Eadweard muybridge History.

Eadweard become well known and famous for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, which is a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.

Photo off zoopraixscope;

 

Muybridge was born at Kingston upon Thames London, England on April 9, 1830. He immigrated to the US, arriving in San Francisco in 1855, where he started a career as a publisher's agent and bookseller. He left San Francisco at the end of the 50’s, while he was back in England; he took up photography seriously, where he learned the wet-colluding process in the 60’s.

In 1872, the former Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken on a debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse's hooves are off the ground at the same time during the trot. Up until this time, most paintings of horses at full gallop showed the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear. Stanford sided with this assertion, called "unsupported transit", and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question , In later studies Muybridge used a series of large cameras that used glass plates placed in a line, each one being triggered by a thread as the horse passed. Later a clockwork device was used. The images were copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed in a machine called a Zoopraxiscope. This in fact became an intermediate stage towards motion pictures and cinematography during the next years where it has grown much stronger and HD.

To see the results for ourselves on this motion pictures, We got a student to walk past the camera’s and just took images and put it together.