June 15, 1878: Eadweard Muybridge Invents Motion Pictures

June 15, 1878: Eadweard Muybridge invents motion pictures. Yes, it goes that far back.

He was born born Edward James Muggeridge on April 9, 1830 in Kingston upon Thomas, Surrey, England. He was interested in Old English, and took the archaic version of his given named, "Eadweard," and made his surname a similarly archaic one, so his name would, presumably, be pronounced "ED-word MIGH-bridge."

He moved to America in 1850, and became a bookseller. In 1860, he returned to Kingston, and took up photography. He returned to America in 1867, and made and sold some stunning photographs of the West, including his adopted hometown of San Francisco. In 1875, he discovered his wife was having an affair, shot and killed the other man, and was acquitted on the grounds of "justifiable homicide."

In June 1878, Muybridge created sequential series of photographs, now with a battery of 12 cameras along the race track at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, now the campus of Stanford University (which is still called "The Farm"). The shutters were automatically triggered when the wheel of a cart or the breast or legs of a horse tripped wires connected to an electromagnetic circuit.

For a session on June 15, 1878, the press and a selection of turf men were invited to witness the process. An accident with a snapping strap was captured on the negatives and shown to the attendees, convincing even the most skeptical witnesses. The news of this success was reported worldwide.

Newspapers were not yet able to reproduce detailed photographs, so the images were widely printed as woodcut engravings. Scientific American was among the publications at the time that carried reports and engravings of Muybridge's groundbreaking images. Six different series were soon published as cabinet cards, entitled The Horse in Motion.

Many people were amazed at the previously unseen positions of the horse's legs in action, particularly the fact that a running horse had all four hooves in the air at regular intervals. This did not take place when the horse's legs were extended to the front and back, as imagined by illustrators of the time, but when its legs were collected beneath its body as it switched from "pulling" with the front legs to "pushing" with the back legs.

In his later years, Muybridge gave many public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, travelling frequently in England and Europe to publicize his work. He retired to his native England permanently in 1894, and died on May 8, 1904.

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June 15, 1878 was a Saturday. Three games were played in baseball's National League:

* The Boston Red Stockings beat the Indianapolis Blues, 7-4 at the original version of the South End Grounds in Boston.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Providence Grays, 11-3 at the Messer Street Grounds in Providence, Rhode Island.

* And the Chicago White Stockings beat the Milwaukee Grays, 12-2 at the Union Grounds in Chicago.