Honors came very late in life to Ducos du Hauron and to his dying day he reproached himself for not exploiting sufficiently his ideas. But when he had tried to do this he encountered only indifference because the scientists were not interested in the work of one who was without academic status. Now Ducos du Hauron is regarded as one of the greatest geniuses of photography. He actually predicted and described a monopack color film. The many good color processes of this type are modern realizations of his extraordinary scientific analyses.
Marey was familiar in a general way with all these developments and ideas, but he was essentially a scientist and not a photographer. Motion picture photography to him was just a good way of learning more about living movement. About 1870 he had made studies of movements in other ways in addition to primitive photographs and drawings made from such photographs. The results of these studies were known all over the world and had a direct influence on the photographers who first successfully took successive pictures of animals in motion. These photographers were Eadweard Muybridge and John D. Isaacs.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), or Edward James Muggeridge, as he was originally named, was born in England, at Kingston-on-Thames. As a young man he was an adventurer who called photography his profession. He made a number of trips back and forth between the United States and England. He was seriously injured in a run-away stage coach accident in July of 1860, in Arkansas, and later obtained several thousand dollars in damages from the Southern Overland Stage Company. Returning to the United States after a visit in England, following the accident, Muybridge received an assignment to photograph, for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, the new territory of Alaska, purchased by the United States in 1867. After this assignment he settled in San Francisco.
In 1872 Governor Leland Stanford of California made a $25,000 bet in connection with a dispute as to whether or not all the legs of a horse running at a full gallop are off the ground simultaneously. The eye was not quick enough to find the answer. Horsemen had never been completely satisfied with the drawings and pictures made by artists of horses in motion. Sanford, as Terry Ramsaye describes in his history of the motion picture, A Million and One Nights, in 1872 sent for the photographer Muybridge and had him go to the Sacramento race track to get photographic proof in order to settle the dispute. Over a period of years Stanford spent considerably more than the $25,000 wager on the photographic experiments. And out of the experiments grew the legend that Muybridge had invented “motion pictures.”
About 1870 Marey had established the movement of the legs of a horse in a gallop through his physiological investigations. But at that time he had no photographic proof of his theory. Years later Muybridge said that Stanford obtained his basic ideas for photographs to win the bet from the writings of Marey.
Muybridge might have been successful in his early experiments if it had not been for an interruption which was of about five years’ duration. He had domestic troubles of a nature that ended in violence. In October 1874, he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyn who had eloped with his wife. After a sensational trial in which the defense was able to succeed in putting the jurors mentally in Muybridge’s place, he was acquitted on February 5, 1875, at the courthouse in Napa, California.
Stanford maintained a friendly interest in Muybridge because he had become increasingly interested in the problem of the movements of a horse in fast action and he wished to obtain evidence to confirm the new theory of animal locomotion which had been developed chiefly by Marey in France. Stanford was primarily interested in the running gaits of horses and other movements secondarily.
The stories of what really happened in 1877 are not identical. Muybridge said in 1883 at a lecture at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, “Being much interested with the experiments of Professor Marey... I invented a method of employing a number of cameras .... I explained my intended experiments to a wealthy resident of San Francisco, Mr. Stanford, who liberally agreed to place the resources of his stock breeding farm at my disposal and to reimburse the expenses of my investigation, upon the condition of my supplying him, for his private use, with a few copies of the contemplated results.”
On the mere statement, Muybridge’s position is subject to serious question. It certainly is unlikely that Stanford would pay all expenses just to obtain a few copies of the “intended results for private use.” The ownership of the results was subject to considerable dispute. Stanford copyrighted the pictures in 1881 and had them published in a book edited by Dr. J. D. B. Stillman, entitled The Horse in Motion. In that book the story is that when Muybridge returned to San Francisco in 1877, he was engaged to continue the experiments by Stanford. According to Stillman, in 1877 pictures were taken of one of Stanford’s horses, with a single camera and “one of these, representing him with all his feet clear of the ground, was enlarged, retouched and distributed to the parties interested.” This then was just another effort to obtain a good, sharp, fast, single picture of action.
John D. Isaacs, later chief engineer for the Harriman Railroad System, had designed and supervised all the installation of the battery camera apparatus. His name was suggested to Stanford by Arthur Brown, then chief engineer of maintenance of the Central Pacific, one of Stanford’s interests. Isaacs was a young man fresh from the University of Virginia, where he had graduated in 1875. He was an amateur photographer and very familiar with Marey’s work and that of the photographers in France and England and in the eastern part of the United States.