Google's Monday homepage doodle pays homage to Eadweard J. Muybridge, an English photographer who successfully used multiple cameras to make it appear as though images were moving.
As Oxford University Press noted, "his work has been described as the inspiration behind the invention of the motion picture."
The doodle, which celebrates Muybridge's 182nd birthday, has an interactive component. Click the "play" button and watch the image of a man riding a horse slowly roll to the left until it looks as though the horse is galloping across the page.
Horses played a pivotal role in Muybridge's career. His 1868 book, Scenery of the Yosemite Valley, caught the eye of former California governor Ieland Stanford, who commissioned Muybridge in 1872 to photograph his horse. Stanford apparently believed that at some point, a horse has all four feet off the ground during a trot. Muybridge's work successfully proved this point a year later, "at least to Stanford's satisfaction," Oxford noted.
Interestingly, "work was interrupted by a dramatic crisis when Muybridge, tried for killing his wife's lover and acquitted," according to Oxford. He took a sabbatical to Central America, but returned to the trotting horse issues in 1877.
Muybridge used his images of Stanford's horse, as well as a self-designed shutter that captured images at one-thousandth of a second, to produce an image of the horse in "arrested motion." Over the next few years, he used 12 and then 24 cameras with electromagnetic shutters to produce his "moving" images.
He toured Europe and later landed at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took thousands of photos for his well-known publication, Animal Locomotion. "This 11-volume work had a tremendous impact, not least on artists, who were forced to reassess completely the manner in which they depicted animal movement," Oxford said.
Muybridge died in 1904 in Kingston-on-Thames in Great Britain.
For more on Google's doodles, meanwhile, see the slideshow below. Recently, the company honored origami legend Akira Yoshizawa and German Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. One of the company's more popular doodles last year was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The company has also honored Gumby creator Art Clokey, Muppets creator Jim Henson, Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and Intel co-founder Robert Noyce.
In 2011, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site." Not everyone is charmed. PCMag's Jamie Lendino recently implored: Enough With the Google Doodles.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.
