Eadweard Muybridge

Based on Wikipedia: Eadweard Muybridge

In 1878, a photographer in California did something that had never been done before: he captured a horse in mid-gallop, all four hooves suspended in the air, frozen in a single instant. This image settled a debate that had raged for centuries. It also launched the age of motion pictures. The photographer's name was Eadweard Muybridge, though that wasn't the name he was born with. In fact, almost nothing about the man who invented motion photography was quite what it seemed.

A Name That Never Stayed Still

He was born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830, in Kingston upon Thames, a market town on the banks of the River Thames in Surrey, England. His father sold grain and coal from the ground floor of their house, and the family lived in the rooms above. It was a modest beginning for someone who would eventually reshape how humans see movement itself.

But Edward could never leave well enough alone, especially when it came to his own identity.

First he changed Muggeridge to Muggridge. Then to Muygridge. Then to Muybridge. When he worked as a photographer, he called himself Helios, after the Greek Titan who drove the sun chariot across the sky. While traveling through Central America, he marketed himself as Eduardo Santiago Muybridge. And finally, after a trip to England in 1882, he reinvented himself one last time as Eadweard, choosing the Old English spelling of Edward that he had seen inscribed on an ancient coronation stone near his childhood home.

Even this final name caused confusion. People constantly misspelled it as Maybridge, Moybridge, or Mybridge. When he died, his gravestone was carved with "Eadweard Maybridge," getting it wrong for eternity.

A Fortune Seeker Heads West

At twenty years old, Muybridge decided to leave England for America. When his grandmother offered him money for the journey, he refused it. "No, thank you Grandma," he told her. "I'm going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again."

He arrived in New York City in 1852 and began selling books imported from England. Through this work, he met a daguerreotypist named Silas Selleck, one of those early photographers who captured portraits on silver-coated copper plates. Photography was barely fifteen years old, and Muybridge was intrigued. But for now, he remained a bookseller.

The Gold Rush was still drawing dreamers westward, and by 1855, Muybridge had made his way to San Francisco. California had been a state for only five years. San Francisco was booming, lawless, and electrified with possibility. Muybridge set up shop selling books and art prints from Montgomery Street, surrounded by dozens of other booksellers and photography studios all competing for the attention of fortune seekers.

He thrived in this chaos. He joined civic organizations, became a director of the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association, and built connections throughout the city. His friend Silas Selleck had also moved west and opened a photography gallery. The two businesses operated side by side.

Then, in 1860, Muybridge decided to return to Europe. He sold his entire stock to his younger brother Thomas, published an announcement in the local paper listing all the cities he planned to visit, and boarded a stagecoach heading east to catch a ship from New York.

He never made it.

The Crash That Changed Everything

Somewhere near the Texas border, the stagecoach ran out of control. The driver died. A passenger died. Muybridge was thrown from the vehicle and struck his head on a rock.

He woke up nine days later in a hospital bed at Fort Smith, Arkansas, with no memory of anything after eating supper at a roadside cabin one hundred fifty miles away. His head throbbed with pain. He saw double. He couldn't hear properly, couldn't taste food, couldn't smell anything. People later claimed his hair turned from black to gray in just three days.

These symptoms persisted for months and, to a lesser degree, for an entire year.

Modern neuroscientists who have studied Muybridge's case believe he likely suffered severe damage to his orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates emotional responses and social behavior. Arthur Shimamura, an experimental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has speculated that this injury explains much of what happened next in Muybridge's life. It may have made him volatile, eccentric, and impulsive. It may also have freed his creativity from the conventional inhibitions that constrain most people.

Even today, there is no effective treatment for this kind of brain injury.

A New Man Emerges

Muybridge eventually made it to New York, where he sued the stagecoach company and won twenty-five hundred dollars in compensation. He then sailed to England, where he was treated by Sir William Gull, personal physician to Queen Victoria herself. Gull prescribed a strict regimen: no meat, no alcohol, no coffee. He recommended rest, outdoor activity, and perhaps a change of profession.

Muybridge later claimed that Gull suggested he try photography.

This seems unlikely to be the whole story. Outdoor photography in the 1860s was brutally demanding work. Photographers had to haul heavy cameras, tripods, and glass plates across rugged terrain. They had to mix dangerous chemicals in portable darkrooms and work quickly before their wet plates dried out. This was hardly restful convalescence. But something about the medium captured Muybridge's imagination, and during his years in England, he mastered the wet-plate collodion process that made professional photography possible.

When he finally returned to San Francisco in February 1867, people who had known him before the accident barely recognized him.

The change wasn't just physical. Friends and associates described a completely different personality. The smart, pleasant businessman they remembered had become an eccentric artist. He no longer cared about his appearance. He grew easily agitated over small matters, then acted moments later as if nothing had happened. He would contradict the terms of business deals he had previously agreed to. And strangest of all, his concern for beauty had completely overtaken his concern for money. If a customer seemed even slightly critical of his photographs, Muybridge would refuse payment entirely.

His old friend Silas Selleck, who had known him for fifteen years, said he could hardly recognize the man who had come back from England.

