The nominations for the Oscars will be announced next Tuesday,
which, we all know, means it won’t be long before Hollywood movie
stars will be standing before the world thanking everyone from
their producers to their hairdressers.
The nominations for the Oscars will be announced next Tuesday, which, we all know, means it won’t be long before Hollywood movie stars will be standing before the world thanking everyone from their producers to their hairdressers.
And almost certainly another year will go by with every Oscar winner failing to thank the three Santa Clara County innovators who made his or her million-dollar career possible: Eadweard James Muybridge, Leland Stanford, and a horse named Abe Edgington.
What do these three have to do with a night at the Academy Awards, you might be wondering. Well, not to make a big deal about their accomplishment, but they are the ones responsible for inventing moving pictures.
It all started with a bet. The story begins with Leland Stanford, the former governor of California and one of the “Big Four” railroad barons who administered the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
Stanford dabbled in raising race horses on his stud farm. His ranch was located on what is now Stanford University in Palo Alto. One afternoon in 1872, Stanford was discussing race horses with Frederick MacCrellish, a newspaper man for the Alta Californian (which at that time was castigating Stanford for the tycoon’s rather nasty railroad business ethics). The two men were discussing whether or not all four hooves of a trotting horse left the ground simultaneously while running.
A wager was made, with Stanford insisting that all four horse hooves left the ground at the same moment. Depending on which historian you ask, the bet involved no money or up to $50,000. Probably it was for nothing, as Stanford was not known as a gambling man.
Eadweard (pronounced “Edward”) Muybridge was in California at that time as the official photographer for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey of the Pacific Coast. Stanford hired the famous English photographer to settle this vital question about a trotting horse motion.
Unfortunately, in 1872, cameras were still very primitive. Shutter speeds were not fast enough to capture quickly moving animals. All attempts at trotting horse photographs resulted in images that were a blur. Stanford told Muybridge to spare no expense at developing cutting-edge photographic technology, and so the Victorian-age photographer began to tinker with improving camera equipment.
The scheme was interrupted for a few years, however, after Muybridge murdered his wife’s lover, Maj. Henry Larkyns in a jealous rage. At a party in the Napa Valley town of Calistoga, the emotional photographer-artist shot Larkyns point blank with a revolver. At the sensational court trial, the jury decided the killing was legally justified. Muybridge walked away a free man.
Muybridge eventually developed a camera shutter fast enough to attempt the horse-hooves test and settle the bet. On June 15, 1878, at Stanford’s private race track, he lined up 12 stereoscopic cameras attached to trip wires placed along the ground of the track at 21-inch intervals. The horse Abe Edgington was attached to a small carriage called a “sulky”, and the driver brought the animal to a trotting speed down the course.
As the carriage wheels snapped the trip wires, each camera took its image of the trotting horse. When these 24 images were exposed, Stanford discovered he’d won the bet. One of the photographs clearly showed all four horse hooves in the air.
Muybridge took these images and placed them in consecutive order inside the drum of a cylinder. The cylinder could be spun, and when Muybridge whirled it at the proper speed, he was amazed to see the images create the reproduced illusion of the horse and carriage trotting along Stanford’s race track.
In 1879, Muybridge improved the technology of using a rapid sequence of images to simulate movement. He invented a motion-picture projector he called a “zootrope” which held the stop-action photos on a glass plate that rotated to create the illusion of movement when viewed through a small slit.
The American inventor Thomas Edison traveled west in the 1880s to visit Stanford at his Palo Alto ranch. Already famous for inventing the electric light bulb, Edison got off the train at the nearest town of Menlo Park. Local legend has it that Edison was so impressed by the area’s beauty, he christened his own New Jersey “invention factory” Menlo Park after the California village. He would later be known as “the Wizard of Menlo Park.”
On that visit, Edison also happened to view Muybridge’s zootrope. This inspired him to start work on his own moving-picture machine. In 1891, the Edison Company produced the Kinetoscope, a film-based motion-picture projector.
Visit Stanford University today, and at the location of the former race track — an area known as the Red Barn — you’ll find an information kiosk describing the accomplishment of Muybridge and his contribution to motion pictures. And along the Walk of Fame in downtown Hollywood, there is a star along the sidewalk in honor of the photographer who, on a sunny June afternoon at Stanford’s stud farm 126 years ago, set in motion the motion-picture industry.
