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    Unavailable
    The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
    Unavailable
    The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
    Unavailable
    The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures

    Written by Edward Ball

    Narrated by John H. Mayer

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.
     
    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 22, 2013
    ISBN9780307876638
    Unavailable
    The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
    Author

    Edward Ball

    Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia; graduated from Brown University; and was a writer for The Village Voice. His first book, Slaves in the Family, won the National Book Award. He is also the author of The Sweet Hell Inside.

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    Reviews for The Inventor and the Tycoon

    3/5

    32 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The strange and innumerable circumstances that bring two disparate people into each others' lives at just the right time are miraculous; and yet we can find evidence of these types of meetings throughout history. This story brings together two such men during a time of technological explosion and great scientific discovery. Each man's story was interesting on its own and is worthy of being told to future generations. However, in the short time where they came together, magic happened. When novel ideas and ingenuity meet adequate funding... the world is changed. In the case of Stanford and Mybridge, it was changed irrevocably and set the human race on its path to the future we currently inhabit.
    • 2/5
      More or less the story of the strange relationship between railroad magnate Leland Stanford and solitary photographer Eadweard Muybridge. I thought I'd like it - the time period and subject matter are right up my alley - but honestly, this book is kind of a mess. Not only is it not told in chronological order, it seems to be more or less on the author's whims, to the point where a lot of things need to be explained two or three times because they were last mentioned several chapters prior to the point at which they became relevant to the narrative. I started thinking maybe the book was written as the author was researching, with the facts presented in the order he found them. He also overuses the word "impresario". Not recommended.
    • 3/5
      Excellent narrator (audio book). I liked the book but it simply wasn't that good. The time period jumped around so much that sometimes I wasn't sure if the author was telling the histories backwards (much like the move "Memento"). There was some connection between the two men Muggeridge and Stanford but it sure seemed like the author wanted there to be a bigger connection than there actually was, and the author often posited what may or may not have been going on in subject's minds. I found it hard to focus on as an audiobook, occasionally thinking that my audio had jumped to the wrong part; but no, it was just once again the author flipping back and forth through time periods. Honestly, about 1/2 the book was focused and interesting and connected... the rest was drivel and repetitious discussion of what "whoever" might have been thinking. Still, I recommend, if you've read everything else you want, and are searching for a historical period book.
    • 3/5
      We are promised "a gilded age murder and the birth of moving pictures" by the cover. The murderer and the person responsible for the moving pictures is Eadweard Muybridge, a somewhat kooky and interesting character who reinvented himself several times. So you may be wondering who the tycoon of the title is - he's Leland Stanford, railroad baron. The intersection of their lives comes when Stanford's interest in horses overlaps Muybridge's interest in capturing motion. Stanford asks Muybridge to take photos of a horse to see if all four feet come off the ground at a gallop (spoiler: they do). Muybridge continues from there to perfect his techniques for freezing motion in photographs and then playing them back in sequence to create movement on a screen.I don't know what the author was trying to do with this book. Muybridge is interesting and weird enough to probably have the book just about him. The murder is honestly not all that interesting, and wasn't a big deal for Muybridge's future or anyone else's opinion of him, no matter how much Ball tried to tease it as something nefarious. Leland Stanford was a tangential player in Muybridge's life, and had almost nothing to do with the story about moving pictures. His horse was the impetus for some of Muybridge's work, but it seems like Muybridge was heading that direction anyway, so it's not like Stanford made it happen. The writing is kind of annoying, jumping between the main players' lives and back and forth in time for no good reason. Perhaps as a result of this, Ball repeats himself or reminds the reader too many times who someone is. ("Mark Hopkins, one of Stanford's partners in the Central Pacific Railroad..." if you can't remember that in Part 3 of the book, after he's been mentioned many times, you're probably not retaining much at all.) Another complaint is that Ball seems to enjoy taking flights of fancy regarding what someone might have done, seen, or thought. I'm fine with speculation to fill in the blank areas, but when it starts off with where someone "might have gone," followed by what they "might have seen" there, and what they "might have thought" about it all, I'm kind of wondering why you're not just writing historical fiction instead.So, the writing is sub-par, there's far too much speculation, and it probably would have been a stronger book just focusing on Muybridge. The positives really have more to do with the actual tale than the book of it. I listened to the audio version, and I often looked up images that were mentioned (Muybridge's panoramas of San Francisco are awesome!). If there's not another book out there on the topic, read The Inventor and the Tycoon, but I'd at least investigate the options before choosing this one.
    • 3/5
      This joint biography of Leland Stanford, the California railroad tycoon and Eadweard Muybridge, the early photographer, pulled together two stories that did join at an important point (the early photographs that show a horse with all of its feet off of the ground as it runs-created by Muybridge and financed by Stanford), but they largely lived lives independent of each other. Each was an important and interesting player in his field and I enjoyed the information. I did find the telling of their stories too disjointed, jumping too frequently from their adulthood to their childhood and back again.