Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Eadweard Muybridge About this episode The invention Eadweard Muybridge is known for is his zoopraxiscope, an early movie technology. But he also innovated in photography, had some other inventions, and was the defendant in a murder trial.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Holly Frey? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:10 Speaker 02 Attention Chicken Nugget fans. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. These new chicken nuggets are their tastiest, crispiest, juiciest nuggets ever. And because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces, they've reinvented several of their sauces, and they created a brand new one. The new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants, don't wait around. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets today.
1:39 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
2:07 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:18 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
2:20 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:23 Holly Frey? I was visiting the Presidio in San Francisco recently. And I started really looking at a statue that I have passed many times there because I love San Francisco and go as often as I can. And that statue is one depicting Edward Boybridge, considered a pioneer of motion picture projection. And I thought, oh, I should look him up. That's interesting. And whoa, boy, there's a lot of story to his life. And then I realized-
2:48 Tracy V. Wilson? You found unexpected things.
2:50 Holly Frey? Well, I did. And then I realized, wait, I know this story. And I'll talk about why in behind the scenes. Because it's, to me, hilarious. The invention that he's memorialized with in that statue is his zoopraxiscope. But he also innovated in photography. He had some other inventions and he was also the defendant in a murder trial.
3:13 Holly Frey? He was heavily linked to Leland Stanford, the founder of Stanford University. So in my book, that's a story worth telling. Heads up, he also changed his name quite a bit. So in the early parts of this episode, we're going to use the name he was going by at the time we're talking about. I hope I caught them all. Because I think that kind of shares the mercuriality of his persona throughout the year.
3:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
3:43 Tracy V. Wilson? So Edward James Muggery, spelled M-U-G-G-E-R-I-D-G-E, was born on April 9, 1830, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England. His father was a merchant who primarily worked in coal and grain sales. This made for a financially stable life for the family. Even after his father died, when Edward was only 13, the family was still comfortable. Edward's mother started running the family business and there was no interruption of their income.
4:16 Holly Frey? As a young man, Edward moved into London to work for the London Printing and Publishing Company. And then when he was 21, he made his first name change, although it's a pretty subtle one. He changed his first name, Edward, E-D-W-A-R-D, the way you would often see it spelled, to Edward, E-A-D-W-E-A-R-D, because he had concluded that it was the version of his name closest to its original Anglo-Saxon form. I also read a number of things that said he was naming himself after an Anglo-Saxon king, but I could never figure out which of the Anglo-Saxon Edwards that would have been.
4:57 Tracy V. Wilson? It does have a very, like, early English, Old English, Middle English kind of vibe to it.
5:05 Holly Frey? Yes, like, he would have a BFF named Ethelred without any sort of question.
5:10 Tracy V. Wilson? For sure.
5:11 Holly Frey? Yeah.
5:12 Tracy V. Wilson? At the age of 22, he moved to the United States and eventually made his way to San Francisco, where he settled. San Francisco was several years into the gold rush at that time, and it was a place where a lot of people saw potential opportunity. And Edward first sought his fortune in the book business. He set up a shop that sold books, but also still worked for the London Printing and Publishing Company as an agent. It'd actually been through that company that he was able to travel to the United States in the first place. It was in California that Edward started toying with variations in his last name, shifting first from Muybridge with an E in it to Muybridge without that E between the double
5:57 Tracy V. Wilson? G and the R. Eventually, he moved on to Muybridge, which he used for quite a while.
6:02 Holly Frey? That is the pronunciation of that first syllable that I always hear in documentaries about him, but I did hear an English person pronouncing it a little bit more like my instead of moy, so that's another... I don't know if he fiddled with those pronunciations along the way either. But in his first eight years in the US, where there is some mystery about where he was at various points in time before he got to San Francisco. But once he landed in San Francisco, Edward did very well for himself. His bookshop stayed really busy and he made a really nice living. He also became acquainted, sort of thanks to proximity, with photography. Deguerratypist RH Vance had a studio right next to Edward's shop.
6:47 Holly Frey? And Moigrid, because he was still using that variation of his name, also became acquainted with a portrait photographer named Willem Schuh. Soon Edward had expanded the offerings in his shop to include photographs that were sold alongside the books.
7:02 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1860, he needed to travel to Europe on an acquisitions trip. He wanted to purchase notable antiquarian books for resale in his shop. He couldn't just leave the shop closed and unattended while he was away, though. So he asked his brother Thomas, who had followed him to the US, to handle things while he was gone.
