Leland Stanford

He had this idea to try to photograph movement or motion.

And there's lots of stories around whether or not he was doing it because of Stanford having a bet, Leland Stanford having a bet about how horses actually move.

But the net result is that Maybridge set up a bank of cameras along a racetrack at Palo Alto and took photographs of a horse in motion and proved once and for all that their feet do come off the ground.

And from his work, along with obviously other inventors and innovators, grew motion pictures.

The apocryphal story is that the only people who reliably got rich during those heady days were the people who ran hotels, brothels, restaurants, laundry services, but some people did get fantastically wealthy.

On the broken backs of Chinese migrant laborers, railroad magnates became American barons, and one, Leland Stanford, used his wealth to seed a university that would bear his name and be responsible for so many ideas that would lead to our modern gold rush.

It's impossible to walk around the Bay Area and not see shocking wealth disparity fueled in large part by the tech industry.

From the beginning of silicon chip manufacturing that would give Silicon Valley its name, factory workers tried to unionize against low pay, miserable conditions, and years of their efforts resulted in no formal agreements with management.

This is a legacy defining thing that's gonna have his name be remembered for hundreds of years, more than just the super rich guy.

'Cause does anyone really remember what Andrew Carnegie did that well? Do people know that Leland Stanford was a guy?

[laughs] Good point.

These names are forever.

The conviction that wealth is there for the taking if you move fast enough, that the rules can be written after the money is made, and that whoever gets there first wins.

A logic that ran straight from the hydraulic mines that blasted apart in mountainsides to Leland Stanford's horse farm at Palo Alto, where the same culture of speculative risk and ruthless speed became Silicon Valley.

Hope you enjoyed this discussion with Nathaniel Philbrick.

And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

So how does the Transcontinental Railroad on the western leg take its form and how does that change California and America's history?

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an amazing story how these shopkeepers that, you know, are more than that, they're commercially very savvy.

Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, you know, being the foremost names, they became known as the big four.

You know, they were way over their financial heads initially.

... yeah, his name was Doc Strong, and he was a pharmacist up in, uh, Dutch Flats, like, kind of near Nevada City.

They prospected, or they, they surveyed the first site of the Transcontinental Railroad going across the Sierra Nevada, and then started a company, and he raised, like, $50,000 from, like, Leland Stanford and other people.

And then they went and lobbied Congress and got the, uh, Pacific Railroad Act passed, which then funded the building of the railroad.

And so, like, ancestrally, I think I'm kind of dealing with, uh, an ancestor who was kind of a like, "Let's do this," kind of guy, who maybe didn't consider the impacts that that way of thinking would have upon the world.

And they're literally battling it out in Congress, um, uh, in 1849, and it comes down to a duel fought outside California beside a lake, uh, in which David Broderick, a US senator, would be shot to death by a pro-slavery state, uh, Supreme Court justice, leaving California wide open, uh, to go with the South, uh, in the event of the Civil War.

There was another senator named Leland Stanford.

Yes.

And he became famous for building a university, among other things, I guess, right?

Well, and th- this is part in, uh, uh, what Stanford would, uh, build the Transcontinental Railroad.

And I think what is underappreciated is the Transcontinental Rail- Railroad was begun during the Civil War as a war measure to keep California in the Union.

And so Leland Stanford and the other k- they're known as the Big Four, would become billionaires of their time.

And, uh, uh, they were very, they were not appreciated in California because they would create a transportation monopoly that would strangle business.

since we're in the neighborhood of independence it is independence day in nigeria which was obtained in 1960 it is also unification day in cameroon obtained in 1961 also independence day in tuvalu since 1978 and lastly it is defenders day in ukraine which was established in 2015 Now, on to the next stop.

We arrive in the year 1891 at Stanford University, which was founded in Palo Alto, California, by a railroad magnate and politician by the name of Leland Stanford, together with his wife, Jane.

This was also the year the university admitted its first students.

Let's now move to 1906.

Uh, went to study English at Stanford, but left without a degree.

Leland Stanford and Stanford University make an appearance here.

Um, moved to New York to try to make it as a writer.

Didn't work out, great.