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 OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
