![]() He wasn't afraid of the world,” says Perich. “He was an artist, he was a salesman, he was an adventurer. It wouldn’t be long, though, before his life would be filled with ingenuity, obsessive ambition and absolute melodrama. He settled in San Francisco shortly after the Gold Rush began, and was believed to have been successful sourcing books from London and selling them in the U.S. What is true, though, is that to make his fastest racehorses go faster, Stanford wanted to understand the most granular details about how they moved, and he believed the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, would help him do it.Īfter the stagecoach accident, Eadweard Muybridge's appearance went from neatly groomed to unkempt, and was often compared to that of the bearded poet Walt Whitman.Ĭourtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-33083Īt just 20 years old, Eadweard Muybridge came to the United States from England with a family bookselling business. And the camera was going to prove whether or not the horse had all four legs suspended in the air,” Braun says, adding that the bet is likely an exaggeration. “One of the stories that you often read is that Stanford placed a bet with the owner of a San Francisco newspaper for $25,000. The 19th-century robber baron and founder of Stanford University was as ambitious as he was wealthy, and believed that emerging technology would help settle the unsupported transit controversy. One person with a big stake in the debate was not a scientist, but racehorse enthusiast Leland Stanford. To understand it was really very critical,” says Marta Braun, a professor at Ryerson University, who has studied Muybridge for almost 30 years. You went to war on horses, and any kind of large-scale movement was done on horses. “We have to remember that the horse was the source of all locomotion of importance. Leland Stanford wanted to understand the most granular details about how they moved, and he believed the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, would help him do it. The “unsupported transit” controversy asked whether or not all four of a horse’s hooves came off the ground when it runs, and it polarized both scientists and casual observers. A new episode of Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast details Muybridge’s landmark photographic accomplishment.įor years, the public was debating the workings of a horse’s gallop. “The breakthrough is that the camera can see things that the human eye can't see, and that we can use photography to access our world beyond what we know it to be,” says Shannon Perich, the Smithsonian’s curator of photography at the National Museum of American History. When the Industrial Revolution was underway, and scholars were obsessed with identifying, cataloging and potentially mechanizing nature, Muybridge’s photo sequence of a moving horse was a milestone. ![]() In the 19th century, it seemed as though Muybridge had used photography to stop time. He showed the world what could be guessed but never seen-every stage of a horse’s gallop when it sped across a track. In June of 1878, before the rise of Hollywood and even the earliest silent movies, Eadweard Muybridge shocked a crowd of reporters by capturing motion.
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