Eadweard Muybridge(1830-1904)

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames, England, to John and Susanna Muggeridge. At the age of 20 he immigrated to the United States as a bookseller, first to New York City, then to San Francisco. In 1860, he planned a return trip to Europe, but suffered serious head injuries en route in a stagecoach crash in Texas. He spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learned the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He returned to San Francisco in 1867, a man with a markedly changed personality. In 1868, he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, and began selling popular stereographs of his work. His great breakthrough came in 1872 when he was hired by wealthy American businessman and former California governor Leland Stanford, who later founded Stanford University. Stanford was interested in whether horses lifted all legs off the ground at once during trotting, and Muybridge was engaged to take photographs to settle the point. Although the experiment proved inconclusive at the time, Muybridge was re-engaged for further photographic studies in 1878. Using a battery of 12 cameras set side by side and a specially marked fence along the racetrack to pinpoint the horse's precise movements, Muybridge effectively created the first true study of motion. By January 1880 he invented zoopraxiscope to project his famous chronophotographic pictures in motion and thus prove that these were authentic. The projector used glass disks onto which Muybridge had an unidentified artist paint the sequences as silhouettes. Later, his more-detailed images were hand-coloured and marketed commercially. A device he developed was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process was an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography. From 1883 to 1886, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion. 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 publicise his work in cities such as London and Paris. He also edited and published compilations of his work (some of which are still in print today), which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He retired to his native England permanently in 1894. In 1904, the year of his death, the Kingston Museum opened in his hometown, and continues to house a substantial collection of his works in a dedicated gallery.