Historedia
Episode 1 of 2

Palo Alto Photographic Sequence

When
15 June 1878
Where
Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm
Part of
Muybridge photographs 'Sallie Gardner at a Gallop'

Muybridge used twelve cameras at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm to capture the phases of a horse's gallop in June 1878.

The session on 15 June 1878 involved invited turfmen and press witnesses. Stanford's racehorse Abe Edgington was sent trotting across the track, tripping wires that broke an electrical circuit. This triggered each camera shutter to open in turn, capturing the movement at a claimed duration of 1/1000th of a second.

Sources

  1. The Horse in Motion Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-28
  2. Eadweard Muybridge Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-24

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.