One person with a big stake in the debate was not a scientist, but racehorse enthusiast Leland Stanford. To understand it was really very critical,” says Marta Braun, a professor at Ryerson University, who has studied Muybridge for almost 30 years.

You went to war on horses, and any kind of large-scale movement was done on horses. “We have to remember that the horse was the source of all locomotion of importance. Leland Stanford wanted to understand the most granular details about how they moved, and he believed the photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, would help him do it.

The “unsupported transit” controversy asked whether or not all four of a horse’s hooves came off the ground when it runs, and it polarized both scientists and casual observers. A new episode of Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast details Muybridge’s landmark photographic accomplishment.įor years, the public was debating the workings of a horse’s gallop. “The breakthrough is that the camera can see things that the human eye can't see, and that we can use photography to access our world beyond what we know it to be,” says Shannon Perich, the Smithsonian’s curator of photography at the National Museum of American History. When the Industrial Revolution was underway, and scholars were obsessed with identifying, cataloging and potentially mechanizing nature, Muybridge’s photo sequence of a moving horse was a milestone. In the 19th century, it seemed as though Muybridge had used photography to stop time. He showed the world what could be guessed but never seen-every stage of a horse’s gallop when it sped across a track. In June of 1878, before the rise of Hollywood and even the earliest silent movies, Eadweard Muybridge shocked a crowd of reporters by capturing motion.

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