Eadweard Muybridge

This part will be solely on Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). He was English but spent part of his life in the USA. He had jobs as a bookseller in NY and San Francisco. While visiting Texas in 1960, he was involved in a stagecoach accident that gave him head injuries. As a result of that accident, he returned to England. He started to get into photography at this time. He returned to America in 1967 to photograph the western part.

The photographs made him a celebrity throughout America. The then governor of California made him a bet to see if a horse's hooves go completely off the ground when they gallop. He then went to work making trip-wires that the horse would set off and make a series of cameras go off as a result. And here is the famous result:

As you can see, a horse's hooves do go completely off the ground. This started his love affair with seeing humans and animals in motion. He soon created the Zoopraxiscope, which had glass disks that you could paint or draw on and then rotate the device to see the stop-motion images in succession. Some historians say this was the first film projector.

He married a 21 year-old woman, Flora Shallcross Stone, in 1872. She loved another man, Harry Larkyns. Stone had a child. Muybridge thought the child was Larkyns and shot Larkyns dead. He went to trial. He blamed the murder on his head injures from 1960. The jury gave Muybridge the verdict of “justifiable homicide" and he was acquitted. Stone was eventually given a divorce from him. The child was given to a French couple.

In the 1880s, he spent some time in Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania sponsored him. He loved going to the Philadelphia Zoo to photograph all the animals. He had made over 100,000 images.

He went back to England in 1894 and there he would pretty much stay until his death from cancer in 1904.