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October 1878: The Movies: Brainchild of a Killer
The world’s first “motion” pictures were captured in 1878 by English landscape photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. Born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston-on-the-Thames in 1830, Muybridge adopted the Anglo-Saxon spelling of his name at the age of 21 in honour of a Saxon king. He moved to America in 1852 as a representative of the London Publishing and Printing Co, and was soon selling books and wolfhound pups in gold-rush San Francisco until a bump to the noggin sustained in a stagecoach crash seemed to kick-start his technical capabilities.
In 1872, he was enlisted by Leland Stanford, the former governor of California, to help settle an argument over whether all four of a horse’s feet left the ground when trotting. Muybridge met with only minimal success, and was forced to abandon his efforts when tried for the murder of his wife’s lover. Muybridge's wife, Flora, a photographic re-toucher only half his age, had given birth to the quaintly named Florado Helios in April 1874. In October of that year, Muybridge discovered the inscription "Little Harry" on the back of a photograph of his son. "Big Harry" was Major Harry Larkins, a roguish ne'er-do-well whom Muybridge had already warned off his wife. Muybridge travelled by ferry, train and horse-buggy to the site of a mine in Calistoga, where Larkyns was working as a surveyor. Finding Larkyns engaged in a game of crib, Muybridge shot him below the left nipple. However, Muybridge was acquitted of the charge of murder after successfully pleading that the injury to his head had left him with a severe neurological disorder that was close to insanity. After his acquittal, Muybridge left the States for a while, and did not resume his experiments until 1877.
Muybridge finally succeeded in his efforts by lining twelve cameras alongside a race-track and stretching strings attached to switches across the track. As the horse Occident ran along the track, each string was broken in sequence, releasing each camera’s shutter and thus making a series of negatives. Although the photographs developed from these negatives were little more than silhouettes (see below), they clearly showed that the horse’s feet did leave the ground as they bunched together beneath its body.
The Scientific American printed drawings of Muybridge’s photographs in its October 1878 edition, and invited readers to paste the pictures onto strips and view them in a zoetrope, a hollow drum with slits in its sides that sat on a spindle so that, when spun, the illusion of moving pictures was achieved when viewing a series of drawings through the slits. In 1879, Muybridge developed a similar device called a zoopraxiscope, which he used one year later to project his pictures onto a screen at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, thereby heralding the age of “motion" pictures. [ADD]
The world's first "motion" picture
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