Ch. 1
“In person he seems to have been ponderous and a little dull, a respectable effect he may have cultivated, but his impact was, to use a term of the time, electrifying.“
Wonder what new adjectives have come up since.
“Pigeons were the fastest communications technology; horses were the fastest transportation tech-nology; the barges moved at the speed of the river or the pace of the horses that pulled them along the canals. Nature itself was the limit of speed: humans could only harness water, wind, birds, beasts. Born into this almost medievally slow world, the impatient, ambitious, inventive Muybridge would leave it and link himself instead to the fastest and newest technologies of the day. But that world was already being transformed profoundly.”
“The first mesh of that amazing iron net which now covers the whole surface of England and all the civilized portions of the earth” - Hannah Kemble
“Not only is distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation goes forward and there is no danger that local peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved." - Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844
“What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local”
Solnit contrasts the “annihilation of space and time” brought by railroads with the expansion of time through Geology that showed Earth was millions of years old and Darwin’s theory of natural selection that showed us evolving over thousands of years and us being closer to animals than to Gods.
“There was the tendency to replace the activities of the hand by machines, just as railroad replaced the actions of the traveling foot”
“And there was the sness that characterized modern European and then American society, always willing to overturn what is for what might be, that restlessness of exploration, colonialism, science, and invention, of originality and individualism, the restlessness that regarded the unknown as a challenge rather than a danger, time as something to speed up or speed through. Photography may have been its most paradoxical invention: a technological breakthrough for holding onto the past, a technology always rushing forward, always looking backward.
“Each event and thought itself must have been experienced at a radically different pace-what was slow then was slower than we could now toler-ate, slower than we could pay attention to; while the speed of our own lives would have gone by them like the blur of speed before Muybridge's images or been as invisible as the passersby in that first photograph of the Parisian boulevard Morse described.”
“Ingenious philosophers will tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it inly creates vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement, prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes.” - George Elliot in 1860
High speed photography - Muybridge’s invention ? - helped freeze time or even reduce the granularity of time that could be captured. Just like better clocks allowed smaller intervals to be measured. Before high speed photography, unless one had a talent they could only see the aggregate of motions or the first and the last with everything in between being a near blur.
1830 - Muybridge born 1830 - First passenger railroad in Britain 1839, 01 - Daguerre announces invention of photography (daguerreotypy). Talbot same 1840 - Telegraphy invented 1858 - Darwin publishes theory of natural selection 1860 - Muybridge suffers accident on his way East 1861 - Watkins starts photographing Yosemite 1867 - Muybridge starts photographing Yosemite 1869, 05, 10 - Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads are joined in Utah. Leland Stanford inaugurates this. 1869 - Samual Langley begins precise time for pay service for east coast https://digital.hagley.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A2541901/datastream/OBJ/download?t 
1872 - Photograph of a horse in motion - Nope references this too 1877 - Railroad riots