Eadweard Muybridge

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I was visiting the
Presidio in San Francisco recently and I started really looking

(00:22):
at a statue that I have passed many times there
because I love San Francisco and go as often as
I can. And that statue is one depicting Edward Boybridge,
considered a pioneer of motion picture projection. And I thought, oh,
I should look him up. That's interesting and oh boy,
there's a lot of story to his life. And then
I thought unexpected things. Well I did, and then I realized, wait,

(00:46):
I know this story, and I'll talk about why in
behind the Scenes because it's to me hilarious. The invention
that he's memorialized with in that statue is his zopraxiscope,
but he also innovated in fat biography. He had some
other inventions, and he was also the defendant in a
murder trial. Uh. He was heavily linked to Leland Stanford,

(01:09):
the founder of Stanford University. So in my book, that's
a story worth telling. Heads up, he also changed his
name quite a bit, so in the early parts of
this episode, we're going to use the name he was
going by at the time we're talking about. I hope
I caught them all because I think that kind of
shares the mercuriality of his persona throughout the year. Yeah. So.

(01:37):
Edward James Muggridge spelled m ugg r Idge was born
on April ninth, eighteen thirty, in Kingston upon Tims, Surrey, England.
His father was a merchant who primarily worked in coal
and grain sales. This made for a financially stable life

(01:57):
for the family. Even after his father died when Edward
was only thirteen, the family was still comfortable. Edward's mother
started running the family business and there was no interruption
of their income. As a young man, Edward moved into
London to work for the London Printing and Publishing Company,
and then when he was twenty one, he made his

(02:18):
first name change, although it's a pretty subtle one. He
changed his first name Edward ed Ward the way you
would often see it spelled, to Edward ea d W
EA r D, because he had concluded that it was
the version of his name closest to its original Anglo

(02:39):
Saxon form. I also read a number of things that
said he was naming himself after an Anglo Saxon king,
but I could never figure out which of the Anglo
Saxon Edwards that would have been. It does have a
very like Early English Old English Middle English kind of
vibe to it. Yes, he would have a BFF named

(03:01):
ethel Red without any Christion. Yeah. At the age of
twenty two, he moved to the United States and eventually
made his way to San Francisco, where he settled. San
Francisco was several years into the gold Rush at that time,
and it was a place where a lot of people
saw potential opportunity, and Edward first sought his fortune in

(03:23):
the book business. He set up a shop that sold books,
but also still worked for the London Printing and Publishing
Company as an agent. It actually been through that company
that he was able to travel to the United States
in the first place. It was in California that Edward
started toying with variations in his last name, shifting first

(03:45):
from Muggridge with an E in it to Muggridge without
that E between the double G and the R. Eventually
he moved on to Moigridge, which he used for quite
a while. That is the pronunciation of that first syllable
that I all was here in documentaries about him. But
I did hear an English person pronouncing it a little
bit more like my instead of moy, So that's another

(04:08):
I don't know if he fiddled with those pronunciations along
the way either, but in his first eight years in
the US, where there is some mystery about where he
was at various points in time before he got to
San Francisco. But once he landed in San Francisco, Edward
did very well for himself. His bookshop stayed really busy

(04:29):
and he made a really nice living. He also became acquainted,
sort of thanks to proximity with photography dagera typist R. H.
Vance had a studio right next to Edward's shop, and Moigridge,
because he was still using that variation of his name,
also became acquainted with a portrait photographer named Willem schu. Soon,

(04:50):
Edward had expanded the offerings in his shop to include
photographs that were sold alongside the books. In eighteen sixty,
he needed to travel to Europe on an acquisition trip.
He wanted to purchase notable antiquarian books for resale in
his shop. He couldn't just leave the shop closed and
unattended while he was away, though, so he asked his

(05:11):
brother Thomas, who had followed him to the US, to
handle things while he was gone. Yeah, he actually had
two brothers that followed him to the United States, and
there are some versions of the story that indicate that
they may have already been working in the shop, and
others that suggest that he was like, hey, now would
be a great time for you to do this, but
we don't know. But he had booked passage aboard a steamer,

(05:34):
the SS Golden Age, to take him to Europe for
this trip, but he missed his ship, and then he
had to make arrangements to travel by stage coach to
Saint Louis, where he planned to take a train to
the East Coast and then get travel from there to
Europe by sea. And the seat he managed to book
was with the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, which at the

