The most important moments in invention are sometimes the imaginative leaps – even when they turn out to be dead-ends
Behind the drawn curtains of his home in Palo Alto, California, the
railroad magnate Leland Stanford waited for his horse to be brought to
life. A white sheet hung against one wall, and in the gloaming the only
light came from a wood-and-brass construction at the back of the room.
Suddenly, with a mechanical clatter and the hiss of an oxyacetylene
lamp, a moving image appeared on the screen. It was little more than a
silhouette, but Stanford and his astonished guests could clearly see
Hawthorn, Stanford’s stallion, walking along as if it were right there
in the room among them.
Eadweard Muybridge, proud and nervous, stood next to his device. The
British photographer had a reputation in California thanks to his superb
technical eye and his majestic Yosemite waterscapes, as well as the
sensational murder of his wife’s lover five years before. But he had
escaped conviction, and resumed work on a commission from Stanford to
capture the motion and beauty of his benefactor’s beloved race horses.
As the applause from the audience died away, Stanford addressed the
photographer. ‘I think you must be mistaken in the name of the animal,’
he said. ‘That is certainly not the gait of Hawthorn but of Anderson.’
It turned out that the stable staff at Stanford’s ranch had switched the
horses. But so crisp was the outline, and so defined its movements,
that Stanford could tell the difference.
This private demonstration for Stanford took place in the autumn of
1879, shortly after he bought the estate that would go on to become
Stanford University. A hundred years later, Stanford and its surrounds
would become renowned as the crucible of the ‘Silicon Valley’ computing
boom, building on the ‘analytical engine’ first envisaged by another
British inventor, the mathematician and polymath Charles Babbage.
Babbage and Muybridge were separated by class, generation and
temperament. But for both creators, the path from conception to
application for their technologies evolved in ways that they couldn’t
have anticipated. Putting their lives side by side contains valuable
insights about the contingency of history, and what it takes to be
remembered as the ‘father’ or ‘mother’ of invention.
Muybridge was born in 1830 as Edward
Muggeridge, into a merchant family that traded in corn and coal in
Kingston upon Thames in England. The place inspired the first of
Muybridge’s many name changes when, at 20, he appropriated the
‘Eadweard’ spelling of the Anglo-Saxon kings that had been carved upon
an ancient coronation stone near his home. He set off to New York as a
young man, in 1850, before crossing the country to the frontier town of
San Francisco. Over time, for reasons he never explained, his surname
evolved to Muygridge and then Muybridge.
Muybridge set up as a professional photographer and, in 1872, he
married Flora Shallcross Stone, a young divorcee half his age. He also
found himself drawn into Stanford’s circle, after the millionaire asked Muybridge to take photographs of his galloping racehorses to determine whether they had all four hooves off the ground at any point in their stride.
With Muybridge away from home much of the time, Flora fell pregnant
to a rambunctious drama critic called Harry Larkyns. Seven months after
the baby was born, Muybridge discovered he was not the father. Incensed,
he tracked down Larkyns at a ranch in the Napa Valley. Muybridge called
out from his hiding place in the dark. As his wife’s lover peered into
the gloom, Muybridge said: ‘My name is Muybridge and I have a message
from my wife,’ shooting Larkyns point-blank through the heart. Within
hours, Muybridge had been arrested.
Charles Babbage led a much more refined life than the knockabout
Muybridge. Born in London in 1791, son of a goldsmith and banker,
Babbage inherited a fortune from his father and could have spent his
life as a dilettante. He thrived in London’s high society, and much of
his work seems to have been undertaken in an attempt to impress the rich
and famous at his popular soirées. But Babbage was also intelligent and
well-educated, holding down the post as Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics at Cambridge for 11 years from the age of 37.
Early on in his tenure, inspired by the industrial revolution, he
began toying with the idea of a mechanical calculator that would use
gears to overcome the labour of working out mathematical equations by
hand. In the summer of 1821, Babbage was helping his astronomer friend
John Herschel check a series of astronomical tables. Going cross-eyed
with the effort of working the array of figures, Babbage is said to have
cried out: ‘My God, Herschel! How I wish these calculations could be
executed by steam!’
Of itself, the idea of a mechanical calculator was not new. Such
devices go back at least as far as the Antikythera mechanism, recovered
from a Greek shipwreck dating to the first or second century BC, which
used a complex mechanism of gears to predict the motion of heavenly
bodies and other natural phenomena. And there is a more direct
antecedent of Babbage’s work in the calculating machine devised by the
French mathematician Blaise Pascal in the 1640s, a number of which were
constructed.
Babbage’s first concept was called a ‘Difference Engine’. Like
Pascal’s machines, it involved a series of gears, but was more
sophisticated in the range and scale of its calculations. He convinced
the British government to invest £17,000 in his project – around £1.2
million in today’s money – but he completed only a fraction of the total
machine. Despite the government’s objections, he dropped the Difference
Engine for a far grander idea – what he called his ‘Analytical Engine’.
Muybridge’s breakthrough came with the zoopraxiscope, the world’s first movie projector
Muybridge’s murder trial in 1875 drew a huge crowd. His defence team
attempted to show that he was deranged, arguing that a wagon crash in
1860 had damaged his judgment and self-control. But the prosecution tore
his insanity plea apart. In a final, impassioned speech, Muybridge’s
defence lawyer told the jury that Muybridge’s actions were justified,
citing the Bible to argue that killing his wife’s adulterous lover was
the right thing to do. After a night’s deliberation, the jury found
Muybridge not guilty.
