Muybridge Created the World's First Motion Picture.

Leland Stanford had bet a friend twenty-five thousand dollars that the traditional view was wrong, and he hired Muybridge to settle the matter. Muybridge made his first attempt to photograph a fast-moving horse in 1872, but due to the limitations of the equipment available at the time, the results were inconclusive.

Six years later, in June 1878, Stanford again commissioned Muybridge to photograph his beautiful, fast mare, Sallie Gardner. Leland Stanford was convinced he was right and he wanted the documentary evidence to prove it. The event was staged in San Francisco and the press was invited to witness the historic occasion. Muybridge set up twelve cameras, all attached to fine black threads that were strung across the track at strategic locations. When Sallie Gardner's breast hit the black threads, the shutters were released.

To everyone's delight and to some people's surprise, the photographs proved conclusively that at a certain point in a full gallop - frame number three shown here-all four feet of a horse are clearly off the ground, bunched together under the belly.

Artists and the public now had to acknowledge that observation with the human eye could not compare with the unerring vision of the camera. The history of the now familiar racetrack photo finish got its start that June day in San Francisco. The photographer, intrigued by such experiments, went on to devote the rest of his life to a prolific photographic study of human and animal locomotion, the results of which were quickly seized upon by painters, physiologists, scientists, and engineers who considered his work an invaluable aid to their own.

On May 14, 1880, Muybridge again made history when his photographs of a galloping horse were shown at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The images were projected on a large screen with a special lantern -a "zoogyroscope." The projector used two glass disks: one carrying twelve images revolving in one direction, and a second, slotted disk that revolved in the opposite direction and that served as a shutter.

The effect of a running horse was so realistic that a reporter who covered the event wrote, "The only thing missing was the clatter of hoofs."
With a series of still photographs, Muybridge had created the world's first motion picture.