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In the 19th century, the horse
was as important to work and leisure as the automobile is today. Knowledge
of the horses gaits, therefore, was especially valuable, particularly
to racehorse owners like Leland Stanford. Many attempts had been made
to capture the horses motion before Muybridges success. One
such effort, in the form of graphs made by the French physiologist Etienne-Jules
Marey, inspired Stanfords project. Mareys tracings showed
that a galloping horse was suspended in the air for a moment. Stanford,
however, wanted an image made by the camerathe machine that, some
argued, could not lie.
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Animal Mechanism, Etienne-Jules Marey, 1872
Lent by Smithsonian Libraries |