurity after Thomas Edison's technology eclipsed his own. A skillfully written tale of technology and wealth, celebrity and murder and the nativity of today's dominant art and entertainment medium.

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November 1, 2011

Asked by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford to help prove that at one point a galloping horse's four hooves leave the ground simultaneously, photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography--the first step on the road to motion pictures. Stanford's continued patronage didn't keep Muybridge from going to trial when he killed his wife's lover. National Book Award winner Ball (Slaves in the Family) leaves the South for a work that combines art, science, true crime, and history-in-the-making in rough-and-tumble Gilded Age San Francisco. Now, that should attract readers.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2012
The obliteration of time and space has been a singular achievement accomplished by a host of inventors, businesspeople, and engineers since the Industrial Revolution. Yet, in the case of Gilded Age railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and inventor-cum-murderer Eadweard Muybridge, it's not so much a matter of destroying distances as creating ways to commodify them. In Ball's incisive new book, both men seek their fortunes in postgold rush California. While Stanford is instrumental in linking east to west via his Central Pacific Railroad, reaping millions and national attention, photographer Muybridge goes a step further and tries to bottle motion by photographing the movement of a trotting horse at Stanford's insistence. Muybridge is the father of the moving picture and a genius with a sociopathic streak that spills over into a tale of frontier scheming and greed against the canvas of a shrinking American West. Well researched and with a narrative that hopscotches through time, but never at the expense of clarity or Ball's dry wit, the book tells a story hardly remembered yet altogether familiar.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)