The Birth of Motion Pictures: From Stanford's Horses to the Zoetrope

In the 1870s, a wealthy industrialist named Leland Stanford hired Edward Moibridge to take fast photographs of his running horses to settle a debate about their leg placement. Moibridge used a series of cameras and created the first prototype of a motion picture through a zoetrope. Present-day movies work by flashing a series of discrete frames, tricking the brain into perceiving smooth motion. The phenomenon of apparent motion, along with persistence of vision, allows us to perceive continuous movement. The flicker fusion threshold determines the speed at which the brain perceives the flickering as continuous motion. Old movies and televisions solved flickering issues by flashing frames multiple times. Illusions like the wagon wheel effect occur when the brain struggles to match up the position of objects between frames, causing them to appear to move backward or not at all.