The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures by Edward Ball

Author:Edward Ball [Ball, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, United States, Biography & Autobiography, Artists; Architects; Photographers, Science & Technology
ISBN: 9780385535496
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2013-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

The redoubt in San Francisco known as Fort Gunnybags, from which vigilantes ruled the city using mob actions and lynching in 1856, the summer after E. J. Muggridge arrived. (Illustration Credit c14.3)

He was E. J. Muggridge to his customers, but in May 1856 came another name change: “Muygridge.”16 He put the new name in his advertisements (and probably pronounced it “My-gridge”). The bookseller had thrown off the grunting sound of his birth name and replaced it with a little melody.

E. J. Muygridge had a brother six years younger, named Thomas, who was fourteen when Muygridge left for America. At sixteen Thomas had moved from the brothers’ hometown in England to a port city in Wales, where he apprenticed as a seaman. At the end of his contract, in 1856, when he was twenty, Thomas joined the merchant marine, and six months after he took his first bunk on a cargo ship, he decided to follow his older brother to America. Muygridge had possibly written home to Thomas, but letters or not, the magnet of get-rich stories pulled people out of Europe, and seamen notoriously deserted ships that made it to California. When the new sailor’s clipper turned up in San Francisco, Thomas walked off the ship and didn’t turn back.

The last of Muygridge’s brothers back home was named George. Records are slim, but around this time George also fetched up in California. He was twenty-three, and he probably came the well-traveled route—Liverpool to New York, New York to the isthmus, a ship to San Francisco. George and Thomas must have looked up to their older brother, because when each of them reached town, each started using their brother’s invented last name, Muygridge.17

The Golden State played on the fantasies of young men. Its stories had caused three brothers to come eight thousand miles from England to a place none of them had ever seen. George, Thomas, and Edward had this much in common with Leland Stanford and his family, although none of them knew it. Just as all the Muygridge brothers had gone to California, Stanford and all of his brothers, five of them, had done the same.

Thomas and George Muygridge went up from San Francisco into the Sierras, where they dug for gold or shoveled for copper, another mineral that had turned up. (On the way to the mountains, the Muygridge brothers probably provisioned in Sacramento, at one of the Stanford brothers’ stores.) The mines never aroused Edward Muygridge, the oldest brother, who stayed in San Francisco with his books. Thomas and George left few traces, and in these years their brother Edward also appears only in scattered records. In October 1857, Muygridge published another moneymaker, a pamphlet about an enormous steamship that had showed up in the harbor, the Great Eastern. A new British vessel, the goliath Great Eastern could carry four thousand passengers—although half of them had to be crammed into steerage—and was designed to sail ten thousand miles without having to take on fresh coal for its boilers.

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