99 Facts About Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.

Eadweard Muybridge spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learned the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions.

Eadweard Muybridge returned to San Francisco in 1867, a man with a markedly changed personality.

In 1874, Muybridge shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, but was acquitted, in a controversial jury trial, on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

Today, Eadweard Muybridge is best known for his pioneering chronophotography of animal locomotion between 1878 and 1886, which used multiple cameras to capture the different positions in a stride; and for his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting painted motion pictures from glass discs that predated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

Eadweard Muybridge edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.

Eadweard Muybridge retired to his native England permanently in 1894.

Eadweard Muybridge used this as the name of his studio and gave it to his only son, as a middle name: Florado Helios Muybridge, born in 1874.

Eadweard Muybridge used "Eadweard Muybridge" for the rest of his career.

Eadweard Muybridge's father was a grain and coal merchant, with business spaces on the ground floor of their house adjacent to the River Thames at No 30 High Street.

At the age of 20, Eadweard Muybridge decided to seek his fortune.

Eadweard Muybridge spent his first years importing and selling books from the UK, and became familiar with early photography through his acquaintance with New York daguerreotypist Silas T Selleck.

Eadweard Muybridge arrived in New Orleans in January 1855, and was registered there as a book agent by April.

Eadweard Muybridge probably arrived in California around the autumn of 1855, when it had not yet been a state for more than five years.

Eadweard Muybridge visited the new state capital, Sacramento, as an agent selling illustrated Shakespeare books in April 1856, and soon after settled at 113 Montgomery Street in San Francisco.

Eadweard Muybridge sold original landscape photography by Carleton Watkins, as well as photographic copies of paintings.

Edward's brother George Eadweard Muybridge came to San Francisco in 1858 but died of tuberculosis soon after.

Eadweard Muybridge was ejected from the vehicle and hit his head on a rock or other hard object.

Eadweard Muybridge woke up in a hospital bed at Fort Smith, Arkansas, with no recollection of the nine days after he had taken supper at a wayside cabin 150 miles away, not long before the accident.

Eadweard Muybridge suffered from a bad headache, double vision, deafness, loss of taste and smell, and confusion.

Eadweard Muybridge was treated at Fort Smith for three weeks before he went to a doctor in New York City.

Eadweard Muybridge fled the noise of the city and stayed in the countryside.

Eadweard Muybridge then went back to New York for six weeks and sued the stage company, which earned him a $2,500 compensation.

Eadweard Muybridge stayed with his mother in Kennington and later with his aunt while in England.

Eadweard Muybridge later stated that he had become a photographer at the suggestion of Gull.

Eadweard Muybridge wrote a letter to his uncle Henry, who had emigrated to Sydney, with details of the patents and he mentioned having to visit Europe for business for several months.

Eadweard Muybridge turned up in Paris in 1862 and again in 1864.

Eadweard Muybridge may have taken up photography sometime between 1861 and 1866.

Eadweard Muybridge possibly learned the wet-plate collodion process in England, and was possibly influenced by some of well-known English photographers of those years, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, and Roger Fenton.

Eadweard Muybridge returned to San Francisco on 13 February 1867 a changed man.

Eadweard Muybridge was much more careless about his appearance, was easily agitated, could suddenly take objection to people and soon after act like nothing had happened, and he would regularly misstate previously-arranged business deals.

Eadweard Muybridge converted a lightweight two-wheel, one-horse carriage into a portable darkroom to carry out his work, and with a logo on the back dubbed it "Helios' Flying Studio".

Eadweard Muybridge had acquired highly proficient technical skills and an artist's eye, and became very successful in photography, focusing principally on landscape and architectural subjects.

Eadweard Muybridge constantly tinkered with his cameras and chemicals, trying to improve the sales appeal of his pictures.

An article published in 2017 and an expanded book document that Eadweard Muybridge heavily edited and modified his photos, inserting clouds or the moon, even adding volcanos to his pictures for artistic effects.

