Today in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge designed a system to record a horse’s (Sallie Gardner) gait in real time. Using 24 cameras positioned around a track and tripwires run across, he was able to capture the horse at different intervals that the naked eye couldn’t see. Putting these pictures together, he in essence created the first live-recorded motion picture. Although it was originally intended to find out if all four of a horse’s legs were off the ground simultaneously, Muybridge’s experiment became the foundation for Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope.

 

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