(05:54):
time was contracted with mail offices throughout the US to
carry mail in bulk as is taking on passengers. But
part way into the journey there was an accident. The
coach was passing through northern Texas, and the driver lost
control when the horses for some reason started running. There
wasn't necessarily a reason. Horses can be unpredictable. The driver tried,

(06:20):
according to the news reports, to break but that did
not work. The stagecoach veered off the road and down
a mountain slope and it crashed into a treat One
of Edward's fellow passengers was killed, but Moigridge and the
rest of them sustained injuries, and in his case, he
had quite a serious head injury. His vision was seriously

(06:42):
affected and his hearing his other senses were affected as well. Yeah,
we'll talk about his accounts of what he was dealing
with a little bit later, but it sounded quite scary.
After several months of being treated at Fort Smith ark
and Saw, which is where he woke up after this accident,

(07:02):
Moigridge traveled to New York by stagecoach, which seems brave
to me after that accident to seek medical help from experts,
and there he was treated by the president of the
New York Academy of Medicine, doctor William Parker, and Parker
gave a fairly grave diagnosis that Edward was never going
to fully recover. But Moigridge was quite tenacious and he

(07:23):
decided to get a third opinion, this time from the
best doctors of Europe, and he really did get, what is,
at least on paper, the best one. His doctor in London,
where he next traveled, was Sir William Gull, who was
also Queen Victoria's personal physician, and while under Gull's care,
Moigridge lived in England for the next several years, possibly

(07:44):
as many as six. Making a long sea voyage with
a serious head injury in this era also very scary
to me. Yes. Uh, There's not a whole lot of
information about what his recovery in London was like. One
thing that is known is that after he had recovered somewhat,
he took a trip to New York to file suit

(08:06):
against Butterfield Overland Mail Company over that accident. He got
a cash settlement, but it was reportedly only a fourth
of the ten thousand dollars that he wanted. He clearly
was not idle. While he was convalescing, he filed inventions
with the British Patent Office. One was a plate printing
technique for books, and another was an apparatus for washing

(08:30):
clothes he was also making business deals from London and
investing in mining and banking ventures in the US and abroad.
Some biographers have come to the conclusion that the actual
medical part of his stay in England was actually pretty brief,
and that he just got busy with all these other
things and that kept him from returning to California. It's

(08:51):
also possible that he was purposely staying in Europe while
the US Civil War was playing out, and it's also
been proposed that the brain injury from the crash was
a contributing factor to his seemingly haphazard kind of wandering
approach to his life during this time. We'll talk a
little more about his personality changes after the accident in

(09:13):
a bit. By the time he returned to San Francisco
in eighteen sixty six, he had lost money on those
various investments he had been making while abroad, and he
had taken up photography. There are so many theories about
when he actually became interested in photography, not just as
something he was selling in the shop, but something he
was going to do himself. Some people think it was

(09:36):
the proximity of his bookshop to photographers that got him started.
Others actually believed that his doctor, Sir William Gull, may
have suggested it as part of his recuperation, and it's
also possible that he picked it up at any other time.
But when he got home to California, he reconnected with
another photographer and a friend of his that was Silas Sellick,

(09:57):
and Selik is also sometimes invoked as the person who
may have been the one to get Edward into photography.
Going back even before the stagecoach accident, Edward had also
changed his last name once again, this time to the
one he's most known by, Moybridge. Regardless of when his
interest in photography began, in eighteen sixty seven, he started

(10:19):
taking pictures that would lead him to just immense success,
and those were photos of Yosemite Valley. He opened a
new business, Helio's Flying Studio, which was the name of
his photography business, and that was another name that he assumed, Helios,
after the Greek word for the sun. This was the
name he used initially for his photographic endeavors. The Helios

(10:42):
Flying Studio wasn't a brick and mortar location. It was
a mobile photography carriage, which sounds cool. He could take
it out into the world and on photo adventures, set
up his equipment and capture shots, and then developed the
film in a dark room that he had assembled there
in the carriage. Which that mobility was really important because,

(11:03):
as our mention of Yosemite might indicate, his special interest
was landscape photography. It is a pretty cool thing. There
are some photos of some of his mobile setups where
he just has everything he might need at hand, and
it's kind of groovy. We will talk about his very
quick success as a photographer in just a moment, but
first we're going to pause for a sponsor break. Moybridge,

(11:35):
as Helios was almost instantly successful. When he sent one
of his early photos to the magazine Philadelphia Photographer, the
publication wanted it and requested his negatives. Philadelphia Photographer was
a prominent photography magazine at the time, and the feature
of his photo in it sort of instantly made Moybridge's career.

