Image of the Day, April 9, 2012
Monday, April 9, 2012 at 6:54PM Tweet By Donna Poulton
In celebration of Edward Muybridge's 182nd birthday, Google took Muybridge's famous stopgap photography for their logo.
Until Edward Muybridge created images of a horse galloping on the Palo Alto racetrack in 1878, the question as to whether all four legs of a horse left the ground while running had been hotly debated. Governor Leland Stanford, who was responsible in part for the transcontinental railroad and for whom Stanford University was named, paid Muybridge to set up a complicated set of cameras to record, frame-by-frame, the horse at a gallop. The series of photographs proved once and for all that all four hooves do leave the ground when the horse is galloping.
Edward Muybridge, “Sallie Gardner,” series at Palo Alto, California 1878. Credit: masters-of-photography.com