A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of June

Black and Yellow Plaid

On June 15, 1878,  photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a  horse’s motion.

Former California Governor Leland Stanford was an imperious, headstrong captain of industry who had helped build the transcontinental railroad and would later found the university that bears his son’s name. He retired to the life of a country horse breeder; and he wanted proof of what his eyes told him: that a horse has all four feet in the air during some parts of his stride.

Many photographers at that time were still using exposures of 15 seconds to one minute. Automatic shutters were in their infancy: expensive and unreliable. Eadweard Muybridge, a successful landscape photographer at that time, devised more-sensitive emulsions and worked on elaborate shutter devices. He also rigged a trip wire across a racetrack, letting the horse’s chest push against the wire to engage an electric circuit that opened a slat-shaped shutter mechanism to make the exposure.

This system produced an “automatic electro-photograph” on July 1, 1877. It showed Occident, a Stanford-owned  racehorse, seemingly with all four feet off the ground. The press and the public failed to accept this as proof, however, because what they actually saw was obviously retouched. (The photo had been reproduced by painting it, then photographing the painting, then making a woodcut of the photo for the printing on paper.)

Muybridge continued his labors with the engineering help of Stanford’s Central Pacific Railroad. They installed 12 evenly spaced trip wires on Stanford’s Palo Alto racetrack. When a horse pulled a two-wheeled sulky carriage over the wire, the wheels depressed the wire, pulling a switch that opened an electrical circuit that used an elastic band to open a rapid-fire sliding shutter mechanism in the side of a purpose-built shack. Inside the shack, behind a row of 12 shutters, was a row of 12 cameras. Opposite the shack was a white wall with vertical lines matching the distance of the trip wires and cameras.

So, on June 15, 1878, before assembled gentlemen of the press, Stanford’s top trainer drove Stanford’s top trotter across the trip wires at about 40 feet per second, setting off all 12 cameras in rapid succession in less than half a second. About 20 minutes later, Muybridge showed the freshly developed photographic plates. The horse, indeed, lifted all four legs off the ground during its stride. Remarkably, this was not in the front-and-rear-extended “rocking-horse posture” some had expected, but in a tucked posture, with all four feet under the horse.

Muybridge refined his invention, increasing the cameras from one to two dozen, and developed an electromagnetic timer that opened shutters independently of any trip wires. That allowed him to study the nonlinear motions of other four-footed animals, human athletes, a nude descending a staircase and even birds. Muybridge went on to publish a series of finely printed, large-format books of his stop-motion photographs.