Muybridge, Eadweard (ĕd`wərd mī`brĭj), 1830–1904, English-born photographer and student of animal locomotion. Muybridge changed his name from Edward James Muggeridge. A gifted and obsessed eccentric, he was a photographic innovator who left a vast and enormously varied body of work. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1850s and settled in San Francisco. In 1872 he made some experiments in photographing moving objects for the U.S. government. Afterward he was engaged by Leland Stanford Stanford, Leland, 1824–93, American railroad builder, politician, and philanthropist, b. Watervliet, N.Y. After practicing law in Wisconsin, he went (1852) to California, where he became a successful merchant.
..... Click the link for more information. to record the movements of a horse with a series of sequential still cameras triggered by threads. He invented (1881) the zoöpraxiscope, which projected animated pictures on a screen, a forerunner of the motion picture. He wrote The Horse in Motion (1878) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His Animals in Motion (1899, repr. 1957) consists of 11 portfolios: thousands of pictures of men, women, children, amputees, and many domestic and wild animals in action. This work was of considerable importance to artists. He also made outstanding landscape studies in Central America and Yosemite and panoramic views of San Francisco. Muybridge murdered his wife's lover in 1874; the case was dismissed as justifiable homicide.

Bibliography

See K. MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture (1972); G. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: the Father of the Motion Picture (1975, 2d ed. 2001); R. B. Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (1976); P. Hill, Eadweard Muybridge (2001); R. Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).

Muybridge, Eadweard

orig. Edward James Muggeridge

(born April 9, 1830, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, Eng.—died May 8, 1904, Kingston upon Thames) English photographer. He immigrated to the U.S. from England as a young man, and in 1868 his photos of Yosemite Valley made him famous. Hired by Leland Stanford to photograph a trotting horse in motion, to test Stanford's contention that it lifted all four legs simultaneously, he developed a special fast shutter for his battery of 12 to 24 cameras, and in 1877 he proved Stanford right. He lectured widely on animal locomotion, illustrating his lectures with his zoopraxiscope, a predecessor of the movie projector. His extensive photographic studies of human movement (1884–87) have been useful to artists and scientists.

Muybridge, Eadweard (1830–1904) photographer; born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England. Emigrating to America at age 20, he invented a photographic shutter to capture images of animal and human locomotion which were viewed on zootropes (1877–87).