__1878: __Photographer Eadweard Muybridge uses high-speed stop-motion photography to capture a horse's motion. The photos prove that the horse has all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. The shots settle an old argument ... and start a new medium and industry.
Former California Governor Leland Stanford financed Muybridge's photo experiments. They were an odd couple. Stanford was an imperious, headstrong captain of industry who had helped build the transcontinental railroad and would later found the university that bears his son's name. Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) was a flamboyant and successful landscape photographer who'd shot and killed his wife's lover and was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
Legend has it that Stanford wanted to settle a $25,000 bet by proving that horses "flew," but most historians doubt that colorful bit. Stanford had retired to the life a country horse breeder, and he wanted proof of what his eyes told him was true. The new medium of photography offered the possibility of that.
Stanford initially staked Muybridge $2,000 for the project, but over the next six years the project cost $50,000 — twice the apocryphal wager and about $1.1 million in today's money.
Many photographers were still using exposures of 15 seconds to one minute. Automatic shutters were in their infancy: expensive and unreliable. All you had to do was remove the lens cap or even cover the lens with a hat or large black cloth. The glass plates had a speed equivalent to about ISO 1.
Muybridge devised more-sensitive emulsions and worked on elaborate shutter devices. He also rigged a trip wire across a racetrack, letting the horse's chest push against the wire to engage an electric circuit that opened a slat-shaped shutter mechanism to make the exposure.
This system produced an "automatic electro-photograph" on July 1, 1877. It showed Occident, a Stanford racehorse, seemingly with all four feet off the ground. The press and the public failed to accept this as proof, however, because what they saw was obviously retouched. No wonder: The photo had been reproduced by painting it, then photographing the painting, then making a woodcut of the photo.
Muybridge continued his labors, with the engineering help of Stanford's Central Pacific Railroad. They installed 12 evenly spaced trip wires on Stanford's Palo Alto racetrack. When a horse pulled a two-wheeled sulky carriage over the wire, the wheels depressed the wire, pulling a switch that opened an electrical circuit that used an elastic band to open a rapid-fire sliding shutter mechanism in the side of a purpose-built shack.
Inside the shack, behind a row of 12 shutters, was a row of 12 cameras. As a backup, each camera had two lenses and made two separate exposures. If both came out, Muybridge selected the sharpest image. Opposite the shack was a white wall with vertical lines matching the trip wires and cameras every 21 inches.
So, on June 15, 1878, before assembled gentlemen of the press, Stanford's top trainer drove Stanford's top trotter across the trip wires at about 40 feet per second, setting off all 12 cameras in rapid succession in less than half a second.
About 20 minutes later, Muybridge showed the freshly developed photographic plates. The horse, indeed, lifted all four legs off the ground during its stride. Remarkably, this was not in the front-and-rear-extended "rocking-horse posture" some had expected, but in a tucked posture, with all four feet under the horse.
Stanford was vindicated, the press astounded, and — as word spread — the art world was split. Painters Edgar Degas and Thomas Eakins loved the realism and used Muybridge's photos to move their own work closer to reality. But sculptor Auguste Rodin thought it an abomination: "It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop."
Muybridge certainly did not stop. He refined his invention, increasing the cameras from one dozen to two (illustrated above), and developed an electromagnetic timer that opened shutters independently of any trip wires. That allowed him to study the nonlinear motions of other four-footed animals, human athletes, a nude descending a staircase and even birds.
Muybridge also adapted the zoetrope, a popular children's toy that produced the illusion of motion by spinning a series of animation-style drawings behind a viewing slit. He fitted one with a glass disk to project the trotting sequences onto a screen. (Because the system compressed the pictures, an artist had to redraw Muybridge's photographic images to counteract the distortion.)
Nonetheless, the "zoopraxiscope" created the first photographic motion pictures, and it was a hit with Stanford. Muybridge went on to publish a series of finely printed, large-format books of his stop-motion photographs. Soon, however, Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers took Muybridge's proof of concept and gave birth to movies as a commercial art form.
Sources: Stanford Magazine, May-June 2001; Eadweard Muybridge, by Paul Hill (Phaidon Press)
*Photo: Electromagnetic shutter timers allowed Muybridge to **dramatically **improve his technique within a decade of his pioneering work.
*
See Also:
- June 15, 1667: First Human Blood Transfusion Is Performed
- Feb. 12, 1878: A Face-Saving Invention From Harvard
- April 21, 1878: Thinking Fast, Firefighter Slides Down a Pole
- Sept. 25, 1878: Yes, Smoking Is a Health Hazard
- Gallery: Laser-Firing Physicists Take High-Speed Photography to Attosecond Range
- Jan. 9, 1839: Say 'Cheese'
- Aug. 19, 1839: Photography Goes Open Source
- Raw File: Exposing the Wired World, One Photo at a Time
- Underwire: Movies