(11:57):
He was very savvy about marketing and was driven to
continue to deliver imagery unlike anything anyone else was capable of.
In some cases, this led him to take up dare
devil grade positions from which to photograph, including going to
the very edge of stone overhangs from cliffs, but in
doing so he was able to offer panoramic views of

(12:20):
Yosemite and other places that no one had even conceived
of before. And as he gained more fame and his
work was demanded at various galleries and in print form,
Moibridge wasn't working alone all the time. He often, as
his business grew, had assistance with him on his tracks
out into nature. That's why we have pictures of his

(12:40):
mobile setup to capture photos. Although reportedly none of these
assistants were ever willing to go out to the precarious
points that he was often photographing from. It was like,
we'll wait back here, you go get your shot. If
you have ever tried to take a photo of a
really sun drenched land escape, even with a modern camera,

(13:02):
you probably know that one of the biggest challenges is
not having the sky become completely blown out in the
Exposureleibridge also encountered this, and he invented an apparatus to
deal with it. He called it a sky shade because
it could be manipulated to cover the upper part of
the camera's lens so that glare and overexposure would not

(13:25):
rob his images of their detail. His use of the
sky shade was sort of a simple solve, but his
photos were way ahead of anything else on the market
at the time. It was not uncommon for landscape photographers
to process their photos layered with other photos, most frequently
to add skyscape and clouds for dramatic effect. Moybridge also

(13:49):
did this, and he created a collection of sky studies
that he could pull from. But although others did it,
few of them had the eye for it that Moybridge did,
and his are very dramatic and by his own design,
very artistic. His photos appeared in magazines and prints were
in really high demand for consumers to display in their homes.

(14:10):
For several years, his success and fame seemed on an
endless upward trajectory. Somewhere along the line, he dropped that
Helios name and just was going by Moybridge. In the
early eighteen seventies, Moybridge had two people enter his life,
each of whom would impact it significantly, but in very

(14:31):
different ways. The first person that changed the course of
his life was Flora Stone. The two had met at
a gallery where Flora was working as a photo retoucher.
She was much younger than Moybridge, and she was already
married when the two of them met. Her husband, Lucia Stone,
was by all accounts unkind to her at best, and

(14:52):
Edward kind of stepped into help. He helped Flora get
a divorce on the grounds of cruelty. So her first marriage,
which she had gotten into when she was just seventeen,
ended in late eighteen seventy, and then on May twentieth,
eighteen seventy one, Flora and Edward were married. She was
twenty one at the time and he was forty. And

(15:13):
Flora was very pretty. She was vivacious, She loved to
go out and socialize, and Edward was not terribly interested
in things like going to the theater and socializing, so
they seemed like kind of an odd match, but according
to his friends, he truly loved her. The other person
was Leland Stanford born Amasa Leland Stanford in New York

(15:34):
in eighteen twenty four. Stanford had become one of the
most powerful men in California. As a young man, Stanford
had gone into law and had a practice in Wisconsin,
but then in eighteen fifty two he moved to Sacramento, California,
to capitalize on the growing population there and its demand
for mining supplies and various necessities. Yeah, he was a

(15:56):
merchant for a while and he did very well for himself,
and his success enabled him to also become involved in
the railroad industry. He became president of the Central Pacific
Railroad when it formed in eighteen sixty one, and he
was a lynchpin in the expansion of rail lines throughout
California for several decades. He also made a move into politics,

(16:18):
initially at the local level and then kind of moving
up the ladder until he became Governor of California in
eighteen sixty two. In eighteen eighty five, he would found
Stanford University. In the two thousand and three book River
of Shadows, author Rebecca Soulnett describes him this way, this
is kind of a snarky way to describe someone's appearance,

(16:39):
but it did tickle me a bit, And knowing that
Leland Stanford profited off a lot of people's work, I
feel like it's kind of funny, she wrote. Quote. Stanford
is something of an enigma. As a young man, he
had the smoldering good looks of a stage villain, but
as he became stouter, he came to look like a
badly taxidermised badger, smart enough to become the seventh riches

