Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge became famous when Leland Stanford hired him to resolve the question of whether a galloping horse ever lifts all four feet from the ground at once^*1. In 1878 he succeeded by lining a track with cameras triggered by tripwires, producing the sequence that proved the point and circulated around the world^*2. He then developed the zoopraxiscope to project motion from sequential images, making him a crucial figure in the prehistory of cinema. His later work at the University of Pennsylvania systematically analyzed human and animal motion in extraordinary detail. Muybridge helped turn photography into a scientific instrument for studying movement itself^*1.