Commentary: Wonders Walk, Run-and Skip; March 1999; Scientific American Magazine; by Morrison, Morrison; 2 Page(s)

A century and more ago Silicon Valley was a place of shady orchards and sunny farms. Fast horses offered a pastime to wealthy landowners such as Palo Alto magnate Leland Stanford, who once wagered a skeptical friend that horses on the gallop often had no hoof touching the ground. The disputants organized a direct test, placing its execution in the hands of Eadweard Muybridge, an ingenious San Francisco photographer. He aligned a dozen or two still cameras to view a stretch of Stanford's racecourse, each camera fitted so that the line of shutters would be tripped one after another by threads extended across the fast horse's path. The image sequence was compelling: Stanford won the bet, and Muybridge, whose whole career was redirected by this success, became a celebrated world pioneer of the nascent cinema. His later 1887 volumes of photographs, still frequently reproduced, provide wonderful motion sequences of every condition of humanity and many creatures of the zoo.

That early inquiry has grown, mostly since World War II, into a science, animal locomotion (the very title of Muybridge's book). The human animal is of course a major subject, with wide applications, from physical training to sports, dance, orthopedics...(Your authors, too, bedecked with glowing red diodes, have capered on foot before the computerfeeding cameras of a local "gait lab," to generate sequences of stick-figure moving images.)