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The Horse in Motion is a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge, including six cards that each show a sequential series of six to twelve "automatic electro-photographs" depicting the movement of a horse. Muybridge shot the photographs in June 1878. An additional card reprinted the single image of the horse "Occident" trotting at high speed, which had previously been published by Muybridge in 1877.
The series became the first example of chronophotography, an early method to photographically record the passing of time, mainly used to document the different phases of locomotion for scientific study. It formed an important step in the development of motion pictures. One of the cards (often retitled Sallie Gardner at a Gallop)[1][2] has even been hailed as "the world's first bit of cinema".[3] Muybridge did project moving images from his photographs with his Zoopraxiscope, from 1880 to 1895, but these were painted on discs and his technique was no more advanced than similar earlier demonstrations (for instance those by Franz von Uchatius in 1853).[4]
An 1879 edition of the "Sallie Gardner" card has the images altered to create more distinct outlines (with straight lines and clear numbers replacing the original photographic background) "with care to preserve their original positions". The verso has a diagram of the mare's foot movements in a complete stride, executed per Stanford's instructions.[11]
Leland Stanford had a large farm at which he bred, trained, and raced both Standardbreds, used for trotting races in which a driver rides in a sulky while driving the horse; and Thoroughbreds, ridden by jockeys and raced at a gallop. He was interested in improving the performance of his horses of both types.[citation needed]
Stanford also had an interest in art and science, in which he looked for illustration and affirmation of his ideas and observations about the horse's motions, but got frustrated with the lack of clarity on the subject.[12] Years later, he explained: "I have for a long time entertained the opinion that the accepted theory of the relative positions of the feet of horses in rapid motion was erroneous. I also believed that the camera could be utilized to demonstrate that fact, and by instantaneous pictures show the actual position of the limbs at each instant of the stride".[13]
In 1873,[14] Stanford approached Muybridge to photograph his favorite trotter Occident in action. Initially, Muybridge believed it was impossible to get a good picture of a horse at full speed. He knew of only a few examples of instantaneous photography made in London and Paris, that depicted street scenes. These were made in very practical conditions, with subjects moving towards the camera no faster than the ordinary walk of a man, in which the legs had not been essayed at all. He explained that photography simply had not yet advanced far enough to record a horse flashing by the camera. Stanford insisted, and Muybridge agreed to try.[12] The first experiments were executed over several days. To create the needed bright backdrop, white sheets were collected and Occident was trained to walk past them without flinching. Then more sheets were gathered to lay over the ground, so the legs would be clearly visible, and Occident was trained to walk over them. Muybridge developed a spring-activated shutter system, leaving an opening of 1/8 of an inch, and in the end, managed to reduce the shutter speed to a reported 1/500th of a second.[14] Nonetheless, the best result was a very blurry and shadowy image of the trotting horse. Muybridge was far from satisfied with the result, but to his surprise, Stanford reacted very enthusiastically after carefully studying the foggy outlines of the legs in the picture. Although Stanford agreed that the photograph was not successful regarding image quality, it was satisfactory as proof of his theory. Most of the previous depictions and descriptions had indeed been wrong. Before leaving his customer, Muybridge promised to concentrate his thoughts on coming up with a faster photographic process for the project.[12] Although Stanford later claimed he did not contemplate publishing the results, the local press was informed and it was hailed as a triumph in photography by the Daily Alta California.[14] The image itself remained unpublished and has not yet resurfaced.
In July 1877, Muybridge worked on a series of progressively clearer, single photographs of Occident, at a racing-speed gait[15] at the Union Park Racetrack in Sacramento, California.[16][17] He captured the horse at full speed.[18]
The "instantaneous photograph" that Muybridge sent to newspapers, was actually a photograph of a painting that Morse's gallery retouch artist John Koch had produced, based on Muybridge's negative, with a cut-out photograph of driver Tennant's face glued in place. Although an Evening Post critic believed that either the picture was a fraud or Stanford's horse was incredibly strange, few seemed to doubt its truthfulness.[19]
Stanford financed Muybridge's next project: to use multiple cameras to photograph the complete stride of running horses at Stanford's farm in Palo Alto. Muybridge ordered lenses from England and had an electrical shutter system built by San Francisco engineers. He had the race track whitened and a background of white planks erected at a slight angle, with a grid that had vertical lines indicating 21 inches (53 cm) distances and several horizontal lines 4 inches (10 cm) apart, of which the lowest was on a level with the track. Wires ran under the surface, from a battery of 12 cameras to two feet from the background, where they were slightly raised to be struck by the wheel of a sulky.[20]
On 15 June 1878, in the presence of invited turfmen and members of the press, Stanford's racehorse Abe Edgington was sent trotting at a mile in 2 minutes and 20 seconds across the track, with the sulky wheel tripping all the wires one by one, breaking the electrical circuit and thus causing each camera shutter to open in turn, for a duration that was claimed to last the 1/1000 part of a second. The resulting negatives were tiny, but had fine details, and proved that the trotting horse assumes inconceivable positions that seemed to have nothing in common with the gracefulness that people associated with it.[20]
After the first successful experiment, running mare Sallie Gardner was sent across the track. The results showed very queer positions that shattered the illusions of the supposed superior grace of the horse. A saddle girth happened to break while she passed the cameras, which was distinctly registered on the resulting photographs. This experiment was deemed even more interesting than the first.[20]
While there have been rumors that Stanford had a large bet riding on the suspected outcome that the study would show that a horse at moments has all legs off the ground when running, the historian Phillip Prodger has said, "I personally believe that the story of the bet is apocryphal. There are really no primary accounts of this bet ever having taken place. Everything is hearsay and secondhand information."[21]
Muybridge made several series of different horses performing several gaits over the next week. He had 6 different 22 14 cm cards printed by Morse's gallery and registered them for copyright at the Library of Congress on 15 July 1878.[22]
The photographic series was immediately hailed as a breakthrough success by the reporters that attended the June 15 presentation and quickly garnered worldwide acclaim. Some of the registered positions were deemed ridiculous and seemed off to many people, since the strides of running horses were usually regarded as very gracious. Doubts about the authenticity, or ideas that the captured positions could be irregular and incidental, would be smothered by the evidence in the large number of pictures that were published, by the praise of experts, by looking at animations of the sequences in zoetropes, and by Muybridge's animated presentations with his Zoopraxiscope.[23]
The images of two of the cards were recreated as an engraving for the cover of the October 19 issue of Scientific American in 1878.[24] La Nature published several series in December and received a very enthusiastic response from Étienne-Jules Marey, a leading expert on animal locomotion.[25]
Muybridge continued the studies at Palo Alto with 24 cameras in 1879, producing further chronophotographic pictures of more horses, some other animals, male athletes, and a sequence depicting a horse skeleton jumping a hurdle (utilizing a technique that resembles stop motion). In 1881, he collected the images in the portfolio The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, but kept the edition very limited because of plans for related book projects with Stanford and Marey.[26]
Muybridge started lecturing about the horse pictures in July 1878, using a stereopticon to project the photographs and examples of the misconceptions of the motions of horses from art history. To demonstrate how the awkward positions in his photographs really made up the graceful movements, he developed a phenakistiscope-based projector with the images traced onto glass disks. The "Zoopraxiscope" was introduced in 1880 at the California School of Fine Arts.[27]
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