Eadweard Muybridge (born April 9, 1830,Kingston upon Thames,Surrey, England—died May 8, 1904, Kingston upon Thames) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies ofmotion and in motion-pictureprojection.

Edward James Muggeridge adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to theUnited States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley,California, made him world famous.

Muybridge’s experiments in photographingmotion began in 1872, when the railroad magnateLeland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in atrotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fastshutter. The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife’s lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for theUnion Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford.

In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford’scontention.

The results of Muybridge’s work were widely published, most often in the form of line drawings taken from his photographs. They were criticized, however, by those who thought that horse’s legs could never assume such unlikely positions. To counter suchcriticism, Muybridge gave lectures on animallocomotion throughout the United States and Europe. These lectures were illustrated with azoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing theillusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the moderncinema, was a sensation at theWorld’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.

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Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under theauspices of theUniversity of Pennsylvania. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual compendium of human movements for the use of artists and scientists. Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolioAnimal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Muybridge continued to publicize and publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.