A bee in flight.

Animal locomotion, which is the act of self-propulsion by an animal, has many manifestations, including running, swimming, jumping and flying. Animals move for a variety of reasons, such as to find food, a mate, or a suitable microhabitat, and to escape predators. For many animals the ability to move is essential to survival and, as a result, selective pressures have shaped the locomotion methods and mechanisms employed by moving organisms. For example, migratory animals that travel vast distances (such as the Arctic Tern) typically have a locomotion mechanism that costs very little energy per unit distance, whereas non-migratory animals that must frequently move quickly to escape predators (such as frogs) are likely to have costly but very fast locomotion. The study of animal locomotion is typically considered to be a sub-field of biomechanics.

Locomotion requires energy to overcome friction, drag, inertia, and gravity, though in many circumstances some of these factors are negligible. In terrestrial environments gravity must be overcome, though the drag of air is much less of an issue. In aqueous environments however, friction (or drag) becomes the major challenge, with gravity being less of a concern. Although animals with natural buoyancy need not expend much energy maintaining vertical position, some will naturally sink and must expend energy to remain afloat. Drag may also present a problem in flight, and the aerodynamically efficient body shapes of birds highlight this point. Flight presents a different problem from movement in water however, as there is no way for a living organism to have lower density than air. Limbless organisms moving on land must often contend with surface friction, but do not usually need to expend significant energy to counteract gravity.

Newton's third law of motion is widely used in the study of animal locomotion: if at rest, to move forwards an animal must push something backwards. Terrestrial animals must push the solid ground, swimming and flying animals must push against a fluid or gas (either water or air).^[1] The effect of forces during locomotion on the design of the skeletal system is also important, as is the interaction between locomotion and muscle physiology, in determining how the structures and effectors of locomotion enable or limit animal movement.

Introduction[link]

Animals move through a variety of fluids, such as water, air and mud. Some, for example seals and otters, move through more than one type of fluid. In some cases locomotion is facilitated by the substrate on which they move. Forms of locomotion include:

Through a fluid medium[link]

Swimming[link]

In the water staying afloat is possible through buoyancy. Provided an aquatic animal's body is no denser than its aqueous environment, it should be able to stay afloat well enough. Though this means little energy need be expended maintaining vertical position, it makes movement in the horizontal plane much more difficult. The drag encountered in water is much higher than that of air, which is almost negligible at low speeds. Body shape is therefore important for efficient movement, which is essential for basic functions like catching prey. A fusiform, torpedo-like body form is seen in many marine animals, though the mechanisms they employ for movement are diverse. Movement of the body may be from side to side, as in sharks and many fishes, or up and down, as in marine mammals. Other animals, such as those from the class Cephalopoda, use jet-propulsion, taking in water then squirting it back out in an explosive burst. Others may rely predominantly on their limbs, much as humans do when swimming. Though life on land originated from the seas, terrestrial animals have returned to an aquatic lifestyle on several occasions, such as the fully aquatic cetaceans, now far removed from their terrestrial ancestors.

Flight[link]

Gravity is a major problem for flight through the air. Because it is impossible for any organism to approach the density of air, flying animals must generate enough lift to ascend and remain airborne. Wing shape is crucial in achieving this, generating a pressure gradient that results in an upward force on the animal' body. The same principle applies to airplanes, the wings of which are also airfoils. Unlike aircraft however, flying animals must be very light to achieve flight, the largest living flying animals being birds of around 20 kilograms.^[2] Other structural modifications of flying animals include reduced and redistributed body weight, fusiform shape and powerful flight muscles.

Rather than fly, some animals simply reduce their rate of falling by gliding. Flight has independently evolved at least four times, in the insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats. Gliding has evolved on many more occasions.

