Author: Rebecca Solnit

Publisher/Date: Bloomsbury (2003, 1st printing)

Format/Condition: New hardcover book with dust jacket in fine condition. Notes, Photographic Credits, Index. Illus., b&w photos. 305 pages. Measures : 9.2 × 6.2 × 1.3 inches

Description: In 1872 an Englishman called Edward Muybridge photographed a horse in California and thereby invented the essentials of motion picture technology. His patron wanted to know if the horse ever lifted all four hooves at once.

In this biography of Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his motion studies of horses (which ushered in the age of the motion picture), author Solnit covers the innovator’s unusual life story, and details his experiments. She also discusses how his work contributed to the emerging technology of the computer, and the influence of California—where Muybridge conducted his experiments—in his life and work.

A gifted and obsessed eccentric, he was a photographic innovator who left a vast and enormously varied body of work. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1850s and settled in San Francisco. In 1872 he made some experiments in photographing moving objects for the U.S. government. Afterward he was engaged by Leland Stanford to record the movements of a horse with a series of sequential still cameras triggered by threads. He invented (1881) the zoöpraxiscope, which projected animated pictures on a screen, a forerunner of the motion picture.