Helios Takes Flight

Whatever the accident had done to Muybridge's brain, it seemed to have unlocked something remarkable in his eye.

He converted a lightweight horse-drawn carriage into a portable darkroom, painted a logo on the back, and dubbed it "Helios' Flying Studio." He began traveling throughout California, photographing everything: private residences, ranches, mills, ships, animals, architectural drawings, paintings, and above all, landscapes.

His technical skills were extraordinary. He constantly tinkered with his cameras and chemicals, always looking for ways to improve his images. In 1869, he patented a device called a "sky shade" that solved a problem plaguing other photographers: the photographic emulsions of the era were so sensitive to blue light that bright skies would often wash out completely, leaving nothing but blank white space above the landscape. Muybridge's invention allowed him to capture clouds, contrast, and drama in his skies.

But he went further than mere technical innovation. Recent scholarship has revealed that Muybridge heavily manipulated his photographs in ways that wouldn't become common practice until the digital age. He inserted clouds from one image into another. He added moons that hadn't been there. He even painted volcanoes into some of his landscape shots. This was not objective documentation. This was art.

He produced over four hundred different stereograph cards, three-dimensional images viewed through a special device that created the illusion of depth. These were enormously popular in Victorian parlors, and tourists snapped them up as souvenirs of San Francisco. Muybridge sold them cheaply and in massive quantities.

The Motion Problem

Before Muybridge, no one had ever seen what a horse actually looked like when it ran.

This might sound strange. Humans had been riding horses for thousands of years. Artists had been painting them for just as long. But the horse's legs move too fast for the human eye to track. When you watch a galloping horse, you see a blur of motion. You cannot see each individual position of the legs as they cycle through their stride.

This led to a famous question that occupied artists, scientists, and sportsmen alike: Is there a moment during a gallop when all four of a horse's hooves are off the ground simultaneously? Paintings traditionally showed horses with their front legs extended forward and their back legs extended backward, as if leaping through the air like a rocking horse. But was this actually what happened?

Leland Stanford wanted to know. Stanford was one of the wealthiest men in America, a railroad baron who had helped build the transcontinental railroad and served as Governor of California. He was also a serious horse breeder who owned some of the fastest trotters in the country. The question of equine locomotion was not merely academic to him. It was business.

In the early 1870s, Stanford hired Muybridge to photograph his horses in motion. The challenge seemed impossible. Photographic emulsions of the era required long exposure times. You couldn't just click a shutter and freeze a split second. Capturing a moving horse would require revolutionary new techniques.

Muybridge spent years developing the solution. He created faster emulsions. He designed shutters that could open and close in a fraction of a second. And then he came up with his most brilliant innovation: instead of trying to capture motion with a single camera, he would use many cameras, arranged in a row, each triggered in sequence as the horse ran past.

The Horse in Flight

In 1878, at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, Muybridge set up a battery of twelve cameras along a track. Thin threads stretched across the track were connected to each shutter. As Stanford's famous trotter Sallie Gardner galloped down the course, her hooves broke the threads one by one, triggering each camera in turn.

The resulting photographs changed history.

They showed something no human being had ever seen before: a horse with all four hooves tucked underneath its body, completely suspended in the air. But not in the way artists had imagined. The legs weren't extended front and back like a rocking horse. They were gathered together beneath the animal's belly.

Every painting of a galloping horse that had ever been created was wrong.

The photographs caused a sensation. Newspapers around the world published the images. Scientists pored over them. Artists realized they had been depicting movement incorrectly for centuries. And Muybridge understood that he had discovered something far bigger than settling a bet about horses.

He had found a way to dissect time itself.

The Zoopraxiscope

Seeing motion broken into sequential photographs was startling. But Muybridge realized that if he could capture motion by splitting it into still images, he could also reverse the process. He could put those images back together and make them move again.

He invented a device called the zoopraxiscope, which sounds like something from a science fiction novel but was actually a fairly simple machine. Glass disks were painted with sequential images of animals and humans in motion. When the disk spun and light was projected through it, the images appeared to move. A horse galloped. A bird flew. A man walked.

It wasn't quite cinema. The images were painted rather than photographed, and the motion was crude by modern standards. But the zoopraxiscope was the first device ever created that could project moving pictures to an audience. When Muybridge demonstrated it to crowds in America and Europe, people were astonished. They had never seen anything like it.

The flexible perforated film strip that would eventually make true motion pictures possible hadn't been invented yet. But Muybridge had shown that the principle worked. Movement could be captured, frozen, and then brought back to life.

One Hundred Thousand Images

Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge entered what would be the most productive period of his life. The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia provided him with facilities, funding, and subjects. Working with an array of cameras triggered by clockwork mechanisms, he systematically photographed every type of motion he could think of.

Horses trotting, cantering, and galloping. Dogs running and jumping. Cats pouncing. Birds taking flight. Camels walking. Elephants lumbering.

And humans. Hundreds of human subjects, many of them nude, performing every imaginable action. Walking. Running. Jumping. Throwing. Climbing. Carrying loads. Pouring water. Getting up from a chair. Lying down on a bed. Boxing. Fencing. Dancing.