(17:00):
man in the United States. He was often regarded as
slow and doltish by his colleagues, so Stanford could easily
be his own episode. But in terms of why he
is germane to Moybridge's story, Leland Stanford was interested in horses,
but the first meeting between these two men had nothing

(17:20):
to do with horses. Moybridge, who was already famous, was
hired in eighteen seventy two to photograph Stanford's Sacramento home.
That project went well enough that Stanford telegraphed with another project.
He asked, would Moybridge come back to Sacramento and take
photos of Stanford's horse occident while he was running at

(17:41):
various gates, and Moybridge agreed. So. In truth, Stanford wanted
a very specific photo, and he thought that Moybridge was
the man who could deliver it. What he wanted was
an image that captured the moment during a horse's gait
when none of the animal's legs touched the ground. Owned
at the time, Stanford believed that this was part of

(18:03):
a horse's movement cycle, but he was a little bit
of an outlier. There's a lot of debate about this,
and most people thought that the horse always had at
least one limb touching the earth. The human eye could
not conclusively perceive this motion because of its speed, so
agreement on the matter was going to require imagery. Moybridge

(18:24):
once again traveled north to Sacramento to see Stanford, and
he took a lot of photos of occident. Unfortunately, we
don't have the first photos of accident that Edward took,
although we do have something that he took several years later.
They were not meant to be published, although they were
written about in an article in the San Francisco Examiner,

(18:45):
which was then reprinted throughout the United States. It read,
in part, quote, some time ago Governor Stanford, the owner
of the horse occident, desired to have a photograph of
the animal taken while said animal was going at full speed.
This article continued with saying that Weybridge quote procured all

(19:05):
the sheets to be had in the stable, and with
these made a reflecting background over this occident was trained
to trot. The great difficulty was to transfix an impression
while the horse was moving at a rate of thirty
eight feet to the second. The article then notes that
the first day of attempts was fruitless. The second day

(19:27):
Moybridge captured a shadow, but the third day he quote
contrived to have two boards clap past each other by
touching a spring, and in doing so leaven eighth of
an inch opening for the five hundredth part of a
second as the horse passed, and by an arrangement of
double lenses crossed, secured a negative that shows occident in

(19:49):
full motion a perfect likeness of the horse. This is
probably the most wonderful success in photographing ever yet achieved,
and the artist is proud out of his discovery, as
the governor is of the picture taken. So a thrilling achievement.
It seemed that Moybridge was poised to really create kind

(20:10):
of a completely new branch of photography in figuring out
how to capture movement, and rapid movement at that. But
as this project was underway, Moybridge's fame turned to infamy
when he was charged with murder. We'll explain how that
came to be after we pause and hear from the
sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.

(20:40):
We have to return to the subject of Flora, Moybridge's wife.
So because of his work, Edward traveled a lot, and
it seems that in his absence, Flora turned to another
person to escort her out on social engagements, and that
man was Harry Larkins, who was a drama critic. Harry
Larkins also wild story of his Maybe one day we'll

(21:01):
do a follow up where we talk about him. Initially,
this whole arrangement may have actually been okay with Moybridge.
As we said earlier, he didn't want to go to
the theater and he didn't want to go out and socialize,
so this may have seemed like great, she's got a
friend to handle it. But over time he grew really
suspicious of Harry and Harry's intentions toward Flora, and he

(21:22):
kind of dramatically and a little bit threateningly told the
critic to stay away from her. In late eighteen seventy three,
Flora and Edward had learned that they were expecting a child.
There had been two previous pregnancies that had not gone well,
and both of those babies had been still born, but
the third time everything went fine. They had a son

(21:43):
born on April fifteenth of the following year. They named
him Florado Heluis Moybridge. Several months after this baby was born,
in October of eighteen seventy four, Moybridge went to the
home of the midwife who had delivered the baby, named
Susan Smith, because she had not yet been paid and

(22:03):
he intended to give her that payment. So when he
got to Smith's home, he saw a photograph of his
infant son that he had not seen before, and when
he asked her where it came from, Smith stated that
Flora had the portrait of the child made at another
photographer right as a retoucher, she was familiar with a
lot of photo studios in the city. And then Smith

(22:25):
said that Flora had sent the midwife a copy of
that photo. When Moybridge picked up the photo to inspect it,
he turned it over and on the back, in his
wife's handwriting were the words little Harry. According to Smith's account,
after having seen that Moybridge looked like a madman, he
became very angry. He demanded that the midwife tell him

