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Updated: June 29, 2025
By the use of sensitive films of gelatine bromide of silver emulsion the time required for the action of ordinary daylight in producing a photograph had been reduced to a very small fraction of a second. Muybridge utilized these films for the photographic analysis of animal motion.
Doctor Muybridge, of Philadelphia, photographed trotting horses with a camera of his own invention that made exposures in rapid succession, in order to learn the different positions of the legs of animals while in rapid motion. A Frenchman also M. Mach photographed a plant of rapid growth twice a day from exactly the same position for fifty consecutive days.
The bronze equestrian statue of Vercingetorix, the fiery Gallic chieftain, in the Clermont museum, is full of violent action. The horse is flying along with his legs in positions which set all the science of Mr. Muybridge at defiance; the man is brandishing his sword and half-turning in his saddle to shout encouragement to his followers.
To have made photographs of a trotting-horse for one minute at the moderate rate of twelve per second would have required, under the Muybridge scheme, seven hundred and twenty separate cameras, whereas with the modern art only a single camera is used.
But there was one source of the stream springing up in America, which long preceded Edison: the photographic efforts of the Englishman Muybridge, who made his experiments in California as early as 1872. His aim was to have photographs of various phases of a continuous movement, for instance of the different positions which a trotting horse is passing through.
The amble, in which the fore and hind leg on the same side are advanced simultaneously, is a natural gait of the elephant, the fastest Muybridge could get from that great beast. He made a menagerie elephant amble at the rate of a mile in seven minutes. The only other animal known to habitually exhibit "the amble" is the giraffe.
The first that met with any degree of success was Edward Muybridge, a photographer of San Francisco. This was in 1878. A revolution had been brought about in photography by the introduction of the instantaneous process.
Muybridge devised an instrument which he called a Zoopraxiscope for the optical projection of his zoetrope photographs. The succession of positives was arranged in proper order upon a glass disk about 18 inches in diameter near its circumference. This disk was mounted conveniently for rapid revolution so that each picture would pass in front of the condenser of an optical lantern.
The principle of the instrument was suggested to Edison by the zoetrope, and of course, he well knew what Muybridge had accomplished in the line of motion pictures of animals almost ten years previously.
Muybridge, as we have seen, used a series of cameras, one for each plate. Marey was limited to a very few photographs, because the entire surface had to be stopped and started in connection with each exposure.
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