The Man Who Stopped Time: The Illuminating Story of Eadweard Muybridge - Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer [Hardcover]

Brian Clegg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2007

The photographs of Eadweard Muybridge are immediately familiar to us. Less familiar is the dramatic personal story of this seminal and wonderfully eccentric Victorian pioneer, now brought to life for the first time in this engaging and thoroughly entertaining biography. His work is iconic: the first icons of the modern visual age. Men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living. Scarcely a day goes by without their derivate use somewhere in today's media. And if most of us have seen Muybridge's distinctive stop-motion photographs, all of us have seen the fruit of his extraordinary technological innovation: today's cinema and television. But it is his personal life that possesses all the ingredients of a classic non-fiction best-seller. It features: a passionately driven man struggling against the odds; dire treachery and shocking betrayal; a cast of larger-than-life characters set against a backdrop of San Francisco and the Far West in its most turbulent and dangerous era; a profusion of scientific and artistic advances and discoveries, one hotly following on another; the nervous intensity of two spectacular courtroom dramas (one pitting Muybridge against the richest man in the land and staring ruin in the face, the other sees him fighting for his life). And for the opening act, a foul murder on a dark and stormy night. Skillfully articulating the fascinating history of a now ubiquitous technology, author Brian Clegg combines ingredients from science and biography to create an eminently readable, fast-paced, and surprising story.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Eadweard Muybridge "stopped time," according to science journalist Clegg, by training a dozen cameras on a trotting horse, to show its movement as no painter ever had. While devising this system of sequential photography, Muybridge realized he could animate the horse's movements by reassembling the negatives. Having made his name as a pioneering photographer of Yosemite and Alaska, he made his historical mark by devising an innovative system of recording and showing motion pictures. Despite his flawed technology, it was Muybridge who opened the first movie house at the 1892 Chicago World's Fair, and his concept inspired the process used today. But Muybridge's engineering successes were tempered by tension in his personal relationships, Clegg shows. He alienated his patron Leland Stanford and spent years trying to drum up the massive financial backing he'd taken for granted. He also lived the second half of his life as a murderer, having shot his wife's lover, yet winning acquittal after arguing for his own insanity. Working with sometimes contradictory evidence like newspaper clippings, court records and personal letters, Clegg holds his readers' attention by filling in gaps in historical data with careful suppositions. (May 12)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As he did for the thirteenth-century experimentalist Roger Bacon in the revealing The First Scientist (2003), Clegg here advocates, with style and conviction, for an underacknowledged scientific and technological forefather. Eadweard Muybridge (ne Edward Muggeridge, 1830-1904) is famous for his photographic sequences, achieved with a battery of successively operated single-plate cameras, depicting horses, other animals, and humans in motion. But he isn't appreciated as the practical founder of the movies, and who knew that he beat an open-and-shut murder rap? Clegg opens with the 44-year-old photographer racing off to shoot his young wife's seducer, then leaves him in jail to recount the rest of his life. Available documentation is often lacking or contradictory, so Clegg makes the best surmises about conundrums in Muybridge's life. Better, he habitually sketches scientific and technological developments (e.g., in photography, the physiology of vision, etc.) up to and sometimes away from Muybridge's achievements. Even more than The First Scientist, this book is packed with factual information and brings a most colorful character vividly to life. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Joseph Henry Press; 2nd Printing edition (March 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0309101123
• ISBN-13: 978-0309101127
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #973,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian has written a number of popular science books, including Ecologic, The God Effect, on the most remarkable phenomenon of the quantum world and Before the Big Bang. Other titles include A Brief History of Infinity and Inflight Science, which explores the science that's all around you and outside your window when you are on an airplane.

Along with appearances at the Royal Institution in London he has spoken at venues from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to Cheltenham Festival of Science, has contributed to radio and TV programmes, and is a popular speaker at schools. Brian is also editor of the successful www.popularscience.co.uk book review site and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Brian has Masters degrees from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences and from Lancaster University in Operational Research, a discipline originally developed during the Second World War to apply the power of mathematics to warfare. It has since been widely applied to problem solving and decision making in business.

From Lancaster, he joined British Airways, where he ran teams including Emerging Technologies, amongst the most eccentric but talented staff in the company, who researched technologies from fingerprint recognition to electronic cash. This emphasis on innovation led to training with Dr. Edward de Bono, and in 1994 he left BA to set up his own creativity consultancy, running courses on the development of new ideas and products, and the creative solution of business problems. Clients include the BBC, the Met Office, British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline, Sony, The Treasury, Royal Bank of Scotland and many other blue-chips.

Brian has also written regular columns, features and reviews for numerous publications, including Nature, The Guardian, PC Week, Computer Weekly, Personal Computer World, Innovative Leader, Professional Manager, BBC History, Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful. His books have been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian, Thai and even Indonesian.