This month in 1878, a horse named Sallie Gardner ran past a series of cameras in Palo Alto, California, a series of cameras that had been set up in a way that could see a horse’s gallop in a way our eyes could not.
And in a way, this running mare became a kind of early movie star.
Sallie Gardner the horse was owned by Leland Stanford, the railroad tycoon and former governor of California.
Stanford famously wanted to know whether a horse ever had all four hooves off the ground while it ran, and with a fortune like his, he was able to put people to work to find the answer.
The man he hired was Eadweard Muybridge, an English immigrant who had built a reputation for breaking new ground in photography and (to put it very mildly) eccentricity.
Muybridge had taken up photographer after he suffered head injuries after a stagecoach crash in the 1860s.
His work won acclaim, but by some accounts his personality changed in the accident.
In fact, his job photographing Stanford’s horses had to be put on hold for a time because Muybridge was on trial for fatally shooting a man he accused of having an affair with his wife (!)
It took years (even setting aside the time he was on trial) to build a system of cameras that could work at a high enough speed to show all of the horse’s movements.
There were 12 cameras in a row, hooked up to a special apparatus that trigger each camera’s shutter one-twenty-fifth of a second apart from each other, right as Sallie Gardner the horse ran past at 36 miles per hour.
The experiment was a success in a lot of ways.
For starters, it answered Leland Stanford’s question: yes, horses do have all four hooves off the ground at times when they run.
It also showed a way photography could be useful for science as well as art.
And coming up with a way to take high-speed sequences of still photos led to a way to replay those still photos at high speed, which of course is what we today refer to as movies.
Now humans are a big part of this story, but it was the horse that set everything in motion.
So I hope Sallie Gardner got an Academy Award for her contributions to the industry.
Starting tomorrow in Deridder, Louisiana, it’s the Beauregard Watermelon Festival.
They are leaning into the theme of the fest: there’s a Watermelon Pageant, a Melon Voice Singing Contest, a Watermelon Weiner Dog Derby, a Seed Spitting Contest and a Melon Mullet Contest!
Eadweard Muybridge (International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum)
Beauregard Watermelon Festival
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Photos by Eadweard Muybridge via Wikicommons
