AllMovie

With his Zoopraxiscope and hundreds of photographs detailing animals in motion, British-born photographer Eadweard James Muybridge played a key role in the development of motion picture technology. Born Edward James Muggeridge in England, Muybridge was raised from boyhood in the U.S. His interest in animal locomotion was sparked in the early 1870s by the research of French scientist Etienne-Jules Marey. In 1872, Muybridge was granted funds by California Governor Leland Stanford to launch a series of his own photographic studies, in part to prove an argument about whether or not all of a running horse's hooves ever simultaneously left the ground. To capture the exact motion of a horse's flight, Muybridge set up 24 cameras alongside a Sacramento racetrack and rigged their shutters to close at the precise moment the horse ran in front of the camera. The experiment was successful -- he proved that horses do indeed briefly "fly" while running -- and with each successive experiment, Muybridge honed his technology, replacing the trip lines he originally used with electronic devices. He also embarked upon the lecture circuit and to demonstrate his work, created the Zoopraxiscope, a projection device based on the Phenakististicope, a magic lantern machine that employed a painted rotating cylinder nested within an outer cylinder with a fixed opening that gave viewers the illusion of motion when the inner cylinder was turned. His Zoopraxiscope was enthusiastically received, and inspired Professor Marey, the man who inspired Muybridge, to further hone the latter's technology with his chronophotographic camera. Muybridge's invention also caught the eye of Thomas Edison who launched his own experiments with "moving" pictures. Meanwhile, Muybridge continued his studies of movement and in 1887 published Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, an 11-volume book summarizing his work that came complete with his many sequential photographs.