London: The 182nd birth anniversary of Eadweard J. Muybridge, the British
photographer of Dutch ancestry is being celebrated here on Monday.Muybridge was born at Kingston upon Thames, England on April 9, 1830. He immigrated to the US, arriving in San Francisco in 1855, where he started a career as a publisher’s agent and bookseller. He left San Francisco at the end of the 1850s, and after a stagecoach accident in which he received severe head injuries, returned to England for a few years.
Muybridge began to build his reputation in 1867 with photos of Yosemite and San Francisco (many of the Yosemite photographs reproduced the same scenes taken by Carleton Watkins. Muybridge quickly gained notice for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West, published under his pseudonym Helios. In the summer of 1873 Muybridge was commissioned to photograph the Modoc War, one of the US Army’s expeditions against West Coast Indians.
In 1872, former Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during the trot. Up until this time, most paintings of horses at full gallop showed the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear.Stanford sided with this assertion, called “unsupported transit”, and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.
In later studies Muybridge used a series of large cameras that used glass plates placed in a line, each one being triggered by a thread as the horse passed. Later a clockwork device was used. The images were copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed in a machine called a Zoopraxiscope. This in fact became an intermediate stage towards motion pictures or cinematography.
Galloping horse set to motion using photos by Eadweard Muybridge.
In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford’s question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford’s Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot. This negative was lost, but it survives through woodcuts made at the time. By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion.
Another series of photos taken at the Palo Alto Stock Farm in Stanford, California, is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, and shows that the hooves do all leave the ground simultaneously — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse as it switches from “pulling” with the front legs to “pushing” with the back legs.[10] This series of photos stands as one of the earliest forms of videography.
Eventually, Muybridge and Stanford had a major falling-out concerning his research on equine locomotion. Stanford published a book The Horse in Motion which gave no credit to Muybridge despite containing his photos and his research, possibly because
Muybridge lacked an established reputation in the scientific community. As a result
of Muybridge’s lack of credit for the work, the Royal Society withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion photography.
Muybridge subsequently filed a lawsuit against Stanford, but lost the dispute.
Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England for good in 1894, published two further, popular books of his work, and died on 8 May 1904 in Kingston upon Thames while living at the home of his cousin Catherine Smith, Park View, 2 Liverpool Road.
Google has also celebrated the 182nd anniversary of the birth of Eadweard J Muybridge.