On a substrate[link]

Terrestrial[link]

Forms of locomotion on land include walking, running, hopping or jumping, and crawling or slithering. Here friction and buoyancy are no longer an issue, but a strong skeletal and muscular framework are required in most terrestrial animals for structural support. Each step also requires much energy to overcome inertia, and animals can store elastic potential energy in their tendons to help overcome this. Balance is also required for movement on land. Human infants learn to crawl first before they are able to stand on two feet, which requires good coordination as well as physical development. Humans are bipedal animals, standing on two feet and keeping one on the ground at all times while walking. When running, only one foot is on the ground at any one time at most, and both leave the ground briefly. At higher speeds momentum helps keep the body upright, so more energy can be used in movement. The number of legs an animal has varies greatly, resulting in differences in locomotion. Many familiar mammals have four legs; insects have six, while arachnids have eight. Centipedes and millipedes have many sets of legs that move in metachronal rhythm. Some have none at all, relying on other modes of locomotion.

Other animals move in terrestrial habitats without the aid of legs. Earthworms crawl by a peristalsis, the same rhythmic contractions that propel food through the digestive tract. Snakes move using several different modes of locomotion, depending upon substrate type and desired speed. Some animals even roll, though typically not as a primary means of locomotion.

Some animals are specialized for moving on non-horizontal surfaces. One common habitat for such climbing animals is in trees, for example the gibbon is specialized for arboreal movement, traveling rapidly by brachiation. Another case is animals like the snow leopard living on steep rock faces such as are found in mountains. Some light animals are able to climb up smooth sheer surfaces or hang upside down by adhesion. Many insects can do this, though much larger animals such as geckos can also perform similar feats.

On water[link]

While animals like ducks can swim in water by floating, some small animals move across it without breaking through the surface. This surface locomotion takes advantage of the surface tension of water. Animals that move in such a way include the water strider. Water striders have legs that are hydrophobic, preventing them from interfering with the structure of water. Another form of locomotion (in which the surface layer is broken) is used by the Basilisk lizard.

Through a solid medium[link]

Some animals move through solids such as soil by burrowing using claws, teeth, or other methods. A burrow is a hole or tunnel dug into the ground by an animal to create a space suitable for habitation, temporary refuge, or as a byproduct of locomotion. In loose solids such a sand some animals, such as the golden mole, marsupial mole, and the pink fairy armadillo, are able to move more rapidly, 'swimming' through the loose substrate. Burrowing animals include moles, ground squirrels, naked mole rats, tilefish, mole crickets, and earthworms.

Energetics[link]

The energetics of locomotion involves the energy expenditure by animals in moving. Energy consumed in locomotion is not available for other efforts, so animals typically have evolved to use the minimum energy possible during movement. However, in the case of certain behaviors, such as locomotion to escape a predator, performance (such as speed or maneuverability) is more crucial, and such movements may be energetically expensive. Furthermore, animals may use energetically expensive methods of locomotion when environmental conditions (such as being within a tunnel) preclude other modes.

The most common metric of energy use during locomotion is net cost of transport, defined as the calories needed above baseline metabolism to move a given distance, per unit body mass. For aerobic locomotion, most animals have a nearly constant cost of transport - moving a given distance requires the same caloric expenditure, regardless of speed. This constancy is usually accomplished by changes in gait. The net cost of transport of swimming is lowest, followed by flight, with terrestrial limbed locomotion being the most expensive per unit distance.^[2] However, because of the speeds involved, flight requires the most energy per unit time. This does not mean that an animal that normally moves by running would be a more efficient swimmer, however; these comparisons assume an animal is specialized for that form of motion. Another consideration here is body mass—heavier animals, though using more total energy, require less energy per unit mass to move. Physiologists generally measure energy use by the amount of oxygen consumed, or the amount of carbon dioxide produced, in an animal's respiration.^[2]

Methods of study[link]

A variety of methods and equipment are used to study animal locomotion:

• Kinematics is the study of the motion of an entire animal or parts of its body. It is typically accomplished by placing visual markers at particular anatomical locations on the animal and then recording video of its movement. The video is often captured from multiple angles, with frame rates exceeding 2000 frames per second when capturing high speed movement. The location of each marker is determined for each video frame, and data from multiple views is integrated to give positions of each point through time. Computers are sometimes used to track the markers, although this task must often be performed manually. The kinematic data can be used to determine fundamental motion attributes such as velocity, acceleration, joint angles, and the sequencing and timing of kinematic events. These fundamental attributes can be used to quantify various higher level attributes, such as the physical abilities of the animal (e.g., its maximum running speed, how steep a slope it can climb), neural control of locomotion, gait, and responses to environmental variation. These, in turn, can aid in formulation of hypotheses about the animal or locomotion in general.

