American bison cantering – set to motion using photos by Eadweard Muybridge

Today in 1882, Eadweard Muybridge lectured at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sellout audience, demonstrating the Zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip. An 1878 experiment by Muybridge in the United States using 24 cameras produced a series of stereoscopic images of a galloping horse, and is arguably the first “motion picture,” though it was not called by this name at the time.