A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book of the Year
Nearly 140 years ago, in frontier California, photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured time with his camera and played it back on a flickering screen, inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures. Yet the visionary inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial became a national sensation. Despite Muybridge’s crime, the artist’s patron, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground all at once—and together these two unlikely men launched the age of visual media. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West.
- ISBN10 0385525753
- ISBN13 9780385525756
- Publish Date 22 January 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 9 November 2015
- Publish Country IN
- Imprint Random House USA Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 447
- Language English