(22:46):
everything she knew, and she did, later saying that she
feared violence if she did not. There was one account
I read that said that she demanded money for this information,
but her account ounce that she gave when things got legal,
did not indicate that at all. So she told Moybridge

(23:06):
that Larry was the father and that she actually had
love letters between Larry and Flora to prove it, because
she had been helping the two of them by running
communications back and forth between them. The morning after this revelation,
Edward met with a business associate to settle some outstanding debts,
and then he started a journey. First he took a

(23:27):
ferry through San Francisco and San Pablo Bays to Vallejo, California.
Then he got on a train and went roughly forty
miles north to Calistoga, which is where Harry had moved
after Moybridge had told him to stay away from Flora.
Moybridge asked after Larkins in Calistoga and found out he
was staying on a ranch about eight miles out of town.

(23:49):
So he got a horse and buggy and he went there.
When he arrived at the ranch, Moybridge asked for Larkins,
and once he had the man in front of him,
he reportedly stated, this this is the reply to the
letter you sent my wife, and he shot Harry Larkins
at point blank range in the heart with a sick shooter.
Larkins dropped to the floor dead after taking a few

(24:11):
steps away from Weybridge. This trial was fascinating. It lasted
for only three days. Moybridge's defense team actually took an
approach that he did not agree with. The opening speech
began with quote, we claim a verdict both on the
ground of justifiable homicide and insanity. We shall prove that

(24:32):
years ago the prisoner was thrown from a stage, receiving
a concussion of the brain, which turned his hair from
black to gray in three days and has never been
the same since. Moybridge didn't believe that insanity was at
issue and played no part in his decision making process.
He'd been very calm and deliberate in his decision to
kill Larkins and believed that it was his right as

(24:55):
a husband to do so. After he shot Harry, he
was easily taken into custody and disarmed, and he was
so calm throughout his booking and charging. At no point
was there any effort to try to claim that Moybridge
had not killed Larkins. Everybody knew that he had done it.
Weybridge's defense team used the very thing that had made

(25:16):
him famous to convey that he was mentally unusual, prone
to impulse, and possibly insane, kind of playing into this
mad genius trope. Those daring positions he would take to
get his incredible Yosemite vista shots were invoked as evidence
that this was not a person most people would consider

(25:37):
sane or stable. Moybridge did testify on his own behalf,
although he did so on the condition that he be
asked no questions about the murder, and he said that
he would only talk about the eighteen sixty stagecoach accident.
When it came to discussing the crash, Weybridge stated in
testimony that he himself did not remember it. He stated quote,

(25:59):
I left Californi for a European tour some years ago.
In July eighteen sixty. I recollect taking supper at a
stage house on the road. We then got on board
the stage, which was drawn by six wild Mustang horses.
That is the last I recollect of that. Nine days
after that, I found myself at Fort Smith, one hundred

(26:19):
and fifty miles distant, lying in bed. There was a
small wound on the top of my head. When I recovered,
each eye formed an individual impression, so that looking at you,
for instance, I could see another man sitting by your side.
I had no taste nor smell, and was very deaf.
These symptoms continued in an acute form for probably three months.

(26:41):
I was under medical treatment for over a year, and
though he didn't personally remember the accident, he relayed what
had happened as told to him by another person who
was involved. Quote. A fellow passenger told me after I
had recovered consciousness that after leaving the station, we had
traveled for probably half an hour. We were then just

(27:02):
entering the Texas Cross timbers. The mustangs ran away the
driver was unable to control them. Just as we were
getting to the timbers. I remarked that the best plan
would be for us to get out of the back
of the stage, because I saw that an accident would
take place. He told me that I took out my
knife to cut the canvas back of the stage and

(27:23):
was preparing to leave when the stage ran against either
a rock or a stump and threw me out against
my head. Moybridge was acquitted not because the jury didn't
think he did it, but because they determined that the
murder was justified. The jury's verdict in this case is
its own unique situation because the jury basically completely ignored

(27:46):
the instructions of the judge. They had been told that
they had four options. They could find Boybridge guilty in
the first degree with either a death penalty or life imprisonment.
Those are two separate options. They could find him not guilty,
or they could find him not guilty by reason of insanity.
The judge also told them that adultery was not a

