The First Movie Ever Made

Asking what was the first movie ever made is a bit like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. It's hard to give a definitive reply. The answer really depends on what you consider to be a movie. If you consider a set of moving pictures to be the first movie ever made, then Eadweard Muybridge's high-speed photographs of a horse galloping can rightfully claim the title.

With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. An 1878 experiment by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the United States using 24 cameras produced a series of stereoscopic images of a galloping horse, is arguably the first "motion picture", though it was not called by this name. This technology required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second, depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Commercial versions of these machines were coin operated.

The Horse In Motion (1878)

Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking motion photography was accomplished using multiple cameras and assembling the individual pictures into a motion picture. Muybridge was commissioned by Leland Stanford (California governor/ Stanford University) to scientifically answer a popularly debated question during this era - are all four of a horse's hooves ever off the ground at the same time while the horse is galloping? Muybridge's time-motion photography proved they indeed were, and the idea of motion photography was born.


You can watch the footage of a horse galloping here: 

posted by Lei Wah Mon

Source: www.voices.yahoo.com