7:22 Holly Frey? Yeah, he actually had two brothers that followed him to the United States. And there are some versions of the story that indicate that they may have already been working in the shop and others that suggest that he was like, hey, now would be a great time for you to do this. But we don't know. But he had booked passage aboard a steamer, the SS Golden Age, to take him to Europe for this trip. But he missed his ship and then he had to make arrangements to travel by stagecoach to St. Louis, where he planned to take a train to the East Coast and then get travel from there to Europe by sea. And the seat he managed to book was with the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, which at the time was contracted with mail offices throughout the US to carry mail in bulk as well as taking on passengers.
8:08 Tracy V. Wilson? But partway into the journey, there was an accident. The coach was passing through northern Texas and the driver lost control when the horses, for some reason, started running.
8:20 Tracy V. Wilson? There wasn't necessarily a reason. Horses can be unpredictable. The driver tried, according to the news reports, to brake, but that did not work. The stagecoach veered off the road and down a mountain slope, and it crashed into a tree. One of Edward's fellow passengers was killed, but Muybridge and the rest of them sustained injuries. And in his case, he had quite a serious head injury. His vision was seriously affected and his hearing, his other senses were affected as well.
8:54 Holly Frey? Yeah, we'll talk about his accounts of what he was dealing with a little bit later, but it sounded quite scary.
9:03 Holly Frey? After several months of being treated at Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is where he woke up after this accident, Muybridge traveled to New York by stagecoach, which seems brave to me after that accident, to seek medical help from experts. And there he was treated by the president of the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. William Parker. And Parker gave a fairly grave diagnosis that Edward was never going to fully recover. But Muybridge was quite tenacious, and he decided to get a third opinion, this time from the best doctors of Europe. And he really did get what is, at least on paper, the best one. His doctor in London, where he next traveled, was Sir William Gull, who was also Queen Victoria's personal physician.
9:45 Holly Frey? And while under Gull's care, Muybridge lived in England for the next several years, possibly as many as six.
9:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Making a long sea voyage with a serious head injury in this era, also very scary to me.
9:59 Holly Frey? Yes.
10:01 Tracy V. Wilson? There's not a whole lot of information about what his recovery in London was like. One thing that is known is that after he had recovered somewhat, he took a trip to New York to file suit against Butterfield Overland Mail Company over that accident. He got a cash settlement, but it was reportedly only a fourth of the $10,000 that he wanted. He clearly was not idle while he was convalescing. He filed inventions with the British Patent Office. One was a plate printing technique for books, and another was an apparatus for washing clothes. He was also making business deals from London and investing in mining and banking ventures in the US and abroad.
10:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Some biographers have come to the conclusion that the actual medical part of his stay in England was actually pretty brief and that he just got busy with all these other things and that kept him from returning to California. It's also possible that he was purposely staying in Europe while the US Civil War was playing out. And it's also been proposed that the brain injury from the crash was a contributing factor to his seemingly haphazard kind of wandering approach to his life during this time. We'll talk a little more about his personality changes after the accident in a bit.
11:21 Holly Frey? By the time he returned to San Francisco in 1866, he had lost money on those various investments he had been making while abroad, and he had taken up photography. There are so many theories about when he actually became interested in photography, not just as something he was selling in the shop, but something he was going to do himself. Some people think it was the proximity of his bookshop to photographers that got him started. Others actually believe that his doctor, Sir William Gull, may have suggested it as part of his recuperation. And it's also possible that he picked it up at any other time. But when he got home to California, he reconnected with another photographer and a friend of his that was Silas Selig.
12:03 Holly Frey? And Selig is also sometimes invoked as the person who may have been the one to get Edward into photography, going back even before the Stagecoach accident. Edward had also changed his last name once again, this time to the one he's most known by, Muybridge.
12:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Regardless of when his interest in photography began, in 1867, he started taking pictures that would lead him to just immense success, and those were photos of Yosemite Valley. He opened a new business, Helios Flying Studio, which was the name of his photography business, and that was another name that he assumed, Helios, after the Greek word for the sun. This was the name he used initially for his photographic endeavors. The Helios Flying Studio wasn't a brick and mortar location. It was a mobile photography carriage, which sounds cool. He could take it out into the world and on photo adventures, set up his equipment and capture shots and then develop the film
13:02 Tracy V. Wilson? in a darkroom that he had assembled there in the carriage. That mobility was really important because as our mention of Yosemite might indicate, his special interest was landscape photography.
