Eadweard Muybridge

Goneforeign's brilliant picture reminded me of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). He was a very fascinating and eccentric fellow.

In 1872, former Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse's hooves left the ground at the same time during a gallop. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.[2] Muybridge's relationship with Stanford was long and fraught, heralding both his entrance and exit from the history books.
To prove Stanford's claim, Muybridge developed a scheme for instantaneous motion picture capture. Muybridge's technology involved chemical formulas for photographic processing and an electrical trigger created by the chief engineer for the Southern Pacific Railroad, John D. Isaacs.
In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's racehorse Occident airborne in the midst of a gallop.
By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of twenty-four cameras. Muybridge used a series of 12 stereoscopic cameras, 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by one horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second. The cameras were arranged parallel to the track, with trip-wires attached to each camera shutter triggered by the horse's hooves.

He developed a zoopraxiscope, an early device for showing motion pictures, which was probably an inspiration for Edison's Kinetoscope. He had a busy life - he murdered his wife's lover, and Philip Glass wrote an opera about his murder trial.

I'm fascinated by the links between still photography and motion pictures.
Here's a little documentary about him...