Some time after, Muybridge reconnected with Stanford. This time, he
set up a bank of 12 top-quality stereoscopic cameras with high-speed
shutters, and took a rapid series of photographs of Stanford’s horse in
motion. The breakthrough came with the invention of the zoopraxiscope,
the device that had enabled Stanford to recognise his horse. Images were
arrayed around the outside of a disc, which rotated rapidly in one
direction, while a counter-rotating disc with slots acted as a gate to
control which image was projected onto a screen, creating the illusion
of movement. It was the world’s first movie projector.
After a sell-out European tour and a legal battle with Stanford, who
claimed the images as his own, Muybridge found another opportunity to
raise his profile. He met William Pepper, the provost of the University
of Pennsylvania, who enabled Muybridge to produce thousands of motion
studies. Between 1884 and 1887, using far better photographic materials,
Muybridge shot hundreds of sequences of men and women, often naked,
performing all sorts of tasks and movements. (It was often very
difficult to persuade bricklayers to do their job with no clothes on,
Muybridge commented ruefully.) The apex of his contribution to moving
pictures came at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, a huge fair
in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing
in the New World. Here, Muybridge built the Zoopraxographical Hall –
the first purpose-built cinema, a 50-foot-high extravaganza in mock
stone.
In contrast to Muybridge’s raw and dusty
work on Stanford’s property, Babbage was inspired by the sophistication
of silk weaving. Making complex patterns with fine silk thread was
painfully slow when done by hand – so much so that two loom operators
might produce only an inch of material a day. In the 1740s, a French
factory inspector devised a loom that used a mechanism such as a musical
box to speed up the process. Just as the pins on the rotating cylinder
of a musical box triggered notes on metal prongs, the device used pins
to control different-coloured threads. However, each cylinder was
expensive to produce, and the design was limited by the size of the
cylinder – one turn, and the pattern began to repeat.
A new loom created by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the son of a master
weaver, swapped the cylinder for a series of holes punched on cards.
Each hole indicated whether or not a particular colour should be used at
that point, and because the train of punched cards could be as long as
the pattern required, almost any piece of weaving could be automated
this way. Before long, Jacquard looms were turning out two feet of silk a
day – a remarkable transformation of productivity.
The versatility of Jaquard’s system appealed to Babbage. A treasure
he often exhibited to visitors was a portrait of Jacquard that appeared
to be an etching – but on close examination it was woven from silk, with
a remarkable 24,000 rows of thread making up the image. Such a product
would have been impossible without Jacquard’s technology, and Babbage
realised that a similar approach could be used in a truly revolutionary
computing device, his Analytical Engine.
Dismissing the fixed gears of his earlier design, Babbage wanted the
Analytical Engine to have the same flexibility as the Jacquard loom. For
the Difference Engine, the data to be worked on was to be entered
manually on dials, with the calculation performed according to the
configuration of gears. In the Analytical Engine, both data and
calculation would be described by a series of Jacquard-style punched
cards, which allowed for far more flexibility of computation.
The Difference Engine was an incomplete mechanical calculator, while the Analytical Engine never got off the drawing board
There was just one problem. Although Babbage designed the Analytical
Engine in concept, he never managed to construct even a part of it.
Indeed, it’s unlikely that his design could ever have been successfully
built. His plans fired the enthusiasm of Ada Lovelace, the mathematician
and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She was eager to work with Babbage
on his Analytical Engine, and described several potential programs for
his hypothetical machine. But Babbage showed little interest in
Lovelace’s contributions. His grand vision proved impossible to make a
reality.
The technologies envisaged by both Babbage and Muybridge bear little
connection to their modern equivalents. Their devices were evolutionary
dead ends. Muybridge’s banks of cameras were clumsy and impractical; his
movies were limited to a couple of seconds in duration. And Babbage’s
computers were even worse. The Difference Engine was an incomplete
mechanical calculator, while the Analytical Engine never got off the
drawing board.
For both computers and moving pictures, the real, usable technology
would require a totally different approach. But how the legacies of each
of these inventors has been preserved varied greatly according to the
vagaries of chance, politics and ambition.
The conceptual originators of the modern computer were the British
mathematicians Alan Turing, who devised the fundamental model, and John
von Neumann, who turned Turing’s highly stylised theory into a practical
architecture. These pioneers had an academic background, and their
consideration was not glory, but solving an intellectual challenge to
help the military effort during the Second World War. As prime minister,
Winston Churchill was determined to keep the power of the computing
equipment at Britain’s disposal a secret, and the work was accordingly
downplayed. As a result, Babbage was never totally eclipsed by his
successors.
But neither academic restraint nor political interference got in the
way of Muybridge’s rivals. Inventors such as the Lumières, two French
brothers who developed a self-contained camera and movie projector, had
everything to gain financially from being recognised as firsts. They
picked up on the invention of the roll-film for still cameras to create
moving pictures that were much easier to make, and lasted much longer.
These entrepreneurs had no need for a conceptual ancestor – Muybridge
was not a muse, but potential competition.
Muybridge’s reputation also suffered after the publication of A Million and One Nights
(1926), a book about the early years of moving pictures by Terry
Ramsaye, the editor of an American cinema trade magazine. Ramsaye cast
Muybridge as a self-serving fraud who passed off other people’s
inventions as his own. He was supported by the evidence of John D
Isaacs, an electrical engineer who helped to build the shutter-release
mechanism used in Muybridge’s action photography, and claimed to be the
genius behind all Muybridge’s work. Muybridge, who had died more than 20
years earlier, couldn’t speak for himself. Ramsaye’s account was later
discredited, but it was enough to wipe Muybridge off the map for many
years.
Science and technology are rarely about lone genius. Neither
Muybridge nor Babbage developed workable inventions that functioned at
scale, and it ultimately took new creators, with fresh approaches, to
bring their ideas to life. But that initial spark matters – and, as
their lives remind us, being an inventor is as much about imagination as
it is about creation.
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