As he wanted to find out whether a horse’s hooves left the ground while it was moving, Eadweard Muybridge captured how a horse moved in an early form of animation.
Through these visual experiments, he found out that a horse’s hooves leave the ground temporarily in mid-trot before galloping forward.
Muybridge also developed a “zoopaxiscope”, an early stop-motion device which enabled him to make his images move. These animations were published in a book called “Descriptive Zoopraxography”, and were published in 1893.
Although we do not one have one of these devices, we are still able to see these animated images as they have been transformed into GIFs.
Scroll down to get a peek of what these first animations looked like below.
[via Atlas Obscura]