• Force plates are platforms, usually part of a trackway, that can be used to measure the magnitude and direction of forces of an animal's step. When used with kinematics and a sufficiently detailed model of anatomy, inverse dynamics solutions can determine the forces not just at the contact with the ground, but at each joint in the limb.

• Electromyography (EMG) is a method of detecting the electrical activity that occurs when muscles are activated, thus determining which muscles are used when in a given movement. This can be accomplished either by surface electrodes (usually in large animals) or implanted electrodes (often wires thinner than a human hair). Furthermore, the intensity of electrical activity can correlate to the level of muscle activity, with greater activity implying (though not definitively showing) greater force.

• Sonomicrometry employs a pair of piezoelectric crystals implanted in a muscle or tendon to continuously measure the length of a muscle or tendon. This is useful because surface kinematics may be inaccurate due to skin movement. Similarly, if an elastic tendon is in series with the muscle, the muscle length may not be accurately reflected by the joint angle.

• Tendon force buckles measure the force produced by a single muscle by measuring the strain of a tendon. After the experiment, the tendon's elastic modulus is determined and used to compute the exact force produced by the muscle. However, this can only be used on muscles with long tendons.

• Particle image velocimetry is used in aquatic and aerial systems to measure the flow of fluid around and past a moving aquatic organism, allowing fluid dynamics calculations to determine pressure gradients, speeds, etc.

• Fluoroscopy allows real-time X-ray video, for precise kinematics of moving bones. Markers which are opaque to X-rays can allow simultaneous tracking of muscle length.

All of the methods can be combined. For example, studies frequently combine EMG and kinematics to determine "motor pattern", the series of electrical and kinematic events which produce a given movement.

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Locomotion

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eadweard Muybridge

• Feather
• Joint
• Kinesis (biology)
• Role of skin in locomotion
• Taxis

References[link]

1. ^ Bejan, Adrian; Marden, James H. (2006). "Constructing Animal Locomotion from New Thermodynamics Theory". American Scientist 94 (4): 342–349 
2. ^ ^{a b c} Campbell, Neil A.; Reece, Jane B. (2005). Biology. Benjamin Cummings. ISBN 0-8053-7146-X. 

Further reading[link]

• McNeill Alexander, Robert. (2003) Principles of Animal Locomotion. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. ISBN 0-691-08678-8

External links[link]

• Beetle Orientation
• Unified Physics Theory Explains Animals' Running, Flying And Swimming

Eadweard Muybridge
Birth name	Edward James Muggeridge
Born	(1830-04-09)9 April 1830 Kingston upon Thames, UK
Died	8 May 1904(1904-05-08) (aged 74) Kingston upon Thames, UK
Nationality	British
Field	Photography
Influenced	Filmmaking

Eadweard James Muybridge ( /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was a British photographer who spent much of his working life in California, and traveling in other parts of the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.^[1]

In his earlier years in San Francisco, Muybridge had become known for his landscape photography, particularly of the Yosemite Valley. He also photographed the Tlingit people in Alaska, and was commissioned by the United States Army to photograph the Modoc War in 1873. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, and was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He traveled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875.

In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.

