10 Awesome Photos Taken by Zoopraxiscope Inventor Eadweard Muybridge

Image via Complex Original

Today is the 182nd birthday of photography pioneer and inventor, Eadweard J. Muybridge. If you head over to the Google homepage you will see a fancy new animated Doogle put in place to commemorate the occasion. For those who have never heard the name, Muybridge was a British photographer who first made his name photographing the beautiful expanse of the American West. He then turned his attention to photographing the locomotion of people and animals—that is capturing how humans and animals move.

One of his brightest moments came when he photographed horses in motion to show former California Governor Leland Stanford that all of a horse's hooves leave the ground while in mid-trot. He did so by lining up a series of glass-plated cameras which were triggered by a thread when the horse passed by. He then took the images, copied them onto a special disc made for a machine Muybridge invented called the zoopraxiscope. Predating the motion picture, the zoopraxiscope allowed the people to take a number of photographic frames and watch them in succession with the result being a moving image.

Aight, enough history. Keep reading to see 10 of what we think are some really cool set of images taken by Muybridge while working on his zoopraxiscope research.