After a few years of tinkering—and a lot more money than Stanford expected—Muybridge eventually solved the two big technical problems. First, he helped develop a chemical for film that was far more light-sensitive. It could therefore capture a clean picture after only a brief exposure.
Second, he developed a far faster shutter system. It actually involved two shutters that slid past each other. Each one had a hole in it, and when the holes aligned for a split-second <CLICK>, you’d get a picture.
Everything came together that morning in June 1878. Muybridge set his equipment up in a white shed near the racetrack, with an open side facing the dirt. Inside were a dozen of Muybridge’s quick-acting cameras, each several inches apart. On the opposite side of the track hung a long white sheet, to make the brown-colored horse stand out.
The horse’s name was Abe Edgington. At Muybridge’s signal, Abe took off, galloping along at 40 feet per second.
Harnessed to Abe was a two-wheeled cart. There were twelve electrical wires buried in the racetrack dirt along Abe’s path. When the cart’s wheels crossed each wire, they completed a circuit, and one of the twelve cameras would fire. <SNAP> Using this setup, Muybridge managed to snap twelve pictures in less than one second. <RAT-A-TAT> It sounded like a machine gun.
Afterward, Muybridge retreated to a dark room to develop the pictures. Leland Stanford paced nervously. Given the inevitable budget overruns, he’d spent $50,000 on the project—$1.2 million today. Would it all prove a waste of money—or worse, would he be proved wrong and embarrassed?
Finally, after twenty minutes, Muybridge emerged from the dark room. And when he showed Stanford the pictures, the railroad tycoon threw his arms up in triumph. Just as he’d predicted, all four hooves clearly left the ground mid-stride. Horses were not eternally earthbound; however briefly, they do fly.
Word about the photographs spread quickly, although the reactions outside Palo Alto were mixed. The masses loved the experiment, and Muybridge became world-famous.
Artists, meanwhile, had a different reaction. Many painters and sculptors, in fact, got downright angry. The spread of photography was already poaching on their territory. Now, Muybridge was making them look foolish.
As one critic noted, the pictures “laid bare all the mistakes that sculptors and painters had made in their renderings” of horses. Indeed, compared to Muybridge’s photos, their depictions of running horses suddenly looked ridiculous—with horses splayed out sometimes as if doing a belly flop.