Eadweard Muybridge, motion decomposed
« British photographer (1830-1904), who proved horses gallop with all four hooves in the air, then invented chronophotography. »
A British émigré in California, Muybridge made his name with Yosemite landscapes before a wager by Governor Leland Stanford changed everything: does a galloping horse, at any moment, have all four hooves in the air? In 1878, at Palo Alto, Muybridge set up 12 then 24 cameras triggered by wires. Sallie Gardner at a Gallop settled the question.
From 1884 to 1887 at the University of Pennsylvania, he produced Animal Locomotion: 781 plates, 20,000 images of humans, animals and athletes broken into sequences. His zoopraxiscope, projecting these sequences in a loop, was the direct ancestor of cinema — Edison and the Lumières drew on it.
In 1874, at Calistoga, Muybridge shot dead his wife's lover. Acquitted on grounds of justifiable homicide, he carried on his career. His scientific work founded the photographic analysis of motion, and remains a resource used by animators and biomechanicists more than a century later.