13:15 Holly Frey? It is a pretty cool thing. There are some photos of some of his mobile setups where he just has everything he might need at hand and it's kind of groovy. We will talk about his very quick success as a photographer in just a moment, but first we're going to pause for a sponsor break.
13:34 Speaker 03 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
13:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
13:57 Speaker 03 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
14:05 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
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14:17 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
14:21 Speaker 04 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
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15:17 Tracy V. Wilson? you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown-Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
15:41 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
16:24 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,
17:28 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
17:50 Holly Frey? Moi Bridge as Helios was almost instantly successful. When he sent one of his early photos to the magazine Philadelphia Photographer, the publication wanted it and requested his negatives. Philadelphia Photographer was a prominent photography magazine at the time, and the feature of his photo in it sort of instantly made Moi Bridge's career. He was very savvy about marketing, and he was driven to continue to deliver imagery unlike anything anyone else was capable of. In some cases, this led him to take up daredevil-grade positions from which to photograph, including going to the very edge of stone overhangs from cliffs.
18:32 Holly Frey? But in doing so, he was able to offer panoramic views of Yosemite and other places that no one had even conceived of before. And as he gained more fame and his work was demanded at various galleries and in print form, Moi Bridge wasn't working alone all the time. He often, as his business grew, had assistants with him on his tracks out into nature. That's why we have pictures of his mobile setup to capture photos. Although reportedly, none of these assistants were ever willing to go out to the precarious points that he was often photographing from. It was like, we'll wait back here. You go get your shot.
19:11 Tracy V. Wilson? If you've ever tried to take a photo of a really sundrenched landscape, even with a modern camera, you probably know that one of the biggest challenges is not having the sky become completely blown out in the exposure. Moi Bridge also encountered this, and he invented an apparatus to deal with it. He called it a "sky shade", because it could be manipulated to cover the upper part of the camera's lens so that glare and overexposure would not rob his images of their detail. His use of the sky shade was sort of a simple solve, but his photos were way ahead of anything else on the market. At the time, it was not uncommon for landscape photographers
19:55 Tracy V. Wilson? to process their photos layered with other photos, most frequently to add skyscape and clouds for dramatic effect. Moi Bridge also did this, and he created a collection of sky studies that he could pull from. But although others did it, few of them had the eye for it that Moi Bridge did, and his are very dramatic and, by his own design, very artistic. His photos appeared in magazines, and prints were in really high demand for consumers to display in their homes. For several years, his success and fame seemed on an endless upward trajectory. Somewhere along the line, he dropped that Helios name and just was going by Moi Bridge.
20:39 Holly Frey? In the early 1870s, Moi Bridge had two people enter his life, each of whom would impact it significantly but in very different ways. The first person that changed the course of his life was Flora Stone. The two had met at a gallery where Flora was working as a photo retoucher. She was much younger than Moi Bridge, and she was already married when the two of them met. Her husband, Lucia Stone, was by all accounts unkind to her at best, and Edward kind of stepped in to help. He helped Flora get a divorce on the grounds of cruelty. So her first marriage, which she had gotten into when she was just 17, ended in late 1870.
21:20 Holly Frey? And then on May 20th, 1871, Flora and Edward were married. She was 21 at the time and he was 40. And Flora was very pretty. She was vivacious. She loved to go out and socialize. And Edward was not terribly interested in things like going to the theater and socializing. So they seemed like kind of an odd match. But according to his friends, he truly loved her.
21:44 Tracy V. Wilson? The other person was Leland Stanford. Born Amasa Leland Stanford in New York in 1824, Stanford had become one of the most powerful men in California. As a young man, Stanford had gone into law and had a practice in Wisconsin. But then in 1852, he moved to Sacramento, California, to capitalize on the growing population there and its demand for mining supplies and various necessities.
22:11 Holly Frey? Yeah, he was a merchant for a while and he did very well for himself. And his success enabled him to also become involved in the railroad industry. He became president of the Central Pacific Railroad when it formed in 1861. And he was a linchpin in the expansion of rail lines throughout California for several decades. He also made a move into politics, initially at the local level, and then kind of moving up the ladder until he became governor of California in 1862. In 1885, he would found Stanford University. In the 2003 book, River of Shadows, author Rebecca Solnit describes him this way. This is kind of a snarky way to describe someone's appearance, but it did tickle me a bit.