(28:09):
justification and should not be considered in their deliberation. It
took several votes for the jury to come to unanimity
and think. It took him a little over a day.
They had decided the Moybridge was not insane, but they
also could not put out of their consideration the adultery issue,
even though they had been expressly told not to factor

(28:31):
it in, so they returned a verdict of not guilty.
According to a newspaper report covering the trial, quote, they
say that if their verdict was not in accord with
the law of the books, it is within the law
of human nature that in short, under similar circumstances, they
would have done as Moybridge did, and they could not

(28:52):
conscientiously punish him for doing what they would have done themselves. Okay,
I stopped what I was doing when I was reading
through this for the first time and sent Holly a
message saying I was not expecting the jury to just
find that that guy needed killin. Yeah, Moybridge's reaction to

(29:15):
this verdict sounds kind of scary. He nearly fainted. He
reportedly not rocked in his chair and made movements that
seemed like convulsions. He had been completely certain that he
would be found guilty, but even after he recovered from
this and was an acquitted man, he got out of town.
He had already planned a trip abroad before the murder

(29:36):
and the trial. Moybridge had been given a photography job
with Leland's company, Union Pacific Railroad. He had to travel
through Mexico and Central America and take photos that could
be used for the railroad's publicity campaigns, and then he
also took photos for his own art business. Of course,
during all of this, Moybridge and Flora had divorced, but

(29:57):
she did not have much of a life after the incident.
She had a stroke in the summer of eighteen seventy five,
and she died two weeks later. As for the baby, Florado,
the San Francisco Examiner stated, quote, her babe is with
a French family at the Mission who have kindly cared
for it during the illness of its mother and will
it is believed adopted, but other accounts indicate that the

(30:20):
child was actually moved to an orphanage. In eighteen seventy seven,
Moybridge was back in California and he got back to
work on the original horse project that had brought him
together with Stanford. It was sort of like that whole
murder and trial had never happened. He was able to
pick up his life without any real fallout. Leland Stanford
had purchased a property in Palo Alto where they once

(30:44):
again photographed occident running. This time, Moybridge worked out a
way to solve the shutter speed problem that he had
in the early days of this assignment. He used a
dozen cameras at once, and each of them let him
take photos at an exposure of a thousandth of a second.
The setup for this series of photos was kind of incredible.

(31:06):
Moybridge had set the cameras up on one side of
the area where occident would run, and then he rigged
a tripwire to each camera. These trip wires were run
across this sort of it's not really a track, but
we'll call with that, across the running area, and while
they were not substantial enough to pose any impediment to
the horse, they were able to trigger the shutters on
the cameras, so Moybridge could capture shot after shot on

(31:30):
different cameras as the horse made its run. And he
eventually patented this setup and he got the shot, by
which we mean he got that long sought after image
of a horse midair with no legs touching the ground.
Accounts of the photo were published in papers around the
country and abroad, with a statement that they had been

(31:50):
retouched but in no way altered the image, just quote
for the purpose of giving a better effect of the details.
But this was still a time when most newspapers could
not publish photographs. Most write ups about the photo did
not include photos, and the images that did run in
articles about the accomplishment were actually line art that had

(32:12):
been traced from the photos. Moybridge had become really kind
of obsessed with this new method of photographing motion though,
so he had several more horse photography sessions, using other
horses from Stanford Stables, and also eventually using two dozen
cameras instead of twelve to really improve the process, and

(32:32):
then he also started photographing other animals and even people
in this way. To bring his progressive motion photos to
the public, Moybridge went on tour and to help show
his photos, he invented a device called a zoa praxis scope.
This was a circular glass plate device that had a
series of photos around the edge of the circle in sequence.

(32:54):
When the light was put behind the glass to project
it onto a wall or a screen, the glass would
spin and you could watch the subject of the photos
in motion. One of the problems of the zoopraxyscope was
that Weybridge couldn't use the photos he wanted to display
as he had originally taken them. If he did, the

(33:15):
image when it was projected would look squished, so it
appeared taller and narrower than the actual subject he had captured,
and he wanted it to look like his picture, so
he worked out this kind of cool setup that if
he tilted the prints of his photos at an angle
and curved the upper corners inward, and then rephotographed those photos.
When he projected them, the subjects retained their real life proportions.

