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Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

Eadweard Mubridge was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1830 the son of a merchant trader.  He moved away from Kingston in about 1852 to make a fortune for himself in America.  He started his American career as a bookbinder’s agent in New York, but shortly after this moved to San Francisco where he was to make his fame and  fortune. It was in San Francisco where his interest in photography really took off.  At first he was a landscape photographer and sold his views of the Yosemite Valley and San Francisco Bay to the middle classes of the town.  This began to net him a fortune in pre- orders and his fame as a landscape photographer began to spread.

His fame brought him to the attention of a former governor Leland Stanford and he was commissioned to solve an age old argument through photography.  Does a trotting horse have all four feet off the ground at any one stage in its stride?  After some time, during which he was put on trial and acquitted of the murder of his wife’s lover, he was, through a series of experiments with shutters and chemicals, able to prove that it did.  This was the beginning of a relationship between Stanford and Muybridge that was to change the history of the moving image. Muybridge’s experiments proved conclusively for the first time, that a horse while galloping lifted all four hooves off the ground. 

Source: Muybridge Museum
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Horse Locomotion