Cameras, Horses and the Beginning of Moving Pictures

I'm reading a book called The Inventor and The Tycoon by Edward Ball. An unlikely friendship between the man who would become governor of California and an eccentric photographer who would become a murderer is the basis of this story.

Amazon book review: 130 years ago E. Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer, his trial one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.

Does the surname Stanford sound familiar?  You're right if you think it's connected with the well known university in California.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY, stanford.edu images

  I'm reading this book on my new Nook.

my Nook dressed in it's Jonathan Adler case

I have to admit I like love reading this way. I resisted an e-reader for awhile but am seeing the advantages of having access to so many books, as well as the various features the Nook offers, like word definitions. I looked up the definition for Brobdingnagian by touching the screen and found it meant 'enormous'.

E. MUYBRIDGE WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO PHOTOGRAPH YOSEMITE VALLEY

 
I'm half-way through the book and am enjoying it. I like the way it rounds out dates and facts with living, breathing people who traveled in different circles and yet through their interaction gave the world something new - a door from the machine age into the virtual world.



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 It's Monday, What Are You Reading?