by Edward Ball
While Isaacs worked on the shutters, Muybridge had Stanford’s groundskeepers build him a studio and experimental track. The studio consisted of a long, narrow shed, fifty by twelve feet, a single open window with no glass running the length of the wall. Twelve cameras (later twenty-four) went inside the shed in a long row, the cameras twenty-one inches apart, each on a stand and aimed out the window. The lenses pointed at a horse track twenty feet away, whose surface dirt had been covered with sheets of rubber, and, on top of that, a heavy dusting of white lime. Beyond the white track stood a ten-foot-high wooden fence that had been painted white and tilted back at an angle. Muybridge wanted the fence at an angle to catch the sun and throw light on the running horses.
The camera shutter operated by electricity, devised for Muybridge by John Isaacs, an engineer at the Central Pacific (Illustration Credit c18.8)
The first method of “shooting” the twelve cameras in sequence involved twelve silk threads strung across the track. As the breast of the horse broke each thin thread, the camera shutter to which it was attached took a picture. This approach was unreliable: horses balked at the string, and because each thread broke at a different tension, the pictures fired off at changing intervals. John Isaacs, the engineer, suggested to Muybridge that he use electricity to trigger the rapid-shutter action and made some drawings.26 Isaacs designed a different triggering mechanism that involved wiring linked to electromagnets next to the shutters, which slapped them down when burst with current.
Speed was the object, and the key was the electrical trigger. Muybridge recruited the San Francisco Telegraph Supply Company, which made hardware for telegraph operators, to provide wiring and electromagnets. John Isaacs, the engineer, had attached twelve strips of wood to the ground, covered with dirt, across which the horses ran in front of the cameras. On top of each strip was placed a wire that reached from the horse track to the camera shed. The wires were exposed to one wheel of the sulky, and as the wheel crossed each wire, it completed a circuit that caused an electromagnet to pull on a spring, which snapped the shutter of each camera. “The horse takes its own picture,” Muybridge said.
What happened next required a technician, a hustler, and a showman. Muybridge was all three. “I would like to see you,” the photographer wrote to Stanford, “and show you the apparatus and electrical machines I am having constructed, and which are nearly finished.” The studio was up and running by May 1878, and that month Muybridge made the first multiple-camera sequences. He had the horses at his disposal, five or six assistants, a trainer, and a jockey. Muybridge shot a few test series of trotters, and they worked. On June 11, he took the first complete, twelve-camera sequence of a trotter.
The “studio” at Palo Alto, a camera shed and experimental track, where in 1878 and 1879 Muybridge made the multiple-camera motion studies of horses that became moving pictures. Initially the animals ran in front of the camera shed, tripping each shutter by breaking a thread stretched across the track. (Illustration Credit c18.9)
Because Muybridge wanted to photograph galloping horses without a sulky, as well as trotters, John Isaacs designed another trigger scheme that didn’t require a carriage wheel. It involved a clocklike mechanism, “a machine constructed on the principle of a music box,” as Muybridge put it, “containing a cylinder with a row of twelve pins on it, arranged in a spiral.” As the cylinder turned, each pin in succession completed a circuit and threw the electromagnets, snapping the shutters. A careful turning of a crank in sync with the horse’s progress could approximate the split-second sequence required, and the cameras would sound off in a percussive clatter.
The photographer invited reporters to see the whole business, and a train car full of newspaper writers came to Palo Alto on June 15 for a demonstration. It’s not too much to say that this erstwhile press conference represents a kind of early birthday for motion pictures, one to add to the several others that film historians bunch together fifteen years later, during the 1890s.