(33:40):
Because the zoopraxyscope used a single rotating disc, it created
a single repeating loop of action, so it wasn't as
though you could tell a narrative story with it, But
still the zoopraxiscope was a marvel. Moibridge published a book
of his motion photos in eighteen eighty one titled The
Attitudes Animals in Motion, and he promoted it by going

(34:03):
on tour again, this time to Europe. But while he
was abroad he was professionally embarrassed by Leland Stanford when
he discovered that Stanford's friend J. D. B. Stillman, who
was a doctor, had published a book about animal motion
using tracings of his photographs. Stillman had not credited him

(34:23):
for taking the photos. Moybridge had been preparing a paper
on the same topic for the Royal Society of London,
and the society accused him of plagiarizing Stillman's work. Moybridge
sued Leland Stanford when he got back to the US,
but he lost. The photographer still had more success ahead
of him without Stanford, though, because of the success of

(34:46):
Moybridge's lectures with the Zoe praxiscope, he was able to
strike a deal with the University of Pennsylvania so the
school would fund his work creating photographic studies of motion.
Over the next nearly two decades, Moybridge was was able
to take thousands and thousands of photographs seen, the number
estimated at twenty thousand, and that culminated in the publication

(35:07):
of a portfolio in eighteen eighty seven titled Animal Locomotion
and electro Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements,
as well as two more books in eighteen ninety nine
in nineteen oh two. Those books were Animals in Motion
and The Human Figure in Motion. Many of the photographs
of humans in motion might elicit some giggles because a

(35:30):
lot of them are nude series featuring the subjects doing
very normal, everyday things like running or playing tennis. Honestly,
some of them feel like you're watching a very old
Benny hillskit. But they offered the scientific community a lot
of information about the way human bodies move, and artists
still use some of these photos today as reference when

(35:52):
drawing or painting people in motion. Moibridge had also presented
the Zoa Praxyscope at the eighteen ninety three Colombia Exposition
in Chicago, along with a lecture about the mechanics of
animal motion. By the time he published those later books,
Moybridge had finished his work with the University of Pennsylvania
and had continued to travel and take photos and lecture

(36:16):
and give demonstrations. He had become famous and sparked the
imaginations of countless creators, really serving as one of the
early pioneers of the film industry. Yeah. I can't state
strongly enough how much his little spinning discs made people
realize that you could capture and replay for an audience motion.

(36:38):
It was quite thrilling for a lot of people, and
very quickly other people started building on that idea. In
the first years of the twentieth century, Moybridge retired. He
returned to Kingston upon Thames, and he died there on
May eighth, nineteen oh four, at the home of his sister,
after a long struggle with cancer. Boy, he did kind

(36:58):
of change the world, though, even if he didn't get
to live long enough to see it. Yeah, I mean,
he'd lived long enough to enjoy fame and do some
other wild things. But I think motion pictures would have
really blown his mind. I had a very silly sentence
if he lived long enough to shoot somebody and be
acquitted for it. We were talking about that on Behind
the Scenes. I have a brief listener mail which I love,

(37:21):
and it's a person that thinks I wouldn't read this
listener mail, and I will, and I will tell you
why I want to do it. It's short. This is from
our listener nanny, who writes, Hi, ladies, have you ever
opened your podcast app and been so excited to see
the title of an episode that you did a little
happy dance? Because I just did. I haven't even listened
to it yet, but I had to write to tell
you how excited I was to see an episode on

(37:42):
sewing patterns, and not just one, a two parter. I
can't wait to get to listening. I'm attaching my obligatory
pet tax my ten year old rescue Roddy Mulu. Thank
you for all the amazing knowledge you share. One This
roth Wiler is so cute now, Oh my goodness, I'm
one of those people that it breaks my heart that
Rotwilers have a reputation for being dangerous because they are,

(38:07):
by nature the biggest cuddle bugs on the planet. So
if you see one that is like that, they have
been mistreated in a way that makes them that way,
and it makes me very frustrated. This baby looks like
it is very loved and goofy, and I love all
of that about it. Also, I just wanted to read
this because it was a little moment of phew, because
I know I want to talk about sewing patterns all

(38:28):
the long day, but as I was prepping that episode,
I was like, I hope anybody else cares. So thank you, Nanny.
Even if it's just you and me, I feel better.
If you would like to write to us and share
your thoughts about this or any other episode, and you know,
send us those cute animal pictures, we still love them.
You can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

(38:51):
You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio
app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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