the inventor and the tycoon by edward ball

Railroad tycoon and founder of Stanford University, Leland Stanford, became Muybridge's patron and hired the photographer to answer the question of whether the four hooves of a running horse left the ground all at once. I thought it would be interesting to look at his life and make the crime central to his life.'īut Muybridge is not the only star of Ball's story. His story is well-known if you're a student of film history, but even there, they don't care to talk about his crime. 'I knew about his eccentric life and then I found he was a murderer, and with that discovery, it made me want to look closely at this figure. 'He's not a household name, but he's known in film history. 'I had always known about Eadweard Muybridge,' Ball says. Set in frontier California nearly 140 years ago, 'The Inventor and the Tycoon' tells the story of famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who is credited with inventing the breakthrough technology of moving pictures.

'Only in my mid-30s did I start writing books. 'I wrote about art and film and I did book reviews. 'I used to be a freelance art critic in New York in the '80s and '90s,' he says.

Ball went on to publish four more books of nonfiction, including his newest, 'The Inventor and the Tycoon.'īall lives in Connecticut and teaches history and nonfiction writing part-time at Yale, but he admits he wasn't always drawn to history and writing biographies. The book recounts the author's search for and meetings with the descendants of the people his family enslaved.īut he didn't stop there.

Edward Ball won the National Book Award for his first nonfiction work, 'Slaves in the Family,' (1998) based on his family's 170-year history as slave owners in South Carolina.

The inventor and the tycoon by edward ball