Eadweard Muybridge

Hello! My name is Eadweard Muybridge. I was born a long, long time ago, on April 9th, 1830, in a town called Kingston upon Thames in England. Even as a boy, I loved adventure and trying new things. I was especially fascinated by photography, which was a brand new invention back then. It felt like magic to capture a moment in time on a picture. My adventurous spirit led me to travel all the way across the ocean to America.

In America, I became known for taking giant, beautiful photographs of amazing landscapes, like the giant mountains and waterfalls in a place called Yosemite. One day in 1872, a man named Leland Stanford asked me a very tricky question. He asked, "When a horse gallops, do all four of its hooves ever leave the ground at the very same time?". Nobody knew the answer. A horse runs so fast that our eyes can't keep up. I loved a good puzzle, so I told him I would use my camera to find out.

It wasn't easy, and my first tries didn't work. But I didn't give up. In 1878, I had a brilliant idea. I set up 12 cameras all in a line next to a racetrack. I attached a tiny string to each camera shutter. As a horse named Sallie Gardner galloped past, her hooves tripped the strings one by one. Click, click, click went the cameras. Each one took a picture just a split second after the other.

When I developed the pictures, I couldn't believe my eyes. On one of the photos, Sallie Gardner was completely in the air. All four hooves were off the ground. We had solved the puzzle. I wanted to show everyone what I had discovered. So, in 1879, I invented a special machine I called a zoopraxiscope. It spun my pictures on a glass disc, and when I shined a light through it, the horse looked like it was really running. It was like the world's very first movie.

After that, I took thousands of pictures of animals and people moving to understand how they worked. I lived to be 74 years old. People remember me today because my pictures that moved were a big step toward creating the cartoons and movies we all love to watch. I helped the world see movement in a brand new way.