Thus far the photographs had been made with a single camera, requiring a separate trotting for each exposure. The horse being of a dark color and the background white, the pictures were little better than silhouettes, and it was difficult to distinguish, except by inference, the right feet from the left.
Several phases of as many different movements had been photographed, which the Author endeavored with little success to arrange in consecutive order for the construction of a complete stride.
It then occurred to him that if a number of cameras were placed in a line, and exposures effected successively in each, with regulated intervals of time or of distance, an analysis of one single step or stride could be obtained which would be of value both to the Scientist and the Artist.
The practical application of this system of photographing required considerable time for its development, and much experimenting with chemicals and apparatus.
It being desirable that the horses used as models should be representatives of their various breeds, and the Author not being the owner of any that could be fairly classed as such, obtained the coöperation of Mr. Stanford, who owned a fine stud of horses at his farm at Palo Alto, and there continued his labors.
The apparatus used at this stage of the investigation was essentially the same as that subsequently constructed for the University of Pennsylvania, the arrangement of which will be described further on.
Some of the results of these early experiments which illustrated successive phases of the action of horses while walking, trotting, galloping, &c., were published in 1878, with the title of "The Horse in Motion." Copies of these photographs were deposited the same year in the Library of Congress at Washington, and some of them found their way to Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna, &c., where they were criticized by the journals of the day.
In 1882 the Author visited Europe and at a reception given him by Monsieur Meissonier was invited by that great painter to exhibit the results of his labors to his brother Artists who had assembled in his studios for that purpose. M. Meissonier was the first among Artists to acknowledge the value to Art design of the Author's researches; and upon this occasion, alluding to a full knowledge of the details of a subject being necessary for its truthful and satisfactory translation by the Artist, he declared how much his own impression of a horse's motion had been changed after a careful study of its consecutive phases.
It is scarcely necessary to point out, in confirmation of M. Meissonier's assertions, the modifications in the expression of animal movements now progressing in the works of the Painter and the Sculptor, or to the fact of their being the result of studious attention to the science of Zoöpraxography.
In the same year, during a lecture on "The Science of Animal Locomotion in Its Relation to Design in Art," given at the Royal Institution (see Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, March 13, 1882), the author exhibited the results of his experiments at Palo Alto, when he, with the Zoöpraxiscope and an oxy-hydrogen lantern, projected on the wall a synthesis of many of the actions he had photographed.