(April, 9, 1830, Kingston upon Thames, UK – May, 8, 1904)

Eadweard Muybridge (pseudonym Edward James Muggeridge) was a photographer and researcher born in Kingston upon Thames (Great Britain) on April 9, 1830. He changed his name when he emigrated to the United States in 1851. He died on May 8, 1904. His experiments on the chronophotography they served as the basis for the later invention of the cinematograph.

Eadweard Muybridge started working on bookbinding and sales. Later he became interested in photography and, on a visit to the United States in 1860, learned about the process of wet collodion (a kind of varnish applied to the plates on which the photosensitive chemical emulsion was spread). In 1867, under the trade name Helios, he set about recording the Wild West stage with his mobile dark room, The Flying Studio. It produced remarkable stereoscopic views and later panoramas, including important series about the city of San Francisco. Then he started working for the Coast and Geodetic Survey.

In 1872, a controversy faced California horse fans. Leland Stanford, former Governor of the State and powerful President of the Central Pacific Railway, and a group of his friends maintained that there was an instant, during the long trot or the gallop, when the horse did not rest any helmet on the ground. Another group, which included James Keene, president of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, claimed otherwise.

At that time there was no known way to prove who was right, until Leland Stanford devised a simple experiment: it consisted of a method that photographed the horse at the different stages of its gallop and that would provide a complete view of the entire journey. , for which Stanford commissioned Eadweard Muybridge to try to capture the movement of his racehorse Occident with his camera. Without much confidence in the result, Muybridge lent himself to photographing the Occident jogging at about 35 km / h at the Sacramento racecourse. He asked the residents of the area to lend him many white sheets and hung them around the track as a background, on which the figure of the horse stood out. In May 1872 Muybridge photographed the horse Occident, but without achieving a result, because the wet collodion process required several seconds to obtain a good result.

Muybridge gave up on these experiments for a time. Later, he made an extensive trip through Central and South America, where he photographed the constructions of the railway lines. Upon returning, he resumed his work on action photography, and in April 1873 he managed to produce better negatives, in which it was possible to recognize the silhouette of a horse. This series of photographs clarified the mystery (he agreed with Stanford), since it showed the four legs of the horse above the ground, all at the same instant of time.

He did not try to take the photographs with a correct exposure, as he knew that the silhouette was sufficient to define the question. His first attempts had failed because the manual shutter was too slow to achieve as short an exposure time as required. Thus, he invented a mechanical shutter, consisting of two pairs of wooden sheets that slid vertically through the grooves of a frame and exposed a 20-centimeter opening, through which light passed. With this system, a record exposure time of 1/500 of a second was achieved.

Impressed with the result of the experiment, which would later become known as The Horse in Motion, Stanford commissioned the search for a photographic studio to capture all successive phases of a horse’s movement. Experiments were resumed at Stanford’s renovated ranch during the summer of 1878. Although with slightly insufficient exposure (due to the technical difficulties mentioned at the time), the resulting series of photographs clearly showed all the movements of a racing mare. from Kentucky named Sally Gardner. Muybridge painted the negatives so that only the silhouette of the mare was visible, whose legs assumed inconceivable positions. The result was a sequence of 12 photographs that was taken in approximately half a second.

Thanks to this experiment, Muybridge devised a new technique in which the track for the moving subject had a length of about 40 meters. Parallel to it was a fixed battery with 24 cameras, and at both ends of the track, placed at 90º and 60º angles, there were two other camera batteries. At each instant three cameras were fired synchronously, one from each battery. Dry plates were impressed at an adjustable shutter speed that could be adjusted from several seconds to the highest speed of 1/6000 of a second, depending on the speed of the subject to be photographed.

In the first series, the camera shutters were triggered by the breakage of threads traversed in the path of the horse or another animal that broke in its path, closing electrical contacts that were activating each of the shutters. But later Muybridge invented a timer based on a rotating drum that rotated according to the speed of the subject and, at the right moments, sent electrical impulses to the cameras.

In October 1878, the scientific journal Scientific American published six engravings made on enlarged negatives of photographs of Muybridge, where a horse was seen moving at a trot and pace. The magazine suggested that its readers cut out the illustrations and mount them in a zoetrope, a cylinder that produces the illusion of movement when it rotates, if the images are viewed through a side slot. The effect that is achieved is based on the so-called retinal persistence: when the human eye perceives a series of similar images and with continuous changes that happen with enough speed – ten or more images per second – the brain interprets them as a movement real, and the impression of continuous movement is generated. Now, if the images were not separated from each other, they would be blurred. After reading this article, Muybridge thought that the results could be improved by projecting the images on a screen and invented an apparatus that used light to project sequential images using a glass disk, an invention that he baptized with the name of zoopraxiscope . In the first projector the images were painted on the glass as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made between 1892 and 1894, used profiled drawings printed on the discs photographically and hand-colored. Some of the animated images were very complex, and included multiple combinations of animal and human movement sequences.

In 1888 he showed his photographs of horses to Thomas Alva Edison and to William K. L. Dickson, inventors of the phonograph, to suggest the possibility of combining both inventions to show sound images. Although the idea was never put into practice, Edison did use a series of photographs of horses on his kinescope, the forerunner of the movie projector.

His scientific legacy

Due to his scientific successes, Muybridge set about recording the movements of humans and animals at the Philadelphia Zoo. The resulting photos were published with the help of the University of Philadelphia in 1887 in the book Animal Locomotion, which remains the basic reference work on human and animal movement. He also wrote The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (The Positions of Animals in Motion, 1881) whose images, added to those of Animal Locomotion, give a total of 100,000 photographic plates. Some of his latest work was published under the titles Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion, 1901. Images from the 71 surviving zoopraxiscope discs have been reproduced in the book Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest (The Projection Box).

Artistic tributes

In the 1990s, music group U2 made a video clip for their song Lemon, which was a tribute to Muybridge’s techniques.

Philip Glass composed The Photographer in his honor. On April 9, 2012, Google created an animated doodle on the occasion of the 182nd anniversary of his birth, showing a grid mosaic with the characteristic colors of the company logo and filled with the drawing of a horseman on top of His horse. In the center there is a play button from which they are put in continuous movement, thus recreating their famous «Horse in motion».

Also on April 9, 2012 an empirical graphic designer named “James Paul T.” elaborates an image in his honor based on the “moving horse” experiment.

In 2009, graphic and typographic designer Víctor García created in Buenos Aires the «MotionBats» family of pictographic typefaces, based on some of Muybridge’s photographic sequences.
“Horse, motion in future” represented by “James Paul T.”