He photographed men and women, young and old, healthy and disabled. He captured movements that lasted only fractions of a second, moments that the human eye could not possibly distinguish as separate instants in time. When you watch someone swing a hammer, you see a blur. Muybridge showed you exactly what happened during that blur: the precise position of every limb at each instant, the arc of the tool, the twist of the body.

By the time he finished, he had produced over one hundred thousand individual images.

The Artist's New Anatomy

The impact on visual art was immediate and profound.

For the first time in history, painters and sculptors could see exactly how bodies moved. They no longer had to guess at the position of a runner's legs or the posture of a jumping figure. Muybridge's photographs provided a reference that was more accurate than any model could hold.

Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist famous for his paintings of ballet dancers, studied Muybridge's photographs obsessively. You can see the influence in his work: the captured instant, the body caught between movements, the sense of frozen time that makes his dancers seem so alive. Thomas Eakins, the American realist painter who had actually helped arrange Muybridge's residency at the University of Pennsylvania, used the photographs to improve his own depictions of human and animal motion.

The influence extended beyond painting. Animators in the twentieth century would use Muybridge's sequences as reference material. Filmmakers would study his photographs to understand how to convey motion on screen. His work became foundational to disciplines that didn't even exist when he was alive.

A Darker Chapter

No account of Muybridge's life can avoid the events of October 1874.

Muybridge had married Flora Shallcross Stone in 1871. She was much younger than him, vivacious where he was brooding, sociable where he was increasingly withdrawn. They had a son, Florado Helios Muybridge, born in 1874, though Muybridge would later claim the boy was not his.

Flora had been having an affair with a man named Harry Larkyns, a charming adventurer and drama critic. When Muybridge discovered letters proving the affair, and found that Flora had been addressing Larkyns as "my baby's father," he did not respond with the legal tools available to a Victorian gentleman. He tracked Larkyns down to a ranch in the Napa Valley.

"Good evening, Major," Muybridge said when Larkyns opened the door. "My name is Muybridge, and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife."

He shot Larkyns through the heart.

At trial, Muybridge's defense argued that the stagecoach accident had damaged his brain, making him unable to control his impulses. Friends testified to his changed personality, his erratic behavior, his sudden rages. The jury, sympathetic to a wronged husband in that era, acquitted him. They ruled it justifiable homicide.

Flora filed for divorce and died shortly afterward, possibly from complications following a stroke. Muybridge placed his son in an orphanage and had little contact with him afterward. The boy eventually tracked down his father decades later, but the reunion was cold. Florado Helios Muybridge died in a car accident in 1944, having never married or had children.

The End of an Era

Muybridge spent his final years giving lectures and demonstrations across Europe and America, projecting his zoopraxiscope images to fascinated audiences. He published massive compilations of his motion studies, books that are still in print today. He was famous, respected, a pioneer who had fundamentally changed how humans understood movement.

In 1894, at the age of sixty-four, he retired to his hometown of Kingston upon Thames. The world had changed enormously since he left England as a twenty-year-old bookseller looking to make his fortune. Photography had evolved from an exotic novelty to a ubiquitous technology. Motion pictures were on the verge of becoming the dominant entertainment medium of the twentieth century. And the scientific study of movement that Muybridge had pioneered was now a recognized field.

He spent his final decade quietly, puttering around his family property, occasionally corresponding with researchers and artists who wanted to understand his techniques. He died on May 8, 1904, at the age of seventy-four.

That same year, the Kingston Museum opened in his hometown. It continues to house a substantial collection of his works in a dedicated gallery. Visitors can see the original photographs that revealed, for the first time, the hidden architecture of motion. A horse with all four hooves in the air. A bird at each stage of its wingbeat. A human figure walking, running, and jumping, frozen into instants that no eye had ever witnessed before Muybridge found a way to capture them.

The Legacy of Frozen Time

It is impossible to know what Muybridge might have become if his stagecoach hadn't crashed in 1860. Would the pleasant businessman have ever thought to photograph movement? Would the undamaged brain have possessed the obsessive drive to solve problems that seemed unsolvable?

Brain injuries are terrible things. They rob people of their memories, their personalities, their ability to function in the world. But in Muybridge's case, something strange happened. The injury that took so much from him also seemed to remove certain barriers. He became willing to attempt things that more cautious men would have dismissed as impossible. He became indifferent to the commercial considerations that constrain most artists. He became obsessed with beauty and truth in a way that sometimes made him difficult to deal with, but that also drove him to accomplish things no one had ever accomplished before.

Today, we live in a world saturated with moving images. We carry devices in our pockets that can record video in slow motion, freezing time in ways that Muybridge could only dream of. Every sports broadcast uses cameras that can show us a baseball spinning toward home plate, a sprinter's muscles contracting in the starting blocks, a diver twisting through the air. We take for granted our ability to see what the human eye cannot see.

All of this traces back to a man with a made-up name, a damaged brain, and a relentless determination to show the world what it had never seen before. Eadweard Muybridge didn't just invent motion photography. He proved that time itself could be sliced into moments, examined, and understood. The horse's hooves left the ground, and the modern world began.