Horse Galloping by Eadweard Muybridge (1878)

The development of high-speed photography in the 1870s led to radical changes in the human perception of time – and it was all the result of a wager over a galloping horse.  Leland Stanford, a California railroad magnate, politician and racehorse owner, made a bet that all four hooves of a galloping horse lifted off the ground at the same time.  The trouble was, he couldn’t prove it, because the unaided human eye couldn’t follow such rapid movement.  So Stanford hired an English-born landscape photographer named Eadweard Muybridge to document a horse’s gait in a series of time-motion photographs.  It took years to fulfill the assignment, because cameras were initially no better than the human eye in capturing fast movement.  Muybridge was an inventor as well as a photographer, and he developed a high-speed shutter that did the trick.  He rigged up a dozen cameras with trip wires along a stretch of racetrack, each designed to snap a picture as a horse galloped past.  The resulting images of the galloping horse caused a sensation.

People in the mid-19^th century had adjusted to the “annihilation of time and space” from such speedy inventions as the railroad and telegraph.  But until Muybridge, no one had succeeded in stopping time altogether.  Exposure times for early cameras were so lengthy that it was initially impossible to capture anything that moved.  You could photograph a busy street scene in broad daylight, and the street would appear empty, because only immobile objects would register on the glass-plate negatives.  Muybridge ended all that with more photosensitive plates and a shutter device that reduced exposure times to 1/1000^th of a second – hundreds of times faster than the blink of an eye.  His photographs of a galloping horse did indeed show all four hooves lifting off the ground at the same time, and Stanford won his bet.

Although mechanical clocks had been around since the 14^th century, daily life continued to be governed by the rhythms of nature until the introduction of inexpensive pocket watches in the mid-1800s.  Soon every shop foreman and railroad conductor was carrying one, and life was now regulated by the clock.  When time was measured by the movement of the sun across the sky, it was regarded as cyclical and continuous.  Clock-time was thought of incrementally: days, hours, minutes and then seconds.  The idea of an instant in time had been around since the ancient Greeks.  But Muybridge’s photographs enabled people to picture it for the first time: those four horse’s hooves suspended simultaneously above the racetrack.  Inevitably, an instant came to be thought of as something hovering motionless in time. 

Muybridge went on to photograph numerous stop-motion series of animal and human locomotion, and he even invented a device called the zoopraxiscope to display moving images – a forerunner to Edison’s motion picture camera.  Of course, what was displayed was not actual movement but a series of still images threading through a machine faster than the eye could register them.   The brain was tricked into seeing motion where none existed. 

Zeno, a fifth-century BCE Greek philosopher, made a similar point about our perceptions of time and motion.  He argued that an arrow in flight cannot really move, because at each instant the arrow hangs motionless in the air.  Since an arrow can never be in two places at once, motion as such was impossible.  His argument was one of a series of paradoxes meant to prove a point, but I suspect even he wouldn’t care to test it by stepping into the path of an actual arrow in flight, even if it theoretically couldn’t really be in two places at once. 

On the other hand, if motion is indeed real, then something else has to give.  A young theorist from New Zealand named Peter Lynds argues that motion is possible only if you eliminate instantaneous time.  He writes, "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during an interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."

But what does this say about Muybridge’s photo of the galloping horse?  Presumably the horse was real.  Its four hooves did indeed leave the ground at the same time, even if the unaided human eye couldn’t detect it.  The photo itself is real.  And yet it is also a fabrication, depicting a moment frozen in time in which the horse hangs motionless in the air, its four hooves forever off the ground.  Such moments do not exist in reality.  To be precise, moments themselves do not exist, those intervals of time without duration in which the action is interrupted and the ceaseless flow of life is brought to a standstill.