Reform

In 1872 the photographer Eadweard Muybridge began a series of experiments at the behest of Leland Stanford, one of the organizers of the Central Pacific Railroad. Stanford wanted to answer the question whether his trotting racehorse, Occident, ever had all its legs off the ground at the same time while moving. The East Coast racing establishment thought “yes”; Stanford and his West Coast friends thought the opposite. Muybridge had been interested in what was known as “instantaneous photography” in order to illustrate motion for some time. Here was a chance to try out this new technology in practice. Muybridge used twelve cameras laid out along the animal’s path, with electronically controlled shutters to photograph the horse’s movements in sequence. Muybridge’s single image of Occident with all four legs off the ground illustrated the horse’s position for about a five-hundredth of a second. When released to the general public for the first time in 1878, that single image disproved hundreds of years of artists’ depictions of moving horses, but it was also a triumph of industrialization. Modern inventions had shown that movement in nature could be broken down into pieces and studied, the same way that industrialists divided labor.