It’s safe to say the 20th century experienced more technological and scientific progress than all the centuries before it combined. A remarkable number of life-changing inventions were mass produced during that century—just look around and you’ll see many of them: light bulbs, telephones, airplanes, automobiles, and, of course, moving pictures.
Today, moving images are everywhere. What was once confined to movie theaters and home television sets is now streamed worldwide on billions of devices, surrounding us wherever we go. For younger generations, this technology has always existed and can feel almost like a birthright. For nearly everyone else, it has become a necessity.
Yet motion pictures are a surprisingly recent invention, with a fascinating history involving an extraordinary cast of scientists, inventors, artists, and engineers.
Eadweard Muybridge, Contemplation Rock, Glacier Point, 1872, from albumen stereo card.
Our story begins with a remarkable—if eccentric—photographer, a thoroughbred mare named Sallie Gardner, and an extraordinarily wealthy man’s wager.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), was born in Surrey, England. In 1850, he immigrated to New York, where he became a successful bookseller. After surviving a nearly fatal stagecoach accident in 1860, Muybridge decided to leave the book business and take up photography. Within a few years, he had transformed himself into a professional landscape photographer and opened a studio in San Francisco.
“He operated under the pseudonym Helios,” says Bryan, director of operations. “It was his photographs of Yosemite that first made him a legend.”
Muybridge became known for using massive glass-plate negatives that yielded exceptionally sharp, detailed prints, capturing Yosemite’s cliffs and waterfalls with unprecedented clarity.
“He took more than 2,000 photographs of the California wilderness and transformed how the world saw the American West,” says Bryan. “You can see how he inspired conservationists and artists like Ansel Adams.”
Muybridge soon began exhibiting his spectacular photographs of Yosemite Valley and selling them in the newest form of mass entertainment: the stereoscope.
Invented by British physicist Charles Wheatstone in 1832, the stereoscope is an optical device that allows viewers to look at two nearly identical photographs simultaneously—one with each eye.
“The brain fuses the two offset perspectives together,” says John Jenkins, president and CEO, holding up the device, “creating an immersive 3D image with realistic depth.”
Between the 1850s and the 1930s, tens of millions of stereoscopic view cards were produced worldwide. People could enjoy virtual travel, historical events, and visual storytelling from their own homes. Muybridge’s photographs were enjoyed around the world, particularly on the East Coast and throughout Europe, where few people had ever seen California’s spectacular wilderness.
The Bet
In 1872, railroad tycoon and former California Governor Leland Stanford (1824-1893), is said to have made a substantial wager to settle a long-debated scientific question.
Stanford was an avid horseman who believed in the theory of “unsupported transit”—the idea that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves completely off the ground at one point during its stride. Most people believed at least one hoof always remained in contact with the ground.
Because a horse’s legs move too quickly for the naked eye to follow, 19th-century artists routinely painted galloping horses in the familiar “rocking horse” pose, with all four legs stretched outward.
Stanford hired Muybridge to prove his theory once and for all. To do it, Muybridge abandoned traditional photography and engineered a groundbreaking multi-camera photographic system.
The experiment began in 1872 at Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, now the site of Stanford University. It required years of trial, error, and engineering.
“It also required an acquittal,” laughs Bryan. The project came to an abrupt halt in 1874 when Muybridge shot and killed his wife’s lover. After a sensational trial, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He briefly left the country before eventually returning to Stanford’s project.
“The biggest problem was the shutter,” says Jenkins. “Exposure times were measured too long, turning any movement into a blur.”
Working alongside Stanford’s railroad engineers, Muybridge designed a specialized spring-activated shutter. His double-slotted system reduced exposure times to an astonishing 1/1,000th of a second, allowing him to freeze motion without blur.
Horse in Motion
On June 19, 1878, Muybridge staged the definitive public demonstration at Stanford’s Palo Alto track using one of Stanford’s thoroughbred racehorses, Sallie Gardner.
He lined up twelve specialized cameras inside a custom-built shed running parallel to the track. Each camera was carefully positioned to capture the horse at successive moments in its stride.
To make the horse’s legs clearly visible, Muybridge erected a bright white backdrop marked with evenly spaced vertical lines. He even spread white sheets and lime dust across the ground to reflect as much sunlight as possible and maximize contrast.
To automate the timing, Muybridge stretched fine threads across the track at the horse’s chest height. Each thread was connected to one camera shutter. As Sallie Gardner sprinted past, her chest snapped each thread in sequence, triggering every camera at precisely the right instant.