Early in his new career, Muybridge was hired by Robert B Woodward to take extensive photos of his Woodward's Gardens, a combination amusement park, zoo, museum, and aquarium that had opened in San Francisco in 1866.

Eadweard Muybridge took pictures of ruins after the 21 October 1868 Hayward earthquake.

Eadweard Muybridge took enormous safety risks to make his photographs, using a heavy view camera and stacks of glass plate negatives.

Eadweard Muybridge returned with numerous stereoscopic views and larger plates.

Eadweard Muybridge selected 20 pictures to be retouched and manipulated for a subscription series that he announced in February 1868.

Eadweard Muybridge's photographs showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West; if human figures were portrayed, they were dwarfed by their surroundings, as in Chinese landscape paintings.

In comparing the styles of the two photographers, Watkins has been called "a classicist, making serene, stately pictures of a still, eternal world of beauty", while Eadweard Muybridge was "a romantic who sought out the uncanny, the unsettling, the uncertain".

Regardless, Eadweard Muybridge started to develop his own leading-edge innovations in photography, especially in the capturing of ever-faster motion.

In 1868, Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by the US government to travel to the newly acquired US territory of Alaska to photograph the Tlingit Native Americans, occasional Russian inhabitants, and dramatic landscapes.

In 1873, Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by the US Army to photograph the "Modoc War" dispute with the Native American tribe in northern California and Oregon.

In 1873, Eadweard Muybridge managed to use a single camera to shoot a small and very fuzzy picture of the racehorse Occident running, at Union Park racetrack in Sacramento.

Eadweard Muybridge promised to study better solutions, but his work on higher-speed photography would take several years to develop, and was delayed by events in his personal life.

Eadweard Muybridge experimented with more sensitive photographic emulsions to work with the shorter exposure times.

In July 1877, Eadweard Muybridge made a new picture of Occident at full speed, with improved techniques and a much clearer result.

Eadweard Muybridge allowed reporters to study the original negative, but as he and Stanford were planning a new project that would convince everyone, they saw no need to prove that this image was authentic.

In June 1878, Eadweard Muybridge created sequential series of photographs, now with a battery of 12 cameras along the race track at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm.

The Daily Alta California reported that Eadweard Muybridge first exhibited magic lantern projected slides of the photographs at the San Francisco Art Association on 8 July 1878.

In 1879, Eadweard Muybridge continued with additional studies using 24 cameras, and published a very limited edition portfolio of the results.

Eadweard Muybridge had images from his motion studies hand-copied in the form of silhouettes or line drawings onto a disc, to be viewed in the machine he had invented, which he called a "zoopraxiscope".

Eadweard Muybridge presented a copy to the wife of Leland Stanford.

On 20 May 1871,41-year-old Eadweard Muybridge married 21-year-old divorcee Flora Shallcross Stone.

Eadweard Muybridge did not care for many of the amusements that she sought, so she went to the theatre and other attractions without him, and he seemed to be fine with that.

Eadweard Muybridge was more of the type that would stay up all night to read classics.

Eadweard Muybridge was used to leaving home by himself for days, weeks or even months, visiting faraway places for personal projects or assignments.

Eadweard Muybridge intervened several times and believed the affair was over when he sent Flora to stay with a relative and Larkyns found a job at a mine near Calistoga, California.

In mid-October 1874, Eadweard Muybridge learned how serious the relationship between his wife and Larkyns really was.

At her place, Eadweard Muybridge came across a picture of Florado with "Harry" written on the back in Flora's handwriting, suggesting that she believed the child to be fathered by Larkyns.

Larkyns died that night, and Eadweard Muybridge was arrested without protest and put in the Napa jail.

Eadweard Muybridge felt he was treated very kindly by the officers and was a little proud of the influence he had on other inmates, which had earned him everyone's respect.

Eadweard Muybridge had protested the abuse of a "Chinaman" from a tough inmate, by claiming "No man of any country whose misfortunes shall bring him here shall be abused in my presence" and had strongly but politely voiced threats against the offender.

Eadweard Muybridge had addressed an outburst of profanity in a similar fashion.

