HOW A BET ORIGINATED MOVIES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 533, 10 December 1928, Page 12

HOW A BET ORIGINATED MOVIES

PHOTO ON THE SCREEN When a horse is running are its four feet all off the ground at once? A bet between two millionaires about this question 50 years ago is to be commemorated by a romantic gift to Kingston-on-Thames from Stanford University, in California. For the bet was settled by photographs taken by a Kingston man, and the photographs he took were, it is claimed, the basis on which the cinema film was invented. Ninety-eight years ago there was born in Kingston a man named Edward Maybridge. He became an unusually clever photographer, and in 1572 went to the United States. Then came the Great Bet. MrLeland Stanford, a California millionaire, made his wager about the horse’s hoofs with another millionaire. Maybridge was invited to settle the question, and by photographs he took he proved conclusively that all tour of a horse’s hoofs were in the am simultaneously during a gallop. Then Maybridge invented a machine for projecting these pictures on to a screen. This machine, called the zoopraxiseope, was the first machine ever invented for showing photographed objects in motion. The inventors of the cinema, it is claimed, used the principle of tfi' s machine in conjunction with a celiuioid film. Maybridge came home to Kingston in 1900, and died there in 1904. He bequeathed his zoopraxiseope ana many of his original plates to the Kingston Museum. . Now Stanford University — which is built on the site where Maybridge took most of his photographs i* sending to Kingston Museum » memorial of Maybridge’s work to j commemorate the’ 50th anniversary j of his experiments.