In 1872 Leland Stanford, the founder of California’s Stanford University, hired an eccentric inventor named Eadweard Muybridge to help resolve a supposed (but undocumented) bet: did a trotting horse’s feet leave the ground with all four feet or not?
Muybridge was a skilled photographer and managed to get blurry snapshots of an “airborne” horse in mid-trot – an example of how the naked eye alone can’t capture fast, subtle motions. He went on, alongside others, to establish what became cinematography. He also continued to capture images of many animals moving, trying to catch them airborne. Of another large animal, the hippo (which he did not photograph) Muybridge wrote:
