Wager of the flying horse: Birth of the “kinēma-neanderthal”.

Feb 7

Before you get excited, let us clarify, kinēma-neanderthal is not an actual word. We made it up for the purpose of this section.

Pretext

By the early 1830s, artists and scientists had already learned the science of perceived motion on a theoretic level. Optical Toys like the phenakistoscope(1832) or the zoetrope(1834) used to leverage 2 phenomena: persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon to create the illusion of motion by mounting successive phase drawings(Multiple drawings of different moments in a single motion) on a twirling disk.

Skipping a few decades, covering the creation of photo positive, photo negative and the evolution of the camera to the point of clicking images with the exposure time of one hundredth of a second.

(If some of the words so far seem alien or intimidating, don’t worry, that’s most of the technical jargon necessary for this section. Before you turn your back on learning them, try looking them up, they sound more complex than they are.)

The Wager

By the mid 19th century, photography had become a part of public life. In 1872, a former California Governor and railroad tycoon by the name of Leland Stanford made a wager with his colleagues for $25,000.

The wager stated that at some point during a gallop, all four of a horses hooves would be off the ground. Conventionally visual artists used to paint horses in the “Flying Gallop” pose to depict they were mid-stride. The pose showcased all four limbs of horses straightened and extended during a gallop.

Introducing: Eadweard Muybridge

To settle the wager, Stanford hired a photographer called Eadweard Muybridge(Born Edward James Muggeridge), who had previously photographed the tycoon’s Sacramento home.

In order to settle the wager, he had to capture images much faster than technology at the time had previously permitted. To overcome this challenge, he would have had to dramatically improve the photographic shutter speed(how fast it captures an image).

The Trial

He started conducting his trials almost immediately, but in 1874, the trials had to be put on hold since Muybridge had to face instead, a murder trial for the murder of his wife’s lover, Harry Larkyns.

He was then acquitted in 1875 on the grounds of “Justifiable Homicide”(no, acts of revenge were not considered justified even back then, he claimed his erratic behaviour was caused by a head injury).

The Return and Breakthrough

It wasn’t until 1877 that Muybridge would come back to work for Stanford, but the experiments were soon delivering reliable results.

On June 19, 1878(Remember this one) Muybridge clicked and delivered a series of photographs of Stanford’s horse “Sallie Gardner” galloping at the Palo Alto Track. The series was titled “Sallie Gardner’s Run”.

The feat of clicking this series was finally achieved using a battery of twelve cameras equipped with stereoscopic lenses(Once again, sounds more complex than it is) achieving a shutter speed of about 1/1000th of a second.

The Outcome of the Wager

For starters, the series proved to be in favour of Stanford’s hypothesis, winning him the wager with his colleagues. The photographs in the series had captured moments where the horse did in fact have all four hooves off the ground.

Secondly, the “Flying Gallop” soon disappeared from art and illustrations, now that ‘Sallie Gardner’s Run’ presented definitive proof against the pose.

Pushback to push forward.

The publishing of the series started a debate among artists on whether the graceful ‘Flying Gallop’ was a superior representation of reality than the poses captured in ’Sallie Gardner’s Run’.

At the centre of this debate, in favour of the ‘Flying Gallop’, French Sculptor Auguste Rodin said “It is the artist who is truthful, and it the the photograph that lies, for in reality, time does not stop.”

While not directly in response, in 1879, Muybridge himself invented the ‘Zoopraxiscope’. It was a hand-cranked device that ran a series of sequential images past the human eye in rapid succession, hence ‘re-animating’ the illusion of motion.

Viewing the first 11 images of Sallie Gardner’s run in rapid succession at the speed of at least 24 frames per second brings the moment back to life.

And therefore, creating the first “Movie”.