The world’s first moving pictures are caught on camera
Eadweard Muybridge’s dynamic images of a galloping horse propel photography into a new age
Eadweard Muybridge led, by any standards, a very strange life. Born in Surrey in 1830, he emigrated to the United States, suffered brain damage in a Texas stagecoach accident and murdered a drama critic whom he had accused of sleeping with his wife, only to be acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
Yet in the middle of all this, Muybridge created what are often described as the world’s first moving pictures. In the late 1860s he had become well known for his stunning images of Yosemite Valley, and the former California governor Leland Stanford commissioned him to find out whether a horse’s feet did – as some people claimed – leave the ground all at once when it was racing.
Muybridge duly began taking pictures, but the real breakthrough came on 15 June 1878 at Stanford’s farm in Palo Alto, before an audience of invited journalists. Hoping to capture Stanford’s mare Sallie Gardner at the gallop, Muybridge had stationed 12 cameras along the track, some 27 inches apart. The shutters were controlled by tripwires, which would be triggered as the horse passed.
Sallie duly set off, galloping at a planned speed of 36 miles per hour. The shutters clicked; the photos were taken. Muybridge developed the prints there and then. When the reporters examined them, they saw that all four of Sallie’s feet had indeed left the ground. And when, two years later, Muybridge projected the pictures on to a big screen, it seemed as if Sallie was genuinely galloping before the audience’s astonished eyes. In effect, he had created the world’s first silent film.