Eadweard Muybridge developed camera equipment and techniques to take high-speed photographs of animals and humans in motion and demonstrated for the first time in history that galloping horses lift all their feet off the ground simultaneously. He also invented an early predecessor to the motion picture projector.
Born in Kingston-on-the-Thames, England, Eadweard Muybridge came to the United States in 1852 as a representative of the London Printing and Publishing Company when he was twenty-two. Three years later, he settled in San Francisco, where he learned photography from a daguerreotype photographer, Silas Selleck
Muybridge first gained recognition for his dramatic photographs of California’s Yosemite Valley
In the spring of 1872, Leland Stanford, who had made his fortune in railroading and served as governor of California, invited Muybridge to discuss a photographic project. Stanford wanted to use scientific methods to develop the greatest stable of racehorses in the American West. He particularly wanted to know how horses move their legs when they gallop—a motion so rapid that individuals watching horses run disagree about what they see. Stanford was especially curious about whether four of a horse’s feet leave the ground at one time as it gallops. Stanford proposed that Muybridge use photography to freeze the movements of a galloping horse. As Muybridge later stated, he was “perfectly amazed at the boldness and originality of the proposition,” and he accepted Stanford’s challenge.
Other photographers had attempted to take pictures of rapid movements, but none had succeeded in capturing an event that occurred too rapidly to be seen with the human eye. The photographic plates available during the 1870’s were not very sensitive to light, and the mechanical shutters of cameras were not very fast. Hence, exposure times of tens of seconds were common, making rapidly moving objects appear as blurs. To accomplish Stanford’s objective, Muybridge had to develop new photographic techniques and instruments.
Muybridge began his efforts at Stanford’s Sacramento, California, ranch. However, his work there was interrupted when he was arrested for killing an army officer named Harry Larkyns in 1874. A jury ruled Muybridge’s act justifiable homicide, but Muybridge nevertheless decided to leave California temporarily. In 1875, he went to Central America and resumed landscape photography.
In 1876, Muybridge returned to California and resumed his project to photograph Stanford’s horses. He developed a new type of camera shutter that made possible exposures of only one-thousandth of a second. His shutter consisted of two sliding pieces, each having a narrow, rectangular slit. The slides were pulled in opposite directions by rubber bands. Photographic plates were thus exposed only during the short intervals when one slit passed in front of the other.
In 1878, Muybridge’s project moved to Palo Alto, where Stanford had established a stock ranch. During that same year, Muybridge used twenty-four cameras, spaced along a fifty-foot length of the track where Stanford’s horse ran. Each camera, which took a single frame, was triggered by a trip-wire stretched across the track, activating its shutter as the horse passed before it. Muybridge was successful, not only in producing a sequence of photographs of a galloping horse, but in showing, for the first time, that a horse lifted all four of its legs off the ground at the same time. Afterward, Stanford arranged to have the results of Muybridge’s work published in The Horse in Motion (1882), written by Jacob Stillman, who was Stanford’s personal physician. Although the book included his photographs, Muybridge complained that it was published without his name on the title page. Because Stanford’s Palo Alto stock farm later became the site of Stanford University, Muybridge’s photographic studies are now regarded as the first research project on that site.
Muybridge’s ideas for photographing horses appear to have been inspired, in part, by the work of the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey
During the fall of 1881, Muybridge lectured in Europe, intent on establishing his reputation as the creator of the techniques for studying motion using photography. While in Paris, Marey
In a private demonstration in Stanford’s house during the fall of 1879, Muybridge projected a sequence of images of Stanford’s horse in motion using his new zoöpraxiscope,
Between 1884 and 1886, Muybridge worked in the courtyard of the Veterinary Hall and Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He used new technology including dry plates that were more sensitive to light than his earlier wet plates and worked with W. D. Marks to develop an electromagnetic clockwork shutter. By 1885, he was using three rows of twelve cameras each. One row was parallel to the subject, while the others were set at positions sixty and ninety degrees to the subject, thereby recording the motion from a variety of angles. At the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge and his co-workers exposed more than twenty thousand negatives, many of which he published in a portfolio called Animal Locomotion (1887).
During his career, Muybridge photographically documented the movements of a wide variety of animals, including horses, goats, cats, gnus, eagles, gazelles, sloths, camels, and birds. Using these photographs, he identified 132 characteristic animal motions. He also studied human motion. He exhibited and sold these photographs to the public, as he had with his landscape photographs earlier in his career. Muybridge never regarded his motion studies to be completely successful, because he sold only twenty-seven complete sets of the Animal Locomotion portfolio. However, he sold many of his smaller, one-hundred-print sets, mostly to artists and libraries. Muybridge later returned to his birthplace, where he died in 1904.
Before Muybridge began his experiments on the photography of moving objects, he considered himself an artist. However, as his focus narrowed to motion studies, he regarded his work as scientific. That judgment has since been disputed by scholars who have noted the extreme lack of scientific rigor in Muybridge’s studies when compared with those of Marey
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Haas, Robert. Muybridge: Man in Motion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Full account of Muybridge’s life, his collaboration with Stanford, and his photography. -
Hendricks, Gordon. Eadweard Muybridge. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2001. Exploration of Muybridge’s photographic work, recounting his early life in England and his work as a photographer in San Francisco. Hendricks also discusses his stormy relationship with Leland Stanford. -
Muybridge, Eadweard. Animals in Motion. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1957. Reprint of Muybridge’s collection of more than 3,900 photographs of thirty-four different animals. Includes Muybridge’s written observations on animal movements. -
Prodger, Philip and Gunning, Tom. Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2003. Written to accompany an exhibition of Muybridge’s photography, this book describes the improvements in photographic chemistry, optics, shutter technology, and other components required to make the study of animal motion possible. -
Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking Books, 2003. Controversial account of the development of technology in America that suggests that the high-technology industries of California’s Silicon Valley and the Hollywood movie industry can be traced back to innovations by Stanford and Muybridge.
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First Commercial Projection of Motion Pictures
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Mathew B. Brady; Jacques Daguerre; Thomas Alva Edison; Leland Stanford.