A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DEadweard Muybridge (b. Edward James Muggeridge) : 1830 - 1904
Eadweard James Muybridge was born at Kingston-on-Thames in England in 1830. He was baptised Edward James Muggeridge and later changed his name to Eadweard Muygridge then finally to Eadweard Muybridge. At the age of twenty he left England for New York City. Muybridge arrived in San Francisco in 1852, established himself in a bookstore, and continued to work for a London printing company. In 1860 Muybridge was seriously injured in a coach accident. He returned to London to recover and remained there for the next six years. In 1866 he arrived in California with "the finest stock of photographic equipment that his money could buy" and a vision to capture America's west on film. In 1873, he published 2,000 photographs in the Catalogue of Photographic Views, Illustrating the Yosemite, Mammoth Trees, Geyser Springs, and Other Remarkable and Interesting Scenery of the Far West. There was a new interest in motion studies at this time. Leland Stanford, who was breeding race horses, engaged Muybridge to record the movements of a trotting horse and to assist in building a theory of locomotion. In 1872, Muybridge obtained twenty-four separate pictures of a running horse by the mechanical operation of an equal number of still cameras placed in a row. By 1877 Muybridge was in Sacramento photographing Leland Stanford's horse, Occident, trotting at full speed. Between the years 1875-1878, Muybridge photographed Central America, Mexico, and the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco, experimented and lectured. In 1879, Leland Stanford travelled to Europe, and visited the French genre and military painter Jean Louis Meissonier. Stanford showed Meissonier Muybridge's photographs of a trotting horse. With Stanford's assistance Meissonier persuaded Muybridge to come to Paris in 1881 to work with Etienne-Jules Marey who had produced motion pictures with a single camera. Muybridge continued lecturing and in 1881 invented his own means of projecting movement - the Zoopraxiscope.
Zoöpraxiscope (Zo`ö*prax"i*scope) n. [Zoö- + Gr. a doing, an acting (from to do) + - scope.] An instrument similar to, or the same as, the, the phenakistoscope, by means of which pictures projected upon a screen are made to exhibit the natural movements of animals, and the like. Muybridge returned to America in 1882, began a lecture series, and worked at the University of Pennsylvania's Veterinary Department. In 1887 he published Animal Locomotion. He toured Europe, lectured and demonstrated his invention at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Following these successes, Muybridge returned to England for more lectures, and then back to America, in 1896. By 1904, Muybridge was 74 years of age. He died on May 8, 1904 in Kingston, England.
In the US from youth. In 1872 under the sponsorship of Governor Leland Stanford of California, he began in Sacramento a series of photographic studies of animal locomotion. These studies, inspired by the animal-motion research of Étienne-Jules Marey of France, were an essential step towards the development of motion pictures as we know them today. Muybridge arranged 24 still cameras in a row along a track. By attaching the shutter mechanism of each camera to a long trip wire and stretching the wires across the track so that a galloping horse would trigger each shutter as he went past the cameras, the inventor was able to obtain a photographic record of successive phases in the horse's motion. He later used more sophisticated shutter-release methods in his movement studies of other animals, including humans. From 1880 he traveled extensively in the US and abroad, lecturing and projecting his serial pictures by means of a device he called the Zoopraxiscope, a machine based on the principles of Plateau's Phenakistiscope. Strictly speaking, Muybridge's serial photos were not motion pictures, but his experiments provided the essential link between still photography and the movies. His experiments strongly influenced such innovators as Professor Marey and Thomas Alva Edison and stimulated their subsequent discoveries, and his Zoopraxiscope with its rotating disc was definitely a forerunner of today's motion picture projector. In 1887, in Philadelphia, Muybridge published an 11-volume summary of his experiments: Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, accompanied by thousands of photos. A complete collection of his photographic plates is preserved at London's South Kensington Museum.
Large Folio Print from Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion
 Muybridge: Animal Locomotion Plate 99 1887 Download a larger version of this plate Download a twice real size version of a single frame from this plate (original is 2 1/8" high)
This fine print was part of a very limited edition published in 1969 by De Capo Press of New York. It is print #99 of 100 prints published in a boxed portfolio by De Capo. Their intention was to reproduce the whole of Muybridge's original opus of 781 prints. It was intended to produce 8 boxed portfolios of approx 100 prints each and to be sold by subscription, mainly institutional libraries. De Capo felt there was a demand since so few copies of the original work survived and most were not complete. For reasons unknown, the work did not progress past the first volume of 1969. De Capo and its backlist were absorbed into another company some time after and publishing history is dificult to find. I have seen a reference to a book review done in AB Bookman in 1969 but have not seen the article myself. If someone has a copy I would appreciate seeing it. The original prints of 1887 were collotypes, a type of large run reproduction of its day. The print offered here is a high quality half-tone/offset print on quality matte paper. While the paper used is smaller than the original prints the images themselves very closely match the size of the images of the original prints. Therefore the margins of free space are not as large as the originals. Subject: a nude male exercising a basic ballet movement. This was photographed from 2 angles simultaneously. 12 shots from each vantage point for a total of 24 frames. Print measures 13 1/2" by 19 1/2" overall. The printed surface measures 9 1/8" by 12 3/8". Print has caption on bottom margin: "Animal Locomotion. Plate 99. First Ballet Action. [M.370] Copyright, 1887 by Eadweard Muybridge. All rights reserved." The number M.370 refers to the original number given the print in the 1887 work.
