Muybridge: The Man Who Shot a Horse, His Wife’s Lover, and the First Frame of Cinema
Before he made a horse fly, he made a bullet fly through a man
Hey everyone,
This week, Efosa takes us on a journey through the remarkable, and sometimes disturbing, life of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer who essentially invented how we see motion in film. While many know of Muybridge’s groundbreaking horse gallop sequence (recently featured in Jordan Peele's "Nope"), few realize the dramatic personal story behind the frames: a brilliant mind forever altered by trauma, a shocking murder, and an obsession that ultimately changed visual storytelling forever.
As we build tools for the next generation of video pros, it's humbling to reflect on those who made the ‘impossible’ viable.
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You may have heard of Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward James Muggeridge), especially if you watched Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi film Nope, where his Horse in Motion served as a central visual and thematic motif.
But if you didn’t, and you’ve ever seen an image of a horse gallop in slow motion, a dancer mid-leap, or a punch land frame by frame, then you’ve seen his work.
He didn’t just capture motion. He invented how we see it.
However, before he made a horse fly, he made a bullet fly through a man..
Let’s rewind the frame.
The Man, The Murder, The Motion
Muybridge wasn’t always Eadweard. Born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830, England, he later respelled his name with medieval flair and the conviction of a man determined to make his mark.
He wasn’t wrong.
He began as a bookseller in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. But in 1860, when Eadweard Muybridge boarded a stagecoach near the Texas border, his life was due to change forever.
The coach crashed violently, killing the driver, injuring all aboard, and hurling Muybridge from the wreckage. He struck his head, losing consciousness and when he woke up in a hospital bed in Arkansas, nine days had completely vanished from memory.
Headaches, deafness, double vision, and a disconnection from reality were his symptoms.
In hindsight, neurologists believe the crash caused significant damage to his orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain tied to decision-making and inhibition.
Muybridge was never quite the same. More erratic. Obsessive.
But, crucially, more inventive.
The Missing Frames
There’s a gap in the reel.
After the accident, between 1862 and 1865, there’s little recollection of where Eadweard Muybridge was or what he was doing.
Just scattered sightings..Paris, briefly. Then again. Then nothing.
He resurfaced as a man with a new name (“Muybridge,” an edit of “Muggeridge”) and a string of short-lived corporate schemes in silver mining and Ottoman banking that folded faster than they formed.
What we do know is that when he emerged from recovery, he took up photography, and with it, obsession.
He trekked through Yosemite with a 40-pound camera, glass plates on his back, scaling cliffs to capture panoramic views never seen before.
Part Ansel Adams, part mad scientist. But it wasn’t landscapes that made him famous.
The $25,000 Horse Question
In the 1872, former California governor and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford allegedly posed a simple question:
When a horse gallops, are all four hooves ever off the ground at the same time?
Photography was in its infancy so the only way to answer this question was via memories or paintings. Stanford wasn’t convinced. So he hired Muybridge to prove it.
Muybridge set up a row of 12 cameras triggered by tripwires across a racetrack. The results were revolutionary: frame-by-frame images of a horse suspended mid-air, frozen in time like never before.
It was photography, but much more. It was motion dissected.
It was also, quietly, the birth of cinema.
Before the Flipbook, The Firearm
Of course, the story doesn’t go from racetrack to red carpet so cleanly.
In 1874, Muybridge discovered his wife, Flora, was having an affair with a drama critic named Major Harry Larkyns. He confronted her but she denied any wrongdoing. So he opened her drawer and there, he found a photo of “their” infant son. On the back: “Little Harry.”
Muybridge was no Harry so you do the math.
I’ll do it for you.
Mrs. Muybridge + Major Harry Larkyns + 9 months = "Little Harry"
"Little Harry" ≠ Eadweard Muybridge
Thus:
He found Larkyns and shot him point blank in the chest, killing him.
Muybridge pleaded insanity. Experts cited his stagecoach accident and possible brain damage as a valid excuse.
The jury didn’t buy it but they acquitted him anyway. “Justifiable homicide,” they said. “Larkyns had it coming," they said.
Muybridge walked free and within two years, he was back at Stanford’s racetrack.
The Flipbook Revolution
From shooting man and horse came a new obsession: What else could be shown frame by frame?
Muybridge built a machine, the zoopraxiscope, which projected painted discs of sequential images to create the illusion of motion. It predates Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph by more than a decade.
A man walking. A gymnast flipping. A woman throwing water.
Each one a single second, stretched across dozens of glass plates.
A marriage of art and science. A spectacle..
The Legacy in 24 Frames
Today, Muybridge’s influence shows up in unlikely places.
Muybridge’s motion studies, particularly Animal Locomotion (1887), are still taught in animation, visual effects, and art schools today. They break down motion into frame-by-frame studies, offering a visual grammar of how humans and animals move.
Animators at Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, and elsewhere have cited his work as foundational in understanding realistic movement, weight, and rhythm.
Even your phone’s slo-mo mode? It owes a debt to the man who wired 12 shutters to strings and bet it all on a horse.
His photos live in the Smithsonian. His machines sit in the Royal Society.
His story? Mostly hidden, except for film and animation buffs, and the occasional true crime podcast.
The Final Frame
He was a man of contradictions: An artist obsessed with precision. A pioneer who shot to create and once, to kill.
So next time you scrub through a timeline or slow down a shot to find the perfect frame, spare a thought for Eadweard Muybridge.
A murderer who made movies possible.
Not the director. Or the star.
The one who asked a question, pulled the trigger on an idea and heartbreak, then gave the world a new way to see.
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