Names[link]

Born Edward James Muggeridge, he was of partial Dutch descent. As an adult in the United States, Muggeridge changed his name several times, starting with "Muggridge". In the 1850s in the United States, he used the surname "Muygridge".^[2]

After he returned to the United States from Great Britain in 1867 he used the surname "Muybridge". In addition, he used the pseudonym Helios (Greek god of the sun) to sign many of his photographs. He also used this as the name of his studio and made it the middle name for his only son, Florado Muybridge, born in 1874.^[3]

While traveling on a photography expedition in the Spanish-speaking nations of Central America in 1875, the photographer advertised his works under the name "Eduardo Santiago Muybridge" in Guatemala.^[4] After an 1882 trip to England, he changed the spelling of his first name to "Eadweard," the Old English form of his name. The spelling was likely derived from the spelling of King Edward's Christian (first) name as shown on the plinth of the Kingston coronation stone, which had been re-erected in the town in 1850. He used "Eadweard Muybridge" for the rest of his career.^[5][6] But his gravestone carries his name as "Eadweard Maybridge".

Early life and career[link]

Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames, England on 9 April 1830 to John and Susan Muggeridge; he had three brothers. His father was a grain and coal merchant, with business spaces on the ground floor of their house, and family living spaces above. After his father died in 1843, his mother carried on the business.

Muggeridge emigrated to the United States at the age of 25, arriving in San Francisco in 1855, a few years after California became a state, and while the city was still the "capital of the Gold Rush."^[7] He started a career as a publisher's agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company, and as a bookseller. At the time, the city was booming, with 40 bookstores, nearly 60 hotels and a dozen photography studios.^[8] Later in his life he wrote about also having spent time in New Orleans and New York City during his early years in the United States.^[9]

Serious accident and recuperation[link]

By 1860, Muybridge was a successful bookseller. He left his bookshop in care of his brother, and prepared to sail to England to buy more antiquarian books. However, Muybridge missed the boat and instead left San Francisco in July 1860 to travel overland by the southern route to the East Coast and then by ship back to Great Britain.^[10]

In central Texas, Muybridge suffered severe head injuries in a violent runaway stagecoach crash which injured every passenger on board, and killed one of them.^[11][12] Muybridge was bodily ejected from the destroyed vehicle, and hit his head on a rock or other hard object. He was taken 150 miles to Fort Smith, Arkansas for treatment (his earliest memories post-accident were there), where he stayed three months, trying to recover from symptoms of double vision, confused thinking, impaired sense of taste and smell, and other problems. He next went to New York City, where he continued in treatment for nearly a year before being able to sail to England.

Arthur P. Shimamura, a neurologist at the University of California Berkeley, has speculated that Muybridge suffered orbitofrontal cortex injuries, which may have led to some of the emotional, eccentric behavior reported by friends in later years, as well as freeing his creativity from conventional social inhibitions. Today, there still is little effective treatment for this kind of injury.^[13][10]

While recuperating in England and receiving treatment from Sir William Gull, Muybridge took up the new field of professional photography sometime between 1861 and 1866.^[14] Muybridge later stated that he had changed his vocation at the suggestion of his physician.^[10] He learned the wet-plate collodion process in England, and may have been influenced by some of the great English photographers of those years, such as Julia Margaret Cameron.^[15][16][17] Also during this period, Muybridge secured at least two British patents for his inventions.^[10]

Photographing the West[link]

Muybridge had left San Francisco in 1860 as a merchant, but returned in 1867 as a professional photographer, with highly proficient technical skills and an artist's eye. He would use the surname "Muybridge" for the rest of his life. He rapidly became successful in photography, focusing principally on landscape and architectural subjects, as did other prominent men, when the West was the land of imagination. He converted a light carriage vehicle into a portable darkroom to carry out his work.^[18] His business cards also advertised his services for portraiture.^[19] His stereographs, the popular format of the time, were sold by various galleries and photographic entrepreneurs (most notably the firm of Bradley & Rulofson) on Montgomery Street, San Francisco's main commercial street during those years.

