History of Film Part 1- Gambling on Horses

Like so many things, the history of the motion picture started with a bet and a horse. In 1872, former California Governor Leland Stanford was a horse racing enthusiast and didn't feel too bad about throwing down the big bucks on a bet as to whether all the horse's feet came off the ground when the horse was at a gallop. The prevailing view of the time was that a horse always kept one foot on the ground when galloping. Leland Stanford said nay nay to that and was ready  to put his money where his mouth is. He bet $25,000 (that's in 1872 dollars, he's what Las Vegas would later refer to as a whale) that all the horse's feet do come off the ground. To prove his case he hired world famous photograph Eadweard Muybridge.                                                    

Muybridge would use a method that those wascally Wachowski's movie, The Matrix, would win an Oscar for over 120 years later (roughly, to the method and the date). He set up 12 cameras along a track that were set to go off as a galloping horse set off trip wires. The end result needed refinement, but led credibility to Stanford's ideas of "unsupported transit" in the gallop. In 1877 and 1878, Muybridge would refine his process and get this:

Or, when played in a zoetrope (you'll have to look that one up yourself), you get this:  http://youtu.be/IEqccPhsqgA

Needless to say, Leland Stanford won his bet, horses can fly, briefly, through like four frames. And a new art form was conceived. It would be another 37 years before the motion picture would be given Birth (of a Nation) to. But, for now' Eadweard Muybridge had a seed, a seed he would build on a touch with works like this http://youtu.be/5bqu6YsQocU, but it would take those no good-nicks from across the sea, the French, to really move the technical and artistic qualities forward. But first, a short tale of a New Jersey gangster, Tony... I mean Thomas Edison. 

About the same time Eadweard Muybridge was taking pictures of horses, Thomas Edison was inventing the light bulb. The light bulb would be crucial in projection, but we're not there yet. Thomas Edison would meet with Eadweard Muybridge and Edison's involvement with the birth of cinema would not end with his inventing the light bulb or meeting with Muybridge, but more to come on that. Next in part two, we're off to France.