Motion Studies: time, space and Eadweard Muybridge, by Rebecca Solnit

This son of Surrey virtually invented the movies- and then his life turned to melodrama, says Frank McLynn

The first identifiable feature film, with characters and a plot, was the 10-minute The Great Train Robbery (1903); while the first movie, properly so-called, was exhibited by the Lumière brothers in 1895. It showed workers leaving a factory, and a train rushing at the audience. But to tell the story of the movies from the beginning one has to go back to the work of Eadweard Muybridge.

The quaint Anglo-Saxon spelling of his first name is significant, since he was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, ancient coronation seat of the early Saxon kings. In his early twenties, in 1852, Muybridge emigrated to California. He became a professional photographer, and made his name with some stunning visual images of Yosemite valley in 1872 and the Modoc Native American war in 1873.

His real breakthrough came in 1877 when, using a battery of 24 cameras attached to a tripwire, he took a series of pictures of a horse in motion and proved conclusively that there are times when all four feet of a galloping horse are off the ground.

From this he progressed to the invention of a form of projector, printing photographs on a rotating glass disc which reassembled his pictures into the appearance of moving actuality. He called this the Zoopraxiscope and took his exhibition of moving animals on tour in the US and Europe.

The Lumière brothers, and later George Méliès, developed Muybridge's ideas further. By 1896, such familiar cinematic devices as fades, dissolves and double exposure were staples of celluloid art.

Muybridge worked in an era when deserts, mountains and precipitous cliffs had replaced forests, lakes and waterfalls as the favourite subjects for landscape portraiture, hence the 19th-century vogue for Yosemite, which occupied the place in the collective imagination Niagara Falls had in the 18th century and the Grand Canyon would have in the 20th. Given his extensive studies of Yosemite, the Lava Beds in northern California and the city of San Francisco, one would be justified in seeing Muybridge as the pioneering visual poet of the Golden State.

To follow his photographic career in detail one needs to know quite a bit about cameras, lighting and exposures. But his most fascinating discovery was that movies are possible because of a physiological phenomenon known as "persistence of vision".

If 24 ordered still pictures are shown to us successively each second, our sense of sight is slow enough to merge them into one continuous action. This is because the retina retains each still picture just long enough for it to be replaced by another only slightly different.

Muybridge's career would be fascinating enough simply in terms of his craft, but once again we confront Yeats's familiar dichotomy between the life and work. Muybridge raised photography virtually to the level of art, but as a human being left much to be desired.

Rebecca Solnit speculates that the rot set in when he was injured in a stagecoach crash in 1860 and suffered damage to the orbitofrontal cortex, leading to a personality change.

Thereafter he was prone to emotional outbursts, inappropriate social actions, loss of inhibition, risk-taking and obsessive-compulsive behaviour. He married a young woman called Flora, who became discontented with his workaholism and took a lover named Harry Larkyns. When Muybridge found out about the affair, he tracked Larkyns down and shot him dead.

At his trial the defence pleaded insanity, citing the stagecoach accident. The judge directed that Muybridge had to be found either insane or guilty (with a mandatory death sentence). In flat defiance of these instructions, the jury found him sane but not guilty: an "impossible" verdict. The jurymen were all married men and the foreman convinced them they would have done the same. Flora hated Muybridge for killing her lover but, without means, she had to sue for divorce. She was awarded alimony, but the judgement could not be enforced as Muybridge had already departed on a photographic assignment in Central America. Flora then seems to have lost her mind and died at 24.

Solnit makes the case that Muybridge had three great crises in his life, which all ended in lawsuits. He successfully sued the stagecoach company and escaped a murder rap, but then fell foul of the law when he tried to sue the multimillionaire Leland Stanford (founder of the university). Stanford had double-crossed him and claimed that he and an associate had really pioneered the study of animal motion.

Muybridge was a hard man to like, and Solnit is scathing at his expense, pointing out that he worked for the big monopolies and the robber barons and "genuflected before power". Yet his eventful life allows her to write some stimulating mini-essays on subjects from 19th-century technology to the spirit of place in San Francisco.

She makes a few mistakes: it was not Sitting Bull but Crazy Horse and Gaul who defeated Custer at the Little Big Horn, and James John not Augustus Dowd was the first white man to see the giant sequoia. But these Homeric nods are forgiveable in a volume that combines biography, cultural history and cinematography in a refreshing, well-written and absorbing bouillabaisse of a book.

Frank McLynn's 'Wagons West: the pioneering years on the overland trails' is published by Cape