For the press demonstration, Muybridge set up a developing room on site, next to the camera shed. The first horse photographed for the press contingent was Abe Edgington, a favorite of Stanford’s. After he ran the gauntlet, Muybridge immediately developed the plates and within twenty minutes had showed them to reporters. The next day the San Francisco Morning Call said, “There is a feeling of awe in the mind of the beholder, as he looks at the glass plate … and he sees the miniature of the neighing horse so perfect that it startles him.… This is a new era in photography.”27
In the next two months, Muybridge moved as fast as any entrepreneur racing to a market. On June 17, 1878, just after the press event, the photographer laid claim to his invention with an application for a U.S. patent on a “Method and Apparatus for Photographing Objects in Motion.” (The days of patenting washing machines were long behind him.) Patents 212864 and 212865 arrived by mail from Washington, D.C., the following spring.28
He had images he could print straight, with no need for a scene painter, so by July 1878, Muybridge published a series of six cabinet cards he called “The Horse in Motion.” Each five-by-seven-inch card showed twelve (or sometimes six) pictures, side by side, of a different horse in various stages of gallop: “The stride of the trotting horse, ‘Abe Edgington,’ ” “ ‘Occident’ trotting at a 2:20 gait,” “ ‘Mahomet’ cantering,” “ ‘Sallie Gardner’ running at a 1:40 gait,” and two others. The card sets sold madly around America. Reprinted in Europe, they sold throughout Britain, France (“Les Allures du Cheval”), and Germany (“Das Pferd in Bewegung”). It’s obvious to anyone who looks at them: Muybridge’s camera was the first to capture time, and these are the photographs that launched moving pictures.
Muybridge, “Occident” Trotting at a 2:20 Gait, 1878. Another early stop-motion series of the horse Occident, which Muybridge sold as a so-called cabinet card (Illustration Credit c18.10)
Three weeks after the demonstration for reporters, Muybridge showed his material to a paying audience. The first talks, with pictures, took place on July 8 and 9 at the San Francisco Art Association, on Pine Street near Market. He used glass slides, two-and-a-half-inch-square copies of the negatives, projected one at a time with a magic lantern, the slide show of the day. The next year Muybridge would build his projector, or zoopraxiscope, that put them in motion. By 1878 various kinds of projectors that used lenses and a light source had been around for two hundred years. During the seventeenth century in the Netherlands (it is said), the astronomer Christiaan Huygens built a device that brought together a lens and a light source to throw pictures on a wall. The descendants of Huygens’s projector spread through Europe as “magic lanterns,” a name embedded with the mystery and deception of the images it generates, which seem to float on air. Magic lanterns initially relied on candles or oil lamps, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, a flaming gas jet that blended oxygen and hydrogen made for bright slide shows. The magic lantern became commonplace entertainment, with traveling lanternists who made their money by showing funny or louche scenes, as well as lecturers whose uplifting talks used respectable pictures to guide the mind.
Muybridge owned a projector, perhaps made of brass and wood, that he used to show his photographs to big groups. At his first “screenings” of the horse pictures at the Art Association, most viewers were women. “The auditorium,” one paper said, “was crowded with an intelligent and fashionable audience, which was feminine by a pleasant majority.”29 He gave four or five nights of talks and slide shows, and public interest ran high.
The horse pictures took most of his time, but Muybridge during the summer of 1878 acted like a person obsessed with grabbing all the images he could: he picked this heavily booked moment to make a second, technically difficult panorama of San Francisco. Again he went up to the tower of the Mark Hopkins house, this time with the biggest gear on the market, a mammoth plate camera. Muybridge had used it before, to photograph at Yosemite. Whereas the first panorama shot from Hopkins’s house consisted of
images wider than they were tall, in landscape view, if you like, for this second version, Muybridge turned the big camera on its side, so that each of the thirteen images came out taller than it was wide, in portrait view. The result gave the series a vertical space so high that the eye seemed to be freed from the horizon. The photographer bound the giant prints, each one nearly seventeen inches wide by twenty-three inches tall, into accordion albums. Unfolded, the length of the thing ran to seventeen feet. Muybridge’s two panoramas took the city apart, analyzed it, and reassembled it into a stop-motion series, not unlike a strip of film.
