Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Edison

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was born on the 9^th April 1830 at Kingston upon Thames. He then 

later passed away on the 8^th May 1904. He was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, an early work in motion-picture projection.

At the age of 20, he emigrated to America, first to New York as a bookseller, and then to San Francisco. He returned to England in 1861 and took up professional photography, learning the wet-plate collodion process.

Today Muybridge is known for pioneering work on animation locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which involved using multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photograph. He created a device called the zoopraxiscope which projects motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

Thomas Edison and George Eastman

George Eastman was born on the 12^th July 1854 and died on March 14^th 1932. Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and populated the use of roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture in 1888 by the world’s first film-makers Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Le Prince. Eastman was the inventor who originally created celluloid film.

Eastman worked closely with Thomas Edison who is considered to be America’s greatest inventor. Edison was born on February 11^th 1847 and died on October 18^th 1931. Eastman and Edison worked together to invent the first motion picture camera.

Edison’s laboratory was responsible of the Kinetograph (a motion picture camera) and the Kinetoscope (a peep-hole motion picture viewer). Most of this work was performed by Edison’s assistant. William Kennedy and Laurie Dickson, beginning in 1888. Motion pictures became successful entertainment industry in less than a decade, with a single viewer Kinetoscopes giving way to films projected for mass audiences.

"I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion ...."

--Thomas A. Edison, 1888