The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

^hc Cfjeatre in a row to prove that a horse has always one foot on the ground when trotting very fast. To demonstrate this Muybridge took a series of snapshots. The threads stretching across the track were broken by the mare as she went past them, each thread releasing the spring of a camera, thus making countless negatives which when riffled with the thumb revealed the horse practically in motion. It appears to be an accepted fact that Muybridge's achievement was the basis for the inventions that first produced motion pictures ; in fact, the Oakland experiment was widely heralded and attracted the attention of the great animal painter, Meissonier, who saw the Muybridge photographs through the courtesy of Governor Stanford, who was then in Paris on a visit. These photographs were first inspected individually, then by means of a spool or wheel (practically an adaptation of the "Zoetrope"), were whirled into motion, practically becoming a moving picture. All the photograph experts of the world were soon "on" to the possibilities. In England Acres, Greene, Paul, Evans, etc. In France, Lumiere Freres, Dr. E. J. Marey and others "got busy." Dr. Marey in 1882 invented what he called a "photographic gun," and with it studied the flight of birds. In England in 1885 W. E. Greene had a public display of figures in motion, photographically, and so great was the crovi^d in front of the windov/s of his Piccadilly store that the police forced Greene to take the novel exhibit out of the windows. Dr. Marey's camera was unquestionably the lead to the latter-day cameras. Sebert, Soret (of Geneva"), and Anschiitz (of Berlin") imoroved upon it. Anschiitz's improvement was called "the Tachyscope," and it was