Eadweard Muybridge
Who was Eadweard Muybridge?
English-American photographer (1830–1904)
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Eadweard Muybridge (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Eadweard Muybridge, originally named Edward James Muggeridge, was born on April 9, 1830, in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England. He became a key figure in photography, with his work on capturing motion influencing both science and the birth of cinema. At around 20 years old, he moved to the U.S., where he started as a bookseller in New York City before heading to San Francisco. In 1860, during a journey towards Europe, he had a serious stagecoach accident in Texas. He spent several years recovering in his hometown, during which he got into photography, learned the wet-plate collodion technique, and secured two British patents for his photographic inventions. By 1867, he returned to San Francisco with a changed personality but a strong drive for photography.
During the late 1860s and 1870s, Muybridge became a prominent photographer of the American West. He made notable large-format photos of Yosemite Valley, sold widely liked stereographs, and documented San Francisco, the Alaskan Territory, West Coast lighthouses, and the Modoc War. His fame attracted Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate and former California governor, who hired him to see if a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once while galloping. In 1878, at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, Muybridge used a series of cameras triggered in sequence to photograph the horse Sallie Gardner mid-stride. The images confirmed that all four hooves leave the ground, becoming one of the most famous scientific images of the 1800s.
Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge carried out a large-scale motion study project at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Using multiple cameras to capture various angles at once, he took over 100,000 photos of people and animals in motion. These studies showed athletes, workers, and animals performing a variety of actions, sometimes capturing moments invisible to the naked eye. The photos were published in a major work, Animal Locomotion, in 1887, becoming an important resource for artists, scientists, and anatomists.
Muybridge also invented the zoopraxiscope, a device that projected moving images from his photos on rotating glass discs, creating motion illusions for audiences. He toured with this device, giving talks in the U.S. and Europe and showing his motion studies to large crowds. The zoopraxiscope came before the flexible perforated film strip standard in cinema, and Muybridge's demonstrations of moving images were among the earliest public exhibitions. He met Thomas Edison in 1888, and although they didn't formally collaborate, the meeting influenced Edison's later work on motion picture technology.
Muybridge spent his last years back in Kingston upon Thames, where he passed away on May 8, 1904. He was honored in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011. His photographic work and the techniques he developed left a lasting impact on photography, the study of movement, and the cinema.
Before Fame
Edward James Muggeridge grew up in Kingston upon Thames during the early Victorian era when Britain was becoming more industrialized and involved in global trade. Not much is known about his early education or family life, except that his father worked as a corn and coal merchant. When he was about 20, like many young Britons at the time, he decided to move to the United States. He first worked as a bookseller in New York City and then in San Francisco.
A stagecoach accident in 1860 changed his career path, leading him back to England to recover. During his time in Kingston upon Thames, he learned the wet-plate collodion process, which was the main method for making high-quality photos then. He also changed his name to Eadweard Muybridge, using an Anglo-Saxon spelling, to reflect his interest in antiquities and to create a unique professional identity when he returned to California in 1867.
Key Achievements
- Produced the landmark chronophotographic series Sallie Gardner at a Gallop in 1878, definitively proving that a galloping horse becomes fully airborne mid-stride
- Created over 100,000 motion-study photographs at the University of Pennsylvania between 1883 and 1886, published as the eleven-volume Animal Locomotion
- Invented the zoopraxiscope, an early motion-picture projection device using painted glass discs, predating flexible film strip cinema
- Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011 for his contributions to photographic and cinematic technology
- Produced some of the earliest and most celebrated large-format photographic documentation of Yosemite Valley and the American West
Did You Know?
- 01.Muybridge used a series of up to 24 cameras with trip wires stretched across a track to photograph Sallie Gardner at a gallop in 1878, with each camera shutter firing in fractions of a second.
- 02.He was tried for the murder of his wife's lover, Harry Larkyns, in 1874, and was acquitted by a jury that accepted his plea of justifiable homicide despite the judge's instructions to the contrary.
- 03.The name Eadweard Muybridge was entirely self-invented; he believed both elements represented archaic Anglo-Saxon versions of his given name and surname, though the surname derivation was largely his own fabrication.
- 04.His zoopraxiscope, demonstrated publicly as early as 1880, projected images painted onto glass discs rather than photographs directly, because photographic images of the period were too faint to project clearly.
- 05.Muybridge photographed the Indigenous Modoc people and military subjects during the Modoc War of 1872 to 1873, producing some of the earliest photographic documentation of an active military conflict in the American West.
Awards & Honors
| Award | Year | Details |
|---|---|---|
| National Inventors Hall of Fame | 2011 | — |