Muybridge established his reputation in 1867 with photos of the Yosemite Valley wilderness (some of which used the same scenes taken by his contemporary Carleton Watkins) and areas around San Francisco. Muybridge quickly gained notice for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West; if human figures were portrayed, they were dwarfed by their surroundings, as in Chinese landscape paintings. He signed and published his work under the pseudonym Helios, which he also used as the name of his studio.^[20]

Muybridge took enormous physical risks to make his photographs, using a heavy view camera and stacks of glass plate negatives. A spectacular stereograph he published in 1872 shows him sitting casually on a projecting rock over the Yosemite Valley, with 2000 feet of empty space yawning below him.^[10]

In 1868, Muybridge traveled to the newly-acquired territory of Alaska to photograph the Tlingit Native Americans, occasional Russian inhabitants, and dramatic landscapes for the US government.^[21] In 1871, the Lighthouse Board hired Muybridge to photograph lighthouses of the American west coast. From March to July, he traveled aboard the Lighthouse Tender Shubrick to document these structures.^[22] In 1873, Muybridge was commissioned by the US Army to photograph the Modoc War against the Native Americans in northern California and Oregon. Many of his stereoscopic photos were published widely, and can still be found today.^[23]

During the construction of the San Francisco Mint in 1870–1872, Muybridge made a sequence of images of the building's progress, using the power of time-lapse photography to document changes over time.^[24]

In 1878, Muybridge made a famous 13-part 360° photographic panorama of San Francisco, to be presented to the wife of Leland Stanford. Today, it can be viewed on the Internet as a panorama or as a QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panorama.^[25]

Stanford and horse gaits[link]

Muybridge's The Horse in Motion, 1878

In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Muybridge for some photographic studies. He had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day — whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting. The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop. The human eye could not break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop. Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground.^[26] Stanford sided with the assertion of "unsupported transit" in the trot and gallop, and decided to have it proven scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.^[27]

Galloping horse, animated in 2006, using photos by Eadweard Muybridge.

In 1872, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing his Standardbred trotting horse Occident airborne at the trot. This negative was lost, but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time (the technology for printed reproductions of photographs was still being developed). He later did additional studies, as well as improving his camera for quicker shutter speed and faster film emulsions. By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiments, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse at a trot;^[28] lantern slides have survived of this later work.^[29] Scientific American was among the publications at the time that carried reports of Muybridge's groundbreaking images.^[29]

Stanford also wanted a study of the horse at a gallop. Muybridge planned to take a series of photos on June 19, 1878 at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm. He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track; the shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed. The path was lined with cloth sheets to reflect as much light as possible. (In later studies he used a clockwork device to set off the shutters and capture the images.) He copied the images in the form of silhouettes onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he had invented, which he called a zoopraxiscope. This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography.

The study is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion; it shows images of the horse with all feet off the ground. This did not take place when the horse's legs were extended to the front and back, as imagined by contemporary illustrators, but when its legs were collected beneath its body as it switched from "pulling" with the front legs to "pushing" with the back legs.^[27]

Murder, acquittal and paternity[link]

In 1872, Muybridge married Flora Shallcross Stone, a divorcee 21 years old, and half his age. In 1874, Muybridge discovered that his young wife Flora's friend, a drama critic known as Major Harry Larkyns, might have fathered their seven-month-old son Florado.^[27] On 17 October, he traveled north of San Francisco to Calistoga to track down Larkyns. Upon finding him, Muybridge said, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here's the answer to the letter you sent my wife," and shot him pointblank. Larkyns died that night, and Muybridge was arrested without protest and put in the Napa jail.^[30]

He was tried for murder. His defense attorney pleaded insanity due to the severe head injury which Muybridge had suffered in the 1860 stagecoach accident. At least four long-time acquaintances testified under oath that the accident had dramatically changed Muybridge's personality, from genial and pleasant to unstable and erratic.^[10] During the trial, Muybridge undercut his own insanity case by indicating that his actions were deliberate and premeditated, but he also showed impassive indifference and uncontrolled explosions of emotion.^[10] The jury dismissed the insanity plea, but acquitted the photographer on the grounds of "justifiable homicide", disregarding the judge's instructions. The episode interrupted his horse photography studies, but not his relationship with Stanford, who had arranged for his criminal defense.^[10]

Today, the court case and transcripts are important to historians and forensic neurologists, because of the sworn testimony from multiple witnesses regarding Muybridge's state of mind and past behavior.^[10] The modern American composer Phillip Glass also found the story fascinating, and composed an opera, The Photographer, with a libretto based in part on court transcripts from the case.

