The Horse in Motion: The Palo Alto Racetrack That Led to Moving Pictures
Watch: the story in under 30 seconds
In June 1878, on a track at Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, a row of cameras settled an old argument: does a moving horse ever have all four feet off the ground? It does. The pictures that proved it are an ancestor of every film made since, and they were taken on land that later became Stanford University.
The setup
Stanford, a former governor of California and an owner of racehorses, first hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1872. Muybridge came back to the work in 1877. By the next summer he had a shed beside the Palo Alto track with twelve cameras in a row, all aimed across the track at a white backdrop marked with numbered lines. Threads stretched across the track. As the horse broke each thread, it fired a camera.
Six days in June
June 15, 1878. With the press watching, the trotter Abe Edgington pulls a sulky through the cameras, driven by C. Marvin.
June 19, 1878. The mare Sallie Gardner, ridden by G. Domm, runs the same line at a gallop. The printed card says the negatives were made 27 inches apart, about one twenty-fifth of a second from one to the next.
Muybridge published the results as a set of cards called The Horse in Motion, sold through a gallery in San Francisco. Shown one after another, the frames move.
A date to be careful with
Many accounts give June 15 as the day Sallie Gardner ran. The card itself is dated June 19, and the June 15 card shows Abe Edgington trotting. We go by the cards.
The Library of Congress holds the cards, and they are in the public domain. This is one entry in the full Bay Area horse history timeline.
Sources
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Horse in Motion: "Sallie Gardner" (the card's printed text)
Wikipedia, "The Horse in Motion" (the six cards and their dates)
Fstoppers, "Murder, Movies, and Horses" (the shed, the threads, the backdrop)
California Curated, "When Muybridge Made Motion Visible in Palo Alto"