Here the author of the National Book Award winner Slaves in the Family offers a riveting account of the men who made us into a society of watchers—a biography and true crime narrative of the partnership between a murderer who invented movies and a robber baron who built railroads. Edward Ball's chronicle of the relationship between Eadweard Muybridge, who developed a way to photograph movement over time and play it back for an audience, and Leland Stanford, the tycoon and former governor of California who financed his photographic experiments, becomes a fascinating exploration of the birth of the age of visual media.