22:56 Holly Frey? And knowing that Leland Stanford profited off a lot of people's work, I feel like it's kind of funny. She wrote, quote, "Stanford is something of an enigma. As a young man, he had the smoldering good looks of a stage villain. But as he became stouter, he came to look like a badly taxidermized badger. Smart enough to become the seventh richest man in the United States, he was often regarded as slow and doltish by his colleagues." So Stanford could easily be his own episode. But in terms of why he is germane to Muybridge's story. Leland Stanford was interested in horses.
23:33 Tracy V. Wilson? But the first meeting between these two men had nothing to do with horses. Muybridge, who was already famous, was hired in 1872 to photograph Stanford's Sacramento home. That project went well enough that Stanford telegraphed with another project. He asked, would Muybridge come back to Sacramento and take photos of Stanford's horse Occident while he was running at various gates? And Muybridge agreed.
24:00 Holly Frey? So in truth, Stanford wanted a very specific photo, and he thought that Muybridge was the man who could deliver it. What he wanted was an image that captured the moment during a horse's gait when none of the animal's legs touched the ground. At the time, Stanford believed that this was part of a horse's movement cycle, but he was a little bit of an outlier. There was a lot of debate about this, and most people thought that the horse always had at least one limb touching the earth.
24:31 Holly Frey? The human eye could not conclusively perceive this motion because of its speed, so agreement on the matter was going to require imagery.
24:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Muybridge once again traveled north to Sacramento to see Stanford, and he took a lot of photos of Occident. Unfortunately, we don't have the first photos of Occident that Edward took, although we do have some that he took several years later. They were not meant to be published, although they were written about in an article in the San Francisco Examiner, which was then reprinted throughout the United States. It read in part, quote, "Some time ago, Governor Stanford, the owner of the horse Occident, desired to have a photograph of the animal taken while said animal was going at full speed." This article continued with saying that Muybridge, quote, "procured all the sheets
25:21 Tracy V. Wilson? to be had in the stable, and with these made a reflecting background. Over this, Occident was trained to trot. The great difficulty was to transfix an impression while the horse was moving at a rate of 38 feet to the second." The article then notes that the first day of attempts was fruitless. The second day, Muybridge captured a shadow, but the third day, he quote, "contrived to have two boards clap past each other by touching a spring and in doing so, leave an eighth of an inch opening for the 500th part of a second as the horse passed and by an arrangement of double lenses crossed, secured a negative that shows oxidant in
26:04 Tracy V. Wilson? full motion, a perfect likeness of the horse." This is probably the most wonderful success in photographing ever yet achieved, and the artist is proud of his discovery as the governor is of the picture taken.
26:20 Holly Frey? So, a thrilling achievement. It seemed that Muybridge was poised to really create kind of a completely new branch of photography in figuring out how to capture movement and rapid movement at that. But as this project was underway, Muybridge's fame turned to infamy when he was charged with murder. We'll explain how that came to be after we pause and hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.
26:50 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
27:32 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
27:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
28:37 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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31:04 Holly Frey? We have to return to the subject of Flora, Muybridge's wife. So because of his work, Edward traveled a lot, and it seems that in his absence, Flora turned to another person to escort her out on social engagements. And that man was Harry Larkins, who was a drama critic. Harry Larkins, also wild story of his own. Maybe one day we'll do a follow-up where we talk about him. Initially, this whole arrangement may have actually been okay with Muybridge. As we said earlier, he didn't want to go to the theater and he didn't want to go out and socialize. So this may have seemed like, great, she's got a friend to handle it. But over time, he grew really suspicious of Harry and Harry's intentions toward Flora. And he kind of dramatically and a little bit threateningly told the critic
31:49 Holly Frey? to stay away from her.
31:51 Tracy V. Wilson? In late 1873, Flora and Edward had learned that they were expecting a child. There had been two previous pregnancies that had not gone well, and both of those babies had been stillborn. But the third time, everything went fine. They had a son, born on April 15th of the following year. They named him Florado Helios Muybridge.
32:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Several months after this baby was born in October of 1874, Muybridge went to the home of the midwife who had delivered the baby, named Susan Smith, because she had not yet been paid and he intended to give her that payment.