The pictures he made in 1877 and 1878 point toward the visual media that engulfed the twentieth century, in film and television, and the beginning of the twenty-first, with the ubiquity of moving pictures on screens. If Muybridge had not photographed Stanford’s horses in 1877, visual media as we know them might not have fallen into place—or, at least, they would be very different.
To read the press on Muybridge from these months, you get the feeling that wonder and delirium swirled around him and what he did. His photographs were “enough to turn your brain,” wrote the editor of the Philadelphia Photographer. “We stretch our imagination to the maximum and are forced to cry ‘stop.’ ”
While Muybridge occupied center stage, Stanford stood in the wings, taking his own credit in separate interviews with reporters. “It was the intention of Mr. Stanford to have a series of views taken,” said the Alta California, “so as to settle the controversy among horsemen about the question whether a fast trotter ever has all its feet in the air at once.”30 In London, the Photographic News said, “It is difficult to say to whom we should award the greatest praise: to Governor Stanford, for the inception of an idea so original, and for the liberality with which he supplied the funds for such a costly experiment, or to Muybridge for the energy, genius and devotion with which he has pursued his experiments, and so successfully overcome all the scientific, chemical, and mechanical difficulties.”31
Before the summer of 1878, Muybridge had been a working artist, represented by a gallery; now science began to claim him. After the “Horse in Motion” pictures, he gave up his stake in the art world and started to reposition himself as a scientist. Some of this was his own doing, some was projected onto him, but in any event, it happened quickly. In October 1878, the magazine Scientific American published engravings made from the Palo Alto photos, along with heavy praise. (The editor of the magazine added a note in which he suggested that readers might want to cut out the pictures and mount them on strips for use inside their personal zoetropes. In other words, they might want to make Muybridge’s still images into moving pictures.)32 In December, in Paris, the French science journal La Nature published five sequences of the photographs. La Nature was the kind of periodical pored over by chemists and engineers and physicians, not artists. The French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey happened to be one reader who saw the pictures. Marey was the man whose studies of horses in motion had gotten Stanford to revive the photo experiments in the first place. Marey wrote the editor of La Nature after seeing Muybridge’s images. To photograph other animals in motion would be “an easy experiment for Mr. Muybridge,” Marey said, “and what beautiful zoetropes he would be able to give us: in them we would be able to see all imaginable animals in their true paces. It would be animated zoology.” Then Marey got in touch with Muybridge directly, writing him in December 1878 to say that he loved the new material coming out of California and asking for help in photographing birds in flight.33 Marey told Muybridge that he should “animate” his photos—put them in motion on screens—because this “would create a revolution.” This was the second time someone suggested that Muybridge try moving pictures.
The photographer wrote Stanford to boast that the scientist Marey had contacted him and sent him a copy of La Nature, “in which I am designated l’eminent savant Americain”—the American scientist.34
At the end of 1878, Stanford gave Muybridge the go-ahead to install twelve more cameras, bringing the total to twenty-four, and to do more motion studies. Stanford and Muybridge decided to photograph not only horses but whatever other animals they could get their hands on, in addition to people. The doubling of the scale to twenty-four images meant Muybridge could capture some one and a half seconds of movement, instead of, as before, something less than one second.35
In March 1879 the Philadelphia Photographer asked Muybridge what chemicals he had used to get fast exposures. What was his magic? The photographer considered the answer a trade secret, and he dodged the question, writing back that he had done nothing in particular. “I have not, nor do not claim any credit for these photographs; whatever praise others may have felt proper … Leland Stanford is entitled much more than I. He originally suggested the idea.”36
About the process that Muybridge used, no one really knows, although some photography historians have speculated.37 Insensitive chemicals had remained the standard in collodion photography, with outdoor exposures of a second or more common. Muybridge used reflective surfaces, both on the ground and on a background fence, to amplify this advantage. Because longer focal lengths ate up light, Muybridge used medium distances in his pictures: the horses ran twenty-five feet from the camera. In the same vein, he used a wide-aperture lens (lenses were sold with fixed apertures, not adjustable openings, as later) to throw more light on the surface of the plate. Although this shrank the depth of field—the range of focus, from nearest to deepest, in a photo—Muybridge kept the movement along a predictable plane. He never described the mix of chemicals he used to process his negatives, but he claimed to make photographs with short exposure times, citing a figure to reporters of one one-thousandth of a second. The blasting light of California, specifically of Palo Alto, gave him an advantage over photographers, say, in England, where sunlight never rose to the intensity of the Pacific West. But as for some breakthrough formula, it remains an enigma.
