Edward Ball, "The Inventor and The Tycoon: A Gilded Age of Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures"
Feb 21 2013 7:00 pm
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 W
est, this popular history unspools a story of passion,
wealth, and sinister ingenuity.
EDWARD BALL is the author of four works of nonfiction, including the bestselling, National Book Award-winning Slaves in the Family. Born and raised in the South, he attended Brown University and received his MFA from the University of Iowa before coming to New York and working as an art critic for the Village Voice. He lives in Connecticut and teaches writing at Yale University.
This event is FREE.
Location:
- Street:
- 768 Boston Post Rd.
- City:
- Madison ,
- Province:
- Connecticut
- Postal Code:
- 06443
- Country:
- United States