Shortly after his acquittal in 1875, Muybridge left the United States on a previously planned 9-month photography trip to Central America, as a "working exile".^[27] By 1877, he had resumed work for Leland Stanford, as described above.

Flora tried to get a divorce, but was unsuccessful.^{[dubious – discuss]} Five months after the trial, while Muybridge was in Central America, she became ill and died in 1875 at the age of 24.^[10] She had placed their son Florado Helios Muybridge (nicknamed "Floddie" by friends) with a French couple. When Muybridge returned, he had the boy moved from a Catholic orphanage to a Protestant one, but otherwise had little to do with him. Photographs of Florado Muybridge as an adult show him to have strongly resembled Muybridge. Put to work on a ranch as a boy, he worked all his life as a ranch hand and gardener. In 1944, Florado was hit by a car in Sacramento and killed, at approximately the age of 70.^[31]

Later work[link]

American bison cantering – set to motion in 2006 using photos by Eadweard Muybridge

Muybridge often travelled back to England and Europe to publicize his work. The opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, and the development of steamships made travel much faster and less arduous than it was in 1860. On 13 March 1882 he lectured at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell-out audience, which included members of the Royal Family, notably the future King Edward VII.^[32] He displayed his photographs on screen and showed moving pictures projected by his zoopraxiscope.^[32]

Muybridge and Stanford had a major falling-out concerning his research on equine locomotion. Stanford had asked his friend and horseman Dr. J. B. D. Stillman to write a book analyzing The Horse in Motion, which was published in 1882.^[29] Stillman used Muybridge's photos as the basis for his 100 illustrations, and the photographer's research for the analysis, but he gave Muybridge no prominent credit. The historian Phillip Prodger later suggested that Stanford considered Muybridge as just one of his employees, and not deserving of special recognition.^[33]

However, as a result of Muybridge not being credited in the book, the Royal Society of Arts withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion studies in photography, and refused to publish a paper he had submitted, accusing him of plagiarism.^[10] Muybridge filed a lawsuit against Stanford to gain credit, but it was dismissed out of court.^[27] However, Stillman's book did not sell as expected. Muybridge, looking elsewhere for funding, was more successful.^[10] The Royal Society later invited Muybridge back to show his work.^[27]

In the 1880s, the University of Pennsylvania sponsored Muybridge's research using banks of cameras to photograph people in a studio, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo to study their movement. The human models, either entirely nude or very lightly clothed, were photographed against a measured grid background in a variety of action sequences, including walking up or down stairs, hammering on an anvil, carrying buckets of water, or throwing water over one another. Muybridge produced sequences showing farm, industrial, construction, and household work, military maneuvers, and everyday activities. He also photographed athletic activities such as baseball, cricket, football, boxing, wrestling, fencing, rowing, discus throwing, and a ballet dancer performing. Showing a single-minded dedication to scientific accuracy and artistic composition, Muybridge himself posed nude for some of the photographic sequences, such as one showing him swinging a miner's pick.^[27][10]

Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. During 1884, the painter Thomas Eakins worked as one of his assistants, to learn more about the application of photography to the study of human and animal motion. Eakins later favored the use of multiple exposures on a single photographic negative to study motion more precisely, while Muybridge continued to use multiple cameras to produce separate images which could also be projected by his zoopraxiscope. The vast majority of Muybridge's work at this time was done in a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the bulky cameras and slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. Towards the end of this period, Muybridge spent much of his time selecting and editing his photos in preparation for publication.

In 1887, the photos were published as a massive portfolio, with 781 plates comprising 20,000 of the photographs, in a groundbreaking collection titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements.^[34] Muybridge's work contributed substantially to developments in the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics. Some of his books are still published today, and are used as references by artists, animators, and students of animal and human movement.