Shortly after his acquittal in February 1875, Eadweard Muybridge left the United States on a previously planned 9-month photography trip to Central America, now acting as a "working exile".

Flora died suddenly in July 1875 while Eadweard Muybridge was in Central America.

Eadweard Muybridge had placed their son, Florado Helios Muybridge, with a French couple.

In 1876, Eadweard Muybridge had the boy moved from a Catholic orphanage to a Protestant one and paid for his care.

Eadweard Muybridge often travelled to American cities as well as back to England and Europe to publicise his work.

Eadweard Muybridge displayed his photographs on screen and showed moving pictures projected by his zoopraxiscope.

Eadweard Muybridge lectured at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal Society.

However, as a result of Eadweard Muybridge not being credited in the book, the Royal Society of Arts withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion studies in photography, and refused to publish a paper he had submitted, accusing him of plagiarism.

Eadweard Muybridge filed a lawsuit against Stanford to gain credit, but it was delayed two years and then dismissed out of court.

In 1883, Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, arranged by artist Thomas Eakins and University of Pennsylvania trustee Fairman Rogers.

Between 1883 and 1886, Eadweard Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in a dedicated studio at the northeast corner of 36th and Pine streets in Philadelphia.

Eadweard Muybridge was now able to afford multiple larger high-quality lenses, giving him the ability to make simultaneous pictures from multiple viewpoints, with a clarity and tonal range not achieved earlier.

In 1884, Eakins briefly worked alongside Eadweard Muybridge, to learn more about the application of photography to the study of human and animal motion.

Eakins later favoured the use of multiple exposures superimposed on a single photographic negative to study motion more precisely, while Eadweard Muybridge continued to use multiple cameras to produce separate images which could be projected by his zoopraxiscope.

Eadweard Muybridge used banks of 12 custom-made cameras to photograph professors, athletes, students, disabled patients from the Blockley Almshouse, and local residents, all in motion.

Eadweard Muybridge photographed at least 9 sequences showing the movements of neurological patients.

Eadweard Muybridge borrowed animals from the Philadelphia Zoo, to study their movements in detail.

Eadweard Muybridge produced sequences showing farm, industrial, construction, and household work, military manoeuvres, and everyday activities.

Eadweard Muybridge photographed athletic activities such as baseball, cricket, boxing, wrestling, discus throwing, and a ballet dancer performing.

Toward the end of this period, Eadweard Muybridge spent much of his time selecting and editing his photos in preparation for publication.

Eadweard Muybridge's work contributed substantially to developments in the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics.

Recent scholarship has noted that in his later work, Eadweard Muybridge was influenced by, and in turn, influenced the French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey.

In 1881, Eadweard Muybridge first visited Marey's studio in France and viewed stop-motion studies before returning to the US to further his own work in the same area.

At the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Eadweard Muybridge presented a series of lectures on the "Science of Animal Locomotion" in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition.

Eadweard Muybridge used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public.

Eadweard Muybridge sold a series of souvenir phenakistoscope discs to demonstrate simple animations, using painted colour images derived from his photographs.

Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England in 1894 and continued to lecture extensively throughout Great Britain.

Eadweard Muybridge retained control of his negatives, which he used to publish two popular books of his work, Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion, both of which remain in print over a century later.

Eadweard Muybridge died on 8 May 1904 in Kingston upon Thames of prostate cancer at the home of his cousin Catherine Smith.

Eadweard Muybridge's body was cremated, and its ashes interred in a grave at Woking in Surrey.

Eadweard Muybridge bequeathed a selection of his equipment to Kingston Museum in Greater London.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds a large collection of Eadweard Muybridge material, including hundreds of collotype prints, gelatin internegatives, glass plate positives, phenakistoscope cards, and camera equipment, totalling just under 800 objects.

Eadweard Muybridge's influence extended to many artists and beyond, including efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, entrepreneur Walt Disney, Nobel-Prize chemist Ahmed Zewail, and the International Society of Biomechanics.