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Eadweard Muybridge was a photographer who, in 1878, was tasked with photographing horses while they run in order to study their gaits. To do this, he set up a row of 12 cameras that each made an exposure in 1/1000 of a second. The results were photos taken at half-second intervals and the image of one of his sequences, taken nearly a decade later, is included below (Image 1).

Image 1

Etienne Jules Marey, in 1882, was studying fast animal movements such as the flight of birds using a photographic gun that was shaped like a rifle (Image 2). This camera exposed 12 images around the edge of a circular plate of glass that rotated once each second. 6 years later, he then built a box-shaped camera that exposed photographs onto a roll of paper film at sometimes as fast as 120 frames per second.

Image 2

In 1877, Emile Reynaud built an optical toy called the Projecting Praxinoscope (Image 3). It was like the Zoetrope except viewers saw through the images through a series of mirrors instead of slots. He then came up with a way to use mirrors and a lantern to project drawings onto a flat screen.

Image 3

Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince, in 1888, was working in England and made a few short films shot at ~16 frames per second using Kodak’s paper roll film, but the frames needed to be printed on a transparent strip and Le Prince could not come up with and create a projector good enough for this. He disappeared while travelling in France, and so did his patent applications.