Eadweard Muybridge (b. 9 April 1830; d. 8 May 1904) was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston on Thames, and it is said that because this area is associated with the coronation of Saxon kings, he took on a name closely resembling (as he saw it) the Anglo Saxon equivalent. In his early twenties he went to live in America, gaining a reputation for his landscape photographs of the American West. As he used the collodion process, like other travel photographers he would have needed to take with him all the sensitising and processing equipment, as all three processes of sensitisation, exposure and processing needed to be done while the plate was still wet. During the late sixties and early seventies he made some two thousand pictures, exposing negatives size 20x24 inch. Though he is not given due acclaim, many his landscape studies rank with the best. However, Muybridge's main claim to fame (apart from being tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife's lover !) was his exhaustive study of movement. Just about this same time the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey was studying animal movement, and his studies began to suggest that a horse's movements were very different from what one had imagined. One of the people who became aware of this research was Leland Stanford, a former governor of California, who owned a number of race horses. Stanford was determined to find the truth about this. It is said that he bet a friend that when a horse gallops, at a particular point all four feet are off the ground simultaneously. To prove his case he hired Muybridge to investigate whether the claim was true. By the 1870s lengthy exposures had been reduced to a minimum, and thus it became possible for photography to begin to extend one's vision of reality. It took a little time, however, for Muybridge to perfect a way of photographing which would supply the answer, for the Collodion process was rather slow. Whilst working on this project Muybridge also undertook other assignments, and it was on his return from one of these, we are told, that he became aware that his wife was having an affair with another soldier. In true Wild West style he shot the soldier dead, and was duly imprisoned for murder; however, presumably partly because of his connections, he was acquitted a little later, and was asked to photograph the Panama railroad, some distance away from the scene of the crime. Returning to his movement experiments, a few years later Muybridge was able to photograph a horse galloping, using twenty four cameras, each triggered off by the breaking of a trip-wire on the course. He not only proved Leland right, but also showed that, contrary to what painters had depicted, a horse's feet are not, as hitherto believed, outstretched, as if like a rocking- horse, but bunched together under the belly. This discovery caused considerable controversy, but eventually became more generally accepted. Muybridge's studies are very comprehensive, and include some detailed studies of men and women walking, running, jumping, and so on. In 1878 an article in Scientific American published some of Muybridge's sequences, and suggested that readers might like to cut the pictures out and place them in a Zoetrope so that the illusion of movement might be re created.
Zoetrope (Zo"e*trope) n. [Gr. life + turning, from to turn.] An optical toy, in which figures made to revolve on the inside of a cylinder, and viewed through slits in its circumference, appear like a single figure passing through a series of natural motions as if animated or mechanically moved.Intrigued by this, Muybridge experimented further, and in time invented the Zoopraxiscope, an instrument which in turn paved the way for cine photography. This invention was greeted with enormous enthusiasm both in America, whilst in England a demonstration at the Royal Institution in 1882 attracted such people as the Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister (Gladstone), Tennyson, and others. In 1884 the University of Pennsylvania commissioned Muybridge to make a further study of animal and human locomotion. The report, "Animal Locomotion" was published three years later and still ranks as the most detailed study in this area. It contains more than twenty thousand images. In 1900 Muybridge returned to Kingston, where he died a few years later. His Zoopraxiscope, together with many of his plates, were bequeathed to the Kingston-upon-Thames Museum, where they are on display. Other plates are in the Royal Photographic Society's collection.
