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Days in Horse Country – The First Equine Movie Star
The first equine movie star was discovered in northern
California in the early 1800s. Photographer
Eadweard Muybridge shot a series of photos of a trotting horse named Abe
Edgington pulling a sulky. The horse
owner, Leland Stanford, hired Muybridge to photograph their racehorses so he
could better understand their movement.
Muybridge ended up discovering the art of motion picture in the process.
Muybridge accomplished this feat by placing twelve cameras with special lenses and an electronically controlled mechanism meant to operate special shutters. Wires were placed under the racetrack at 21-inch (53 cm) intervals and triggered the release of the camera shutters as the sulky wheels rolled over them.
The twelve pictures took about half a second to record and they showed Abe Edgington trotting in motion rather than a single, still photograph.
After this historic event, Muybridge invented a machine called a “zoopraxiscope”, the first film projector, designed to put together the pictures he had shot so he could easily show the fluid motion of the sequence.
Michael