32:31 Holly Frey? So when he got to Smith's home, he saw a photograph of his infant son that he had not seen before. And when he asked her where it came from, Smith stated that Flora had the portrait of the child made at another photographer. Right? As a retoucher, she was familiar with a lot of photo studios in the city. And then Smith said that Flora had sent the midwife a copy of that photo. When Muybridge picked up the photo to inspect it, he turned it over. And on the back, in his wife's handwriting, were the words, "Little Harry." According to Smith's account, after having seen that, Muybridge looked like a madman. He became very angry. He demanded that the midwife tell him everything she knew. And she did, later saying that she feared violence if she did not.
33:17 Holly Frey? There was one account I read that said that she demanded money for this information, but her accounts that she gave when things got legal did not indicate that at all. So she told Muybridge that Larry was the father and that she actually had love letters between Larry and Flora to prove it, because she had been helping the two of them by running communications back and forth between them.
33:42 Tracy V. Wilson? The morning after this revelation, Edward met with a business associate to settle some outstanding debts. And then he started a journey. First, he took a ferry through San Francisco and San Pablo Bays to Vallejo, California. Then he got on a train and went roughly 40 miles north to Calistoga, which is where Harry had moved after Muybridge had told him to stay away from Flora. Muybridge asked after Larkins in Calistoga and found out he was staying on a ranch about eight miles out of town. So he got a horse and buggy and he went there.
34:17 Holly Frey? When he arrived at the ranch, Muybridge asked for Larkins. And once he had the man in front of him, he reportedly stated, "This is the reply to the letter you sent my wife." And he shot Harry Larkins at point blank range in the heart with a six shooter. Larkins dropped to the floor dead after taking a few steps away from Muybridge.
34:38 Tracy V. Wilson? This trial was fascinating. It lasted for only three days. Muybridge's defense team actually took an approach that he did not agree with. The opening speech began with, quote, "We claim a verdict, both on the ground of justifiable homicide and insanity. We shall prove that years ago, the prisoner was thrown from a stage, receiving a concussion of the brain, which turned his hair from black to gray in three days and has never been the same since." Muybridge didn't believe that insanity was at issue and played no part in his decision-making process. He'd been very calm and deliberate in his decision to kill Larkins and believed
35:18 Tracy V. Wilson? that it was his right as a husband to do so. After he shot Harry, he was easily taken into custody and disarmed, and he was so calm throughout his booking and charging. At no point was there any effort to try to claim that Muybridge had not killed Larkins. Everybody knew that he had done it.
35:38 Holly Frey? Muybridge's defense team used the very thing that had made him famous to convey that he was mentally unusual, prone to impulse, and possibly insane, kind of playing into this mad genius trope. Those daring positions he would take to get his incredible Yosemite Vista shots were invoked as evidence that this was not a person most people would consider sane or stable.
36:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Muybridge did testify on his own behalf, although he did so on the condition that he be asked no questions about the murder. And he said that he would only talk about the 1860 Stagecoach accident. When it came to discussing the crash, Muybridge stated in testimony that he himself did not remember it. He stated, quote, "I left California for a European tour some years ago in July 1860. I recollect taking supper at a stage house on the road. We then got onboard the stage, which was drawn by six wild Mustang horses. That is the last I recollect of that nine days. After that, I found myself at Fort Smith, 150 miles distant, lying in bed.
36:46 Tracy V. Wilson? There was a small wound on the top of my head. When I recovered, each eye formed an individual impression so that, looking at you, for instance, I could see another man sitting by your side. I had no taste nor smell and was very deaf. These symptoms continued in an acute form for probably three months. I was under medical treatment for over a year."
37:09 Holly Frey? And though he didn't personally remember the accident, he relayed what had happened as told to him by another person who was involved. Quote, "A fellow passenger told me after I had recovered consciousness that after leaving the station, we had traveled for probably half an hour. We were then just entering the Texas cross timbers. The Mustangs ran away. The driver was unable to control them. Just as we were getting to the timbers, I remarked that the best plan would be for us to get out of the back of the stage because I saw that an accident would take place. He told me that I took out my knife to cut the canvas back of the stage and was preparing to leave when the stage ran against either a rock or a stump
37:52 Holly Frey? and threw me out against my head."
37:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Muybridge was acquitted, not because the jury didn't think he did it, but because they determined that the murder was justified. The jury's verdict in this case is its own unique situation because the jury basically completely ignored the instructions of the judge. They had been told that they had four options. They could find Muybridge guilty in the first degree with either a death penalty or life imprisonment. Those were two separate options. They could find him not guilty, or they could find him not guilty by reason of insanity.
38:30 Tracy V. Wilson? The judge also told them that adultery was not a justification and should not be considered in their deliberation.
38:39 Holly Frey? It took several votes for the jury to come to unanimity. I think it took them a little over a day. They had decided that Muybridge was not insane, but they also could not put out of their consideration the adultery issue, even though they had been expressly told not to factor it in. So they returned a verdict of not guilty. According to a newspaper report covering the trial, quote, "They say that if their verdict was not in accord with the law of the books, it is within the law of human nature." That, in short, under similar circumstances, they would have done as Muybridge did, and they could not conscientiously punish him for doing what they would have done themselves. Okay.
39:26 Tracy V. Wilson? I stopped what I was doing when I was reading through this for the first time and sent Holly a message saying, I was not expecting the jury to just find that that guy needed killing.
39:38 Holly Frey? Yeah.
39:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Muybridge's reaction to this verdict sounds kind of scary. He nearly fainted. He reportedly rocked in his chair and made movements that seemed like convulsions. He had been completely certain that he would be found guilty, but even after he recovered from this and was an acquitted man, he got out of town. He had already planned a trip abroad before the murder and the trial. Muybridge had been given a photography job with Leland's company, Union Pacific Railroad. He had to travel through Mexico and Central America and take photos that could be used for the railroad's publicity campaigns. And then he also took photos for his own art business, of course.
40:18 Holly Frey? During all of this, Muybridge and Flora had divorced, but she did not have much of a life after the incident. She had a stroke in the summer of 1875, and she died two weeks later. As for the baby Florado, the San Francisco Examiner stated, quote, "Her babe is with a French family at the mission who have kindly cared for it during the illness of its mother and will, it is believed, adopt it." But other accounts indicate that the child was actually moved to an orphanage.
40:48 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1877, Muybridge was back in California, and he got back to work on the original horse project that had brought him together with Stanford.
40:57 Holly Frey? It was sort of like that whole murder and trial had never happened. He was able to pick up his life without any real fallout. Leland Stanford had purchased a property in Palo Alto where they once again photographed Occident running. This time, Moi Bridge worked out a way to solve the shutter speed problem that he had in the early days of this assignment. He used a dozen cameras at once, and each of them let him take photos at an exposure of a thousandth of a second. The setup for this series of photos was kind of incredible. Moi Bridge had set the cameras up on one side of the area where Occident would run, and then he rigged a tripwire to each camera.
41:39 Holly Frey? These tripwires were run across this sort of, it's not really a track, but we'll call it that, across the running area. And while they were not substantial enough to pose any impediment to the horse, they were able to trigger the shutters on the cameras. So Moi Bridge could capture shot after shot on different cameras as the horse made its run. And he eventually patented this setup.
42:00 Tracy V. Wilson? And he got the shot, by which we mean he got that long sought after image of a horse midair with no legs touching the ground. Accounts of the photo were published in papers around the country and abroad with a statement that they had been retouched, but in no way altered the image, just quote, "for the purpose of giving a better effect of the details."
42:24 Holly Frey? But this was still a time when most newspapers could not publish photographs. Most write-ups about the photo did not include photos, and the images that did run in articles about the accomplishment were actually line art that had been traced from the photos. Moi Bridge had become really kind of obsessed with this new method of photographing motion, though, so he had several more horse photography sessions, using other horses from Stanford stables, and also eventually using two dozen cameras instead of 12 to really improve the process. And then he also started photographing other animals and even people in this way.
43:01 Tracy V. Wilson? To bring his progressive motion photos to the public, Moi Bridge went on tour. And to help show his photos, he invented a device called a zoopraxiscope.
43:12 Tracy V. Wilson? This was a circular glass plate device that had a series of photos around the edge of the circle in sequence. When the light was put behind the glass to project it onto a wall or a screen, the glass would spin and you could watch the subject of the photos in motion.
43:29 Holly Frey? One of the problems of the zoopraxiscope was that Muybridge couldn't use the photos he wanted to display as he had originally taken them. If he did, the image when it was projected would look squished, so it appeared taller and narrower than the actual subject he had captured. And he wanted it to look like his picture. So he worked out this kind of cool setup, that if he tilted the prints of his photos at an angle and curved the upper corners inward and then re-photographed those photos, when he projected them, the subjects retained their real-life proportions. Because the zoopraxiscope used a single rotating disc, it created a single, repeating loop of action.