The story is legend: California governor Leland Stanford makes a bet with Dr. John D. Isaac in 1872. Stanford wagers $25,000 that at least one foot of a horse stays in contact with the ground at all times. After commissioning the photographic services of acquitted murderer Eadweard Muybridge, Stanford loses the bet and sparks a motion picture revolution. A nice story, but unfortunately untrue. Stanford was not the state's Governor at the time. Isaac did not take the bet. And Eadweard Muybridge wasn't actually Eadweard Muybridge. His real name was Edward James Muggeridge, a well respected photographer whose stills of the Yosemite valley in 1869 had made him famous. Stanford's real interest was in studying horses closely enough to understand their behavior in motion. By doing this, he hoped to improve his breeding and training methods for horseracing. What Stanford needed was the shutter technology that only Muybridge had. Muybridge had pioneered an automated shutter mechanism for cameras. Previously, exposures to film were acheived by hand, as the photographer removed a lens covering and quickly replaced it. But the sophisticated Muybridge devices could be triggered by a horse galloping by a row of 12 cameras and tripping a wire connected to the shutters. The shutters were a bit slow for capturing successive phases in the horse's motion, but improvements by Stanford's railway telegraphers helped make them faster. Finally, in 1877, Muybridge rigged a Sacramento racecourse and made history when a horse named Occident tripped the tiny wires at full speed. The pictures revealed that Occident's hooves were all airborne at once. Muybridge continued his series photography, expanding the cameras to 24 and improving shutter speed with a system of magnetic releases that gave an exposure every 2/1,000 of a second. He then proceeded to capture the stride of every living animal. His pictures were widely published in still form. He also adaptated them to a children's toy called the called the "wheel of life," or zoetrope, to create persistance of vision, the ability of the human brain to blend pictures into continuous movement. These demonstrations strongly impressed inventors like Thomas Edison and stimulated the adoption of high speed shutters into motion picture equipment. In 1887, Muybridge published eleven volumes of his experimental stills and continued to lecture into his seventies.
Eadweard Muybridge, original name Edward James Muggeridge, (b. April 9, 1830, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, Eng. d. May 8, 1904, Kingston upon Thames), English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He emigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge's experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse's gait all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife's lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford. In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1,000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford's contention. The results of Muybridge's work were widely published, most often in the form of line drawings taken from his photographs. They were criticized, however, by those who thought that horse's legs could never assume such unlikely positions. To counter such criticism, Muybridge gave lectures on animal locomotion throughout the United States and Europe. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual compendium of human movements for the use of artists and scientists. Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolio Animal Locomotion, An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movement. Muybridge continued to publicize and publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.
Edward James Muggeridge was born on April 9, 1830 in Kingston-on-Thames, England. He was the second of four sons born to John Muggeridge and Susannah Smith Muggeridge. John Muggeridge was a grain, coal and timber merchant and Susannah Smith Muggeridge came from a prosperous family engaged in the business of carrying by barge. At the age of 22 Edward decided to go to America and he changed his name to Eadweard Muygridge. He took the spelling of his first name from the "Coronation Stone," which had been discovered in Kingston in 1850. Seven Saxon kings had been crowned upon this stone and two kings named Eadweard appeared on its plinth. As for the spelling of his last name, the "muy" may have been added to reflect some Spanish ancestry, and gridge was later changed to bridge. Upon his arrival in New York, Muybridge secured employment as a commission merchant for the London Printing and Publishing Company. One of his first friends in the U.S. was daguerreotypist Silas T. Selleck, who sparked Eadweard's interest in photography. When Selleck went West and established a successful photography studio, Muybridge soon followed. In 1855 he settled in San Francisco, where he opened a bookstore at 113 Montgomery Street. In his free time Muybridge explored California; he was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the state that he began to think about photographing landscapes. Muybridge was aware of the potential of new photographic markets in America and he considered the possibility of photography as a second career. In 1860 he returned to England where he spent several years regaining his health (he was injured in a stage coach accident during the trip from SF to NY) and studying photography more seriously. Around 1866 he returned to America, altering his surname from Muygridge to Muybridge. When he arrived in San Francisco he joined Silas Selleck in the photography business. The following year Muybridge took his "Flying Studio" to Yosemite and made numerous photographs which were presented in 1868 under the pseudonym "Helios." Over the next couple of years he made photographs of the San Francisco Bay Area, Alaska, and the Pacific Coast. In the Spring of 1871 Muybridge married Flora Shallcross Stone. A year later he became acquainted with the Leland Stanford family and this marked the beginning of his motion photography. Over the next couple of years, in addition to his motion studies, he photographed the Modoc Indians and U.S. soldiers in Northern California, Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad. In February of 1875, after being acquitted for the murder of his wife's lover, Muybridge went south to photograph Panama and Central America. He returned to San Francisco in November upon hearing of his wife's death. The rest of his career was spent primarily on the motion studies, first at Stanford University and later at the University of Pennsylvania. Eadweard Muybridge died May 8, 1904 at 2 Liverpool Road, Kingston-on-Thames.
1893 - Edweard Muybridge projects sequences of human beings in motion at the Chicago fair in a specially constructed building of classical design, the Zoopraxographical Hall, a forerunner of the Cinema theatre Source: http://www.cequel.co.uk/acclarke/shc.html
Animations by Charl Lucassen
Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture
Eadweard Muybridge of Kingston Upon Thames
Animals in Motion: Muybridge's Photographic Investigations
Les merveilles du Gif Animé en hommage au grand inventeur Edward Muybridge (in French but large animations)
Chanimations
University Maastricht
Etienne-Jules Marey en de (foto)grafische inscriptie van het bewegende lichaamThe Human Motor http://access.tucson.org/~michael/hm_intro.html
Muybridge, Telling Stories Back to the Top | Scientists and Engineers M - Z | Quit | eMail: Dr Russell Naughton |
