Muybridge, Eadweard (Adopted name of Edward James Muggeridge (1830-1904)

English photographer and student of animal locomotion. Muybridge changed his name from Edward James Muggeridge. A gifted and obsessed eccentric, he was a photographic innovator who left a vast and enormously varied body of work. In 1872 he made some experiments in photographing moving objects for the U.S. government. Afterward he was engaged by Leland Stanford to record, with a series of sequential still cameras, the movements of a horse. He invented (1881) the zoöpraxiscope, which projected animated pictures on a screen, a forerunner of the motion picture. He wrote The Horse in Motion (1878) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His Animals in Motion (1899, repr. 1957) consists of 11 portfolios: thousands of pictures of men, women, children, amputees, and many domestic and wild animals in action. This work was of considerable importance to artists. Muybridge murdered his wife's lover in 1874; the case was dismissed as justifiable homicide.