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View Full Version : Eddie M, Google, Horses & Then Some


bigmack
04-09-2012, 03:33 AM
Why is Google highlighting what they are taday?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif/220px-Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif

Looks familiar.

Eadweard J. Muybridge ( /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer of Dutch ancestry who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip

In 1872, former Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day. Whether all four of a horse's hooves are off the ground at the same time during the trot. Up until this time, most paintings of horses at full gallop showed the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear. Stanford sided with this assertion, called "unsupported transit", and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.

In later studies Muybridge used a series of large cameras that used glass plates placed in a line, each one being triggered by a thread as the horse passed. Later a clockwork device was used. The images were copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed in a machine called a Zoopraxiscope. This in fact became an intermediate stage towards motion pictures or cinematography.

Galloping horse set to motion using photos by Eadweard Muybridge.
In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot. This negative was lost, but it survives through woodcuts made at the time. By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion.

Another series of photos taken at the Palo Alto Stock Farm in Stanford, California, is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, and shows that the hooves do all leave the ground simultaneously — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse as it switches from "pulling" with the front legs to "pushing" with the back legs

This series of photos stands as one of the earliest forms of videography.
Eventually, Muybridge and Stanford had a major falling-out concerning his research on equine locomotion. Stanford published a book The Horse in Motion which gave no credit to Muybridge despite containing his photos and his research, possibly because Muybridge lacked an established reputation in the scientific community. As a result of Muybridge's lack of credit for the work, the Royal Society withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion photography. Muybridge subsequently filed a lawsuit against Stanford, but lost the dispute.