We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE GENESIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL FILM
So it was that, in 1872, Muybridge set out to help Leland Stanford win his wager. Setting up a battery of cameras around the rim of a race track, Muybridge took a rapid succession of still photographs, hoping that one or more of them would catch the horse's action in such a way as to prove Stanford's point. His equipment was the bulky camera and the slow wet plates of that day. The results of the experiment were disappointing from a photographic point, for it required an extremely short exposure time to freeze the action of the galloping horse. Of the series of twenty or more plates which Muybridge exposed, only four gave him an acceptable image, but at least one of these was sufficient to win the wager for Governor Stanford.
From 1874 to 1877, Eadweard Muybridge suffered a succession of personal misfortunes, but in 1877 he was back in California again under the sponsorship of Leland Stanford. With adequate financial backing, and with better equipment and expert assistants, Muybridge succeeded in getting a perfect set of synchronized still photographs, each taken a split-second apart, showing a horse moving at a gallop.
At the same time, men in other parts of the world were not idle. In France, Etienne Jules Marey had been investigating ways and means of photographing the locomotion of man and animals, and was far along in his work when the published reports of Muybridge's work reached him in 1878-79. Here, another of those curious coincidences occurred in the history of the motion picture. Governor Stanford had gone abroad during this period, and had decided to have his portrait painted by the well-known French painter, Meissonier, who was also a good friend of Marey. Meissonier, fairly recently, had painted a picture in which he showed a galloping horse with all four of its feet off the ground. His colleagues contended that this was a fundamental error, and Meissonier was still smarting under their derision when he and Stanford met. Needless to say, Meissonier was delighted to find proof for his contention, and Stanford immediately met Marey. Through this meeting
[5]