Eadweard Muybridge has traveled for the past…

Eadweard Muybridge has traveled for the past five years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by his patron, the railroad magnate and former governor of California Leland Stanford.

A businessman and race-horse owner, Stanford had hired in 1872 Muybridge for some photographic studies.

He had taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day—whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting.

The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop.

The human eye could not break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop.

Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground.

Stanford, siding with the assertion of "unsupported transit" in the trot and gallop, had decided to have it proven scientifically.

Stanford had sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.

Muybridge had settled Stanford's question in the same year with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot.

(This negative was lost, but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time, the technology for printed reproductions of photographs still being developed).

In 1877, Muybridge returns to California and resumes his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gives an exposure of 21,000 of a second.