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FILM AND EDUCATION
optics, but the phenomenon remained little more than a physiological curiosity until the nineteenth century. In 1832 Joseph Plateau, of Ghent, put together a crude mechanical device which could give the viewer a sense of life-like motion by looking at a rapid succession of drawings, and which he called the Phenakistoscope. Two years later, in 1834, W. G. Hornor took Plateau's device and improved it. The result was his Zoetrope, or Wheel of Life.
But through all these years, the men of science and arts were doing little more than demonstrating and proving the persistence of vision. In every case, they were dealing solely with drawings. The faithful reproduction of life action was still ahead of them. But it existed there as a goal, for as early as I860 the Englishman, Sir John Herschel, was making a daring prediction in Photographic News: "What I have to propose may seem to you like a dream, but it has, at least, the merit ot being possible and indeed at some time realizable. Realizable — that is to say, by an adequate sacrifice of time, trouble, mechanism and outlay. It is representation of scenes in action by photography."*
It remained for Eadweard Muybridge to set the stage for the first of the two chain reactions which were to make the motion picture an actuality. Muybridge, a skilled photographer, had been ambling through the Rockies and the western coast of America doing private and commercial photography and was, by fortunate coincidence, in California when Governor Leland Stanford and a group of friends fell into an amicable argument. Governor Stanford, who was also a wealthy horseman, argued against his friends that a galloping horse at some moment in its stride had all four feet off the ground. The argument was hot, and the result was a wager of $25,000. But the problem was how to prove it, for the action was too fast for the eye. How Stanford happened to meet with Eaweard Muybridge we don't know, but it was a fortunate meeting, for here was a photographer with an inquisitive turn of mind. * Italics added.