Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton

Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton
: invention of movements

Anywhere where people are gathering, we always carry our camera. On vacation trip, family gathering, social meetings, birthday parties or any event, we carry our camera. It could be digital camera, DSLR camera, camcorder or even the camera attached on a phone, whatever the device is, we carry it and take the precious moments that we want to keep in our memory with it.
What more fascinating is, it does not take much time to capture those times. Just by pressing one button, we can keep the memories in our pocket, and remember it forever by watching it. However, it was just a dream for about a century ago. People instead capture those moments by painting and drawing of the scene and loved people, but it took amount of time, and it didn’t look exactly the same as people wanted.
Around that time, Joseph Nicephore Niepce invented Heliograph technique, and produced the first photography that remained as the first permanent photograph. Inspired by him, Louis Daquerre invented Daguerreotype, then William Henry Fox Talbot invented advanced Calotype process of photography and re-inspired others to reach to current day’s technology of photography.
However, their inventions were limited to still cut picture, not moving ones or describing motions we love to watch. It is hard to imagine a life without the motion pictures such as films or animations. Nothing would have been possible without those technologies, because lots of sources we get knowledge and entertain us come from those moving images. Movie stars and associated workers would lose their jobs, documentaries describing other part of the world which we are not familiar with will not be able to know, and for my case, I wouldn’t be able to watch my grandfather playing with me through video and recall those beautiful memory.

It was the effort and passion of Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton who made our current entertainment through photography and furthermore, movies and videos. It doesn’t mean that they invented the video, but Eadweard Muybridge gave the idea of moving pictures, and whether it was indirect or direct, he influenced others to create cinematograph (It is a film camera, by Lumiere brothers). And in contrary, Harold Edgerton impressed us with the photos that look like the time has stopped while it is actually moving.
Then how did they thought about this techniques that surprises us and what process it took them to develop all those fantastic ideas into real life? By introducing and comparing those two great artists, their contribution to the photography will be researched throughout this paper.

Eadweard Muybridge

Muybridge was born in 1830 in London with the name Edward Muggeridge. (Hendrick,10)
He moved to United States in 1852, and moved to San Francisco in 1855 when he was looking for new career. He first worked as a publish agent and bookseller. However he got an accident, so he went back to England for few years. While staying in England, he happened to learn about the wet-collodion process. He started to get interested in photography and when his injury was cured, he came back to United States in 1866. Surprisingly, when he came back, he was commissioned to take pictures of the Pacific coast by US government, so he did. It was the project that US was working on to promote Manifest Destiny of United States, which was the American belief that US was destined to expand from Atlantic to Pacific areas. One of the photo he took was the Yosemite Studies, created between 1868-1873. Along with this pictures, his series of photographs of Pacific got noticed and exhibited, and he started to build his fame as landscape photographer. He changed his name from Edward Muggeridge to Eadweard Muybridge around this time. Later he joined the expedition to Alaska where was the recently gained territory, and built his reputation more and more as a photographer. Around mid 1870s, one man named Leland Stanford, the Governor of California who loved horses, got into one argument with his companies that all hooves of the horses are off the ground at some point during the gallop. Stanford wanted to prove it scientifically and sought a person who could solve this problem. Muybridge was hired and asked to solve photographically.It wasn’t much successful at first, because at that time, a single picture could take up to few minutes and it took much times to develop other methods to take pictures of something in motion. He found a new fast working string shutter which he said it works less than the two thousandth part of a second, but it wasn’t successful either. The string attached to the camera were stretched across the track and horse broke it during their running, so he replaced it to electrically controlled ones(“History of Photography-Eadweard Muybridge”). In 1878, he finally succeeded to photograph a horse in gallop in 12cuts in 1 plate The movement of the horse was captured with its legs switches from front leg’s pulling to back leg’s pushing motion, and also showed that all hooves were off the ground at once at some point. It was titled as
The Horse in Motion (Fig.1). It was widely published and it was said that the first motion picture was born, and remain as the early forms of video (“History of Photography-Eadweard Muybridge”). By this fame, he was later invited by University of Pennsylvania, and funded by them to study more of motion pictures under the university. With Thomas Eakins, they devised more advanced camera, and Muybridge was able to take more motions with perfectly developed camera. The shutters were controlled by clockwork so it can capture at any time, and three of those devices made it possible to take motion from side, front and back(“History of Photography-Eadweard Muybridge”). Muybridge’s motion pictures then advanced to moving pictures such as Buffalo Galloping in 1887 (Fig.2) and Sequence of a Woman Walking Downstairs (around late 19th century) (Fig.3). It was just a still shot photographs that everyone was researching and studying before Muybridge. Maybe it wouldn’t be possible without Stanford’s favor, but Muybridge sure did thought of moving images in his mind and brought it into our real life, and made others to think about moving pictures. Then what about Harold Edgerton?