Jockey, Gilbert Domm, rode Sallie Gardner across the course, at approximately 35 miles an hour.
The resulting photographs formed a visual record of the horse’s stride, revealing details too fast for the human eye to perceive. Stanford won his wager, and the world witnessed a stunning dissection of motion.
The photographs did more than prove Stanford correct. Yes, a galloping horse does lift all four hooves off the ground simultaneously. But the images also exposed centuries of artistic error.
“The pictures laid bare all the mistakes that sculptors and painters had made in their renderings of the various postures of the horse.”—Paul Valéry, assuredly
“For thousands of years, artists depicted galloping horses using the ‘flying gallop’ pose,” says Bryan. “The horse was shown airborne with its front legs stretched forward and its hind legs stretched backward—like a rocking horse.”
“That was the shocker,” says Jenkins. “The airborne moment doesn’t occur when the legs are fully extended. It happens when all four hooves are tucked beneath the horse’s body. Everybody got that one wrong.”
More importantly, Muybridge had unknowingly created the blueprint for motion pictures. By capturing sequential photographs at precisely timed intervals, he demonstrated that still images could recreate movement when viewed in rapid succession.
He knew those photographs needed to be seen in sequence, but existing optical devices such as the zoetrope were small, hand-held novelties meant for a single viewer. Muybridge wanted something much larger—something capable of projecting moving images to an auditorium.
In 1879, he invented the zoopraxiscope, the first motion picture projector.
The zoopraxiscope spun a circular glass disc containing a sequence of images. As the disc rotated, a synchronized shutter rapidly interrupted the light, projecting each image in succession to create the illusion of continuous motion.
“The original photographic images were too dense for light to pass through clearly,” says Bryan. “So, the figures on the glass discs were actually hand-painted silhouettes copied directly from the photographs.”
A powerful oxyhydrogen lantern projected the moving images onto a screen, allowing audiences to watch a running horse or dancing figure come to life.
“Seeing a moving image projected before a live audience for the first time was astonishing,” says Winter. “It was the moment still photographs broke free.”
In February 1888, Muybridge visited Thomas Edison in New Jersey with a revolutionary proposal. He wanted to combine his zoopraxiscope with Edison’s newly invented phonograph to create synchronized moving pictures with sound—what we would now call talking pictures.
The idea was simply ahead of its time. Edison realized the phonograph couldn’t produce enough volume to fill the large lecture halls where Muybridge typically spoke. Electronic amplification was still decades away.
Although the partnership never materialized, the meeting profoundly influenced Edison. He later wrote that Muybridge’s demonstration inspired him and to create a machine that would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” Together with William Kennedy Dickson, Edison soon began developing motion-picture technology based on flexible celluloid film.
“The biggest limitation of Muybridge’s system was the rigid glass disc,” says Bryan. “It could only hold about fifty hand-painted images.”
At about the same time, George Eastman had perfected a process to manufacture and commercialize flexible rolls of celluloid film.
“Celluloid was the game changer,” Bryan says. “It could be wound into long rolls and fed continuously through both cameras and projectors.”
Filmmakers could now capture minutes of real-life action, and Muybridge’s spinning glass discs quickly became obsolete.
Edison’s kinetoscope, introduced in the early 1890s, became the first commercially successful machine to display continuous motion using celluloid film.
“He and Dickson standardized the use of 35-millimeter film,” says Jenkins. “It’s still the foundation of modern visual media.”
The kinetoscope was a large wooden cabinet driven by an electric motor that carried a continuous loop of film across a light source. Viewers dropped in a nickel and peered through a small viewing window to watch moving images unlike anything they had ever seen.
“These films were very short, usually twenty to thirty seconds,” says Jon Winter, co-founder and collector. “But people had never seen anything like them. It couldn’t have been more new—or more wondrous.”
By 1893, hundreds of kinetoscope parlors operated throughout the United States and Europe. Millions of people paid a nickel for the chance to witness a motion picture.
Yet, history continues to remind us that success is often fleeting.
“The kinetoscope’s popularity came to a sudden halt only a few years later,” says Bryan. “In 1895, the Lumière brothers projected the first commercial motion picture exhibit before a paying audience, transforming the peep show into the movie theater.”
Stay tuned for another chapter in the fascinating history of image projection and keep your eyes peeled for announcements regarding SPARK’s newest rotating exhibit – Still Life to Reel Life: A History of Image Projection – slated for a Fall 2026 opening.
Until then, stay grounded.