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MOTION PICTURE PHOTOGRAPHY
About the year 1872, Edward Muybridge, an Englishman employed in the United States Geodetic Survey, made photographs of a race-horse in motion. Muybridge made these at the instance of several race-horse owners, who had come to a hot discussion regarding the gait and mode of locomotion of their favorite steeds. Muybridge set up his camera with wet collodion plates (dry plates did not come into general use until sometime later) and made snapshots of race-horses at the Sacramento race-track. A few trials demonstrated that unless he could show rapid successive pictures of the horses in motion he could not settle the dispute. The contestants made up a fund with which he purchased twenty-four cameras and placed them at the edge of the race course, close together in a row with a fine thread attached to the shutter of each camera and stretched across the race-track, so that the horse in passing would break the thread and release the shutter of the camera, and thus make an exposure upon the sensitized plate. Each successive camera passed would then show a slight advance in action, with the result that by the time the animal had passed in front of the twenty-four cameras, he would leave a fairly accurate record which could be studied at leisure. The first results were not very satisfactory, as the sensitiveness of the collodion plates was not sufficient to get pictures in the small fraction of a second required to stop the motion. To overcome this obstacle, a fence was built at the side of the track in front of the cameras and painted black. If the horse being studied was not white, lines were drawn upon its limbs in white paint, so that with the help of the brilliant California sun, sharp well-defined silhouettes could be made at a much greater speed than had hitherto been possible.
Leland Stanford, Governor of California at that time, and an enthusiastic horseman himself, became very much interested in Muybridge 's experiments. Governor Stanford was a wealthy man and furnished him with funds, to continue his animal study. A studio was built at the Governor's private race-track in Palo Alto, where Leland Stanford University now stands, and in this studio were placed the twenty-four cameras. Here it was that Muybridge conducted the major part of his experiments. Having succeeded in analyzing animal motion, he now proceeded to synthetize his results; or, in other words, to reproduce the movements of the animal so that they would be visible to the eye.