Harold Edgerton

While Muybridge presented the movement from still images, Harold Edgerton presented us the still image from movement. Just like Muybridge, Edgerton was not a photographer at first. Born in Nebraska in 1903, he first learned photography from his uncle, and bought his first camera at the age of 15. He got interested in to take a picture with the new devices because he was also interested in electrical things. Edgerton majored electrical engineering, and looked like he wished to live a life as an engineer. He was awarded by using stroboscope to study synchronous motors, and his first attention to using stroboscope on everything started (Grundberg). Another thing that he wanted to do was to capture the things that human eyes cannot catch. Around that time, by early 1930s, he started to fall again into photography, and what came into his mind was using strobe light to capture the things in motion that human eyes cannot see.
He invented a repeatable short-duration electronic flash which is also called and known as stroboscopic light, that revealed motion in segments never can be seen by human eyes (Grundberg). This device could flash up to more than 100 times in a second, it could record instantaneous events and sequential moments. He used it to capture the fast moments that we can’t see, and presented it to us with motors, running water, birds in flight, golfers and football players in motion, and the most famous ones we know could be Milkdrop Coronet, 1957 (Fig.4), and a Bullet going through an Apple, 1964 (Fig.5). In these photos(Fig.4), he actually stopped the time and presented us how the movement is processing in a second. The drop of milk is stopped in a motion having a shape like a crown, and it is almost looks like a painting that drawn in very realistic manner. In a Bullet going through an Apple, the explosion of the apple is precisely captured and telling us that is how it looks like when bullet goes through something. Without his inventions, no one would have thought of photography as stopping time to see more rather than a device to capture the moments of time, but Edgerton did.
His contribution to our current life regarding photography didn’t stop at the artistic level as mentioned, but further more. He also invented many underwater photographic devices for ocean researches, such as illuminating the depths and designing the units of underwater for ocean explorers. Also, during World War 2, it is said that his night aerial photography were attached to planes and made the Normandy invasion on France successful, and awarded the Medal of Freedom due to it. His company EG&G, developed another device that could record nuclear explosions for further scientific developments. There is no doubt that Edgerton’s invention that reveals the time to our eyes is one of the great invention of the time.

Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton lived a different era, but just like all geniuses, they were not satisfied with what they already have, and they wanted more, both of their goal was similar, but at the same time, different on what they have achieved in photography. Muybridge wanted capture the moment and present it to the public how the action works, and moreover, he wanted to create moving images that is not standing still like previous photographs. So he chose the moving and living creatures such as animal and human, and captured its every movement in each single shots, and re-created into motion photographs that entertains our eyes, and furthermore, made our current technology of videography possible. We all know that animation is created by the process of fast shifting sequences of individual slides. How could it be possible to watch classic Disney movies or animations without Muybridge’s creation of motion pictures? When Muybridge gave a lecture at California School of Fine Art in San Francisco about decades ago, it was said that “the motion pictures were born.” He clearly did devoted to current technology of photography that we can enjoy by just clicking one button and make our memories in one sequenced photograph just as it is. Then how is it different with the idea of Harold Edgerton?
Edgerton also looked for similar thing as Muybridge did. He wanted to capture the movement and present it to the public. However, what different was that Edgerton wanted to capture what we cannot see. He was curious about what is happening in the movement that cannot be caught by human’s eyes. He devised strobe light photography, and took hundreds of pictures within a second. He presented the moment of falling water, how it looks, what happens in that short second. It was not the sequence that Muybridge portrayed, but the second of those presenting sequence. He gave the reversing idea to what Muybridge suggested. Without him, it wouldn’t be able to think of the moment in the movement, but we could have just focused on what are moving and flowing. His multi-shot technology allowed us to stop the sequential movement and think about the moment in there. The motion and time bring Muybridge and Edgerton together, and let us to explore the movement and the time that flows between it.