Beginning in spring 1879, and using the twenty-four-camera arrangement, Muybridge photographed twenty-five horses: Sallie, Nelson, Clyde, Dandie, Sharon, Gypsy, Albany, Nimrod, Oakland Maid, Eros, Mohawk, Elaine, Clay, Hattie H., Florence, Phryne L., Gilberta, Vaquero, Riata, Frankie, Lancaster, Abe Edgington, Mahomet, Sallie Gardner, and Occident (the last four for the second time). He photographed a greyhound, an ox, a bull, a cow, a deer, a goat, and a boar, all brought to heel, running past the battery of cameras. The animals walked, paced, cantered, trotted, ambled, ran, leaped, hauled, and stood for the camera, building a pile of raw data to describe the movements of mammal bodies.38
Athletes from the Olympic Club in San Francisco showing off their bodies and greeting Muybridge (holding his hat, and shaking hands) at the Palo Alto Stock Farm, 1879 (Illustration Credit c18.11)
Click here to view a larger version of this image.
In August 1879, a group of male athletes from the Olympic Club in San Francisco came to Palo Alto, and Muybridge photographed them fencing, tumbling, jumping, and boxing. He directed the men in standing leaps, running leaps, high jumps, back somersaults, twisting somersaults, javelin throws, club and pick swinging, wrestling, and standing around, posturing and flexing their muscles. The San Francisco Chronicle said it was marvelous how “all of their intricate movements were instantaneously and exactly pictured.”
The obsessive streak that Stanford and Muybridge both shared appeared in late summer. It was at this point that Muybridge took off his clothes for the first time in front of the cameras. He photographed himself naked, swinging a pickax: a forty-nine-year-old man, trim and sagging only slightly, a twenty-pound hammer arcing overhead. In these pictures, the braggadocio of the photographer is palpable. He seems to know what he is doing will change ways of seeing.
A second stroke of obsession came from Stanford’s side. The governor had become so fixed on demonstrating the movement of limbs that he bought the skeleton of a horse. He acquired one on the East Coast, from a taxidermist or a natural history museum, and had it sent by train to Californ
ia. There Muybridge carefully arranged the bones of the beast in various positions—standing, trotting, running, and leaping a hurdle—and photographed them as though they were alive. When projected on a screen, the skeleton looked like one of Stanford’s stallions executing a perfect canter, in death.
Muybridge, Leland Stanford, Jr., on his Pony “Gypsy”—Phases of a Stride by a Pony While Cantering, 1879 (Illustration Credit c18.12)
For the rest of the year, the press explosion around Muybridge continued. His name became a commonplace in American papers, while in Europe, news editors found him fascinating. Reports about the photographer appeared in the Illustrated London News and the Times (Britain), L’Illustration, Journal Amusant, Le Temps, Figaro, and Le Globe (France), Berliner Fremdenblatt (Germany), and Wiener Landwirtschaftliche Zeitung (Austria).
In June 1879, a writer for the London-based magazine The Field said, “It is obvious that if the figures in the stages in the stride of the racer could be … seen in rapid succession, the appearance of the horse in action should … be reproduced.” Another call for projected movement.39
The costs mounted. Stanford told his office to give Muybridge whatever money, men, and material he needed. The photographer sent his invoices, and Stanford’s accountants kept their own figures. By the end of 1879, Frank Shay, one of the accounts keepers, estimated that Stanford had spent some $42,000 for all the experiments, or about $950,000 in 2010 dollars.40