44:10 Holly Frey? So it wasn't as though you could tell a narrative story with it. But still, the zoopraxiscope was a marvel.
44:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Muybridge published a book of his motion photos in 1881 titled "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion," and he promoted it by going on tour again, this time to Europe. But while he was abroad, he was professionally embarrassed by Leland Stanford when he discovered that Stanford's friend, J. D. B. Stillman, who was a doctor, had published a book about animal motion using tracings of his photographs. Stillman had not credited him for taking the photos. Muybridge had been preparing a paper on the same topic for the Royal Society of London, and the society accused him of plagiarizing Stillman's work.
44:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Muybridge sued Leland Stanford when he got back to the US, but he lost.
45:04 Holly Frey? The photographer still had more success ahead of him without Stanford, though. Because of the success of Muybridge's lectures with the zoopraxiscope, he was able to strike a deal with the University of Pennsylvania, so the school would fund his work creating photographic studies of motion. Over the next nearly two decades, Muybridge was able to take thousands and thousands of photographs, I've seen the number estimated at 20,000, and that culminated in the publication of a portfolio in 1887 titled "Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements", as well as two more books in 1899 and 1902. Those books were "Animals in Motion"
45:47 Holly Frey? and "The Human Figure in Motion". Many of the photographs of humans in motion might elicit some giggles, because a lot of them are nude series, featuring the subjects doing very normal, everyday things, like running or playing tennis. Honestly, some of them feel like you're watching a very old Benny Hill skit. But they offered the scientific community a lot of information about the way human bodies move. And artists still use some of these photos today as reference when drawing or painting people in motion. Muybridge had also presented the zoopraxiscope at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, along with a lecture about the mechanics of animal motion.
46:30 Tracy V. Wilson? By the time he published those later books, Muybridge had finished his work with the University of Pennsylvania and had continued to travel and take photos and lecture and give demonstrations. He had become famous and sparked the imaginations of countless creators, really serving as one of the early pioneers of the film industry.
46:50 Holly Frey? Yeah, I can't state strongly enough how much his little spinning discs made people realize that you could capture and replay for an audience motion. It was quite thrilling for a lot of people, and very quickly, other people started building on that idea. In the first years of the 20th century, Muybridge retired. He returned to Kingston upon Thames, and he died there on May 8, 1904, at the home of his sister, after a long struggle with cancer. Uh, boy, he did kind of change the world, though, even if he didn't get to live long enough to see it. Yeah. I mean, he lived long enough to enjoy fame and do some other wild things, but I think motion pictures would have really blown his mind.
47:35 Holly Frey? I had a very silly sentence of, he lived long enough to shoot somebody and be acquitted for it. Phew, phew. We're gonna talk about that on Behind the Scenes. Um, I have a brief listener mail, which I love, and it's a person that thinks I wouldn't read this listener mail, and I will, and I will tell you why I want to do it. It's short. Uh, this is from our listener, Noni, who writes, hi, ladies. Have you ever opened your podcast app and been so excited to see the title of an episode that you did a little happy dance? Because I just did. I haven't even listened to it yet, but I had to write to tell you how excited I was to see an episode on sewing patterns and not just one, a two-parter. I can't wait to get to listening. I'm attaching my obligatory pet tax. My 10-year-old rescue Roddy Maloo. Thank you for all the amazing knowledge you share. One.
48:20 Holly Frey? This Rottweiler is so cute. No. Oh, my goodness. And I'm one of those people that it breaks my heart that Rottweilers have a reputation for being dangerous because they are, by nature, the biggest cuddle bugs on the planet. So if you see one that is like that, they have been mistreated in a way that makes them that way, and it makes me very frustrated. This baby looks like it is very loved and goofy, and I love all of that about it. Also, I just wanted to read this because it was a little moment of, phew, because I know I want to talk about sewing patterns all the long day. But as I was prepping that episode, I was like, I hope anybody else cares. So thank you, Noni. Even if it's just you and me, I feel better.
49:03 Holly Frey? If you would like to write to us and share your thoughts about this or any other episode, and, you know, send us those cute animal pictures. We still love them. You can do that at [email protected] . You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
49:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
49:40 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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