The first “film” was born out of a bet. Leland Stanford, a former governor of California and an avid fan of horse racing, made a bet that all four hooves leave the ground when a horse gallops. To prove it, Stanford hired (for a stunning twenty five grand) an English photographer by the name of Eadweard Muybridge. In the 1870s, cameras took several seconds to “snap” a photo (this was because of a slow shutter speed). During this span of time, the subject had to stay perfectly still while the film was exposed, so as not to blur the image. This, of course, was a problem in trying to capture the motion of a galloping horse. To combat this problem, Muybridge underwent a long inventive process to increase the shutter speed. Five years subsequent to his employment, Muybridge had reduced the exposure time to 1/2000th of a second. Now ready to film, he set up tripwires along a horse track and had a horse run through them. The tripwires were attached to the shutters of a dozen cameras. As the horse ran by a camera, the tripwire was triggered and the shutter opened, exposing the film. When the horse crossed the final camera, Muybridge had twelve images, sequencing a galloping horse and confirming Governor Stanford’s wager. Also, it marked the beginning of the motion picture industry. Later on Muybridge went on to invent the zoopraxiscope in 1879, and is regarded as the first movie projector. It used still images painted on rotating glass discs. When light was shone through the …
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Apr