A phenakistoscope disc by Muybridge (1893)

The phenakistoscope – a couple waltzing

Recent scholarship has noted that in his later work, Muybridge was influenced by the French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey. Muybridge visited Marey's studio in France^[when?] and viewed stop-motion studies before returning to the US to further his own work in the same area. While Marey's scientific achievements in the realms of cardiology and aerodynamics (as well as pioneering work in photography and chronophotography) are indisputable, Muybridge's efforts were to some degree more artistic rather than scientific. As Muybridge explained, in some of his published sequences he had substituted images where original exposures had failed, in order to illustrate a representative movement (rather than producing a strictly scientific recording of a particular sequence).^{[citation needed]}

Today, similar setups of carefully timed multiple cameras are used in modern special effects photography but they have the opposite goal of capturing changing camera angles, with little or no movement of the subject. This is often dubbed "bullet time" photography.

After his work at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge traveled widely and gave numerous lectures and demonstrations of his still photography and primitive motion picture sequences. At the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Muybridge presented a series of lectures on the "Science of Animal Locomotion" in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition. He used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public, making the Hall the first commercial movie theater.^[35]

Retirement and death[link]

Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England permanently in 1894. He published two popular books of his work, Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901), both of which remain in print over a century later. He died on 8 May 1904 in Kingston upon Thames while staying at the home of his cousin Catherine Smith. Muybridge was cremated, and his ashes were interred at Woking in Surrey. For unknown reasons, his headstone is engraved with the name "Eadweard Maybridge".^[27]

In 2004 a British Film Institute commemorative plaque was installed on the outside wall of the former Smith house, at Park View, 2 Liverpool Road.^[36] Many of his papers and collected artifacts were donated to the Kingston Library, and eventually passed to the Kingston Museum in his place of birth.

Legacy and representation in other media[link]

Many of Muybridge's photographic sequences have been published since the 1950s as artists' reference books.^{[citation needed]} Cartoon animators often use Muybridge's photos as a reference when drawing their characters in motion. Since 1991, the company Optical Toys has published Muybridge sequences in the form of movie flipbooks.

The filmmaker Thom Andersen made a 1974 documentary titled Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, describing his life and work.

The composer Philip Glass's opera The Photographer (1982) is based on Muybridge's murder trial, with a libretto including text from the court transcript. A promotional music video featured an excerpt of the opera and numerous Muybridge images.

The play Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge (2006) was a co-production between Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre and the University of British Columbia Theatre. While blending fiction with fact, it conveys Muybridge's obsession with cataloguing animal motion. The production started touring in 2010.

The Canadian poet Rob Winger wrote Muybridge's Horse: A Poem in Three Phases (2007). The long poem won the CBC Literary Award for Poetry and was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Literature, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the Ottawa Book Award. It expressed his life and obsessions in a 'poetic-photographic' style.

In 1985, the music video for Larry Gowan's single "(You're a) Strange Animal" prominently featured animation rotoscoped from Muybridge's work. In 1986, a galloping horse sequence was used in the background of the John Farnham music video for the song "Pressure Down". In 1993, the rock band U2 made a video of their song "Lemon" into a tribute to Muybridge's techniques. In 2004, the electronic music group The Crystal Method made a music video to their song "Born Too Slow", which was based on Muybridge's work, including a man walking in front of a background grid.

Kingston University's Eadweard Muybridge Building is named in honour of Muybridge, who was born in nearby Kingston upon Thames, England.

His work has influenced the following:

• Étienne-Jules Marey — recorded the first series of live action photos with a single camera by a method of chronophotography
• Thomas Eakins — American artist who worked with and continued Muybridge's motion studies, and incorporated the findings into his own artwork
• William Dickson — credited as inventor of the motion picture camera
• Thomas Edison — developed and owned patents for motion picture cameras
• Marcel Duchamp — artist, painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
• Harold Eugene Edgerton — pioneered stroboscopic and high speed photography and film, producing an Oscar-winning short movie and many striking photographic sequences
• Francis Bacon — artist who made numerous paintings from photographs by Muybridge
• John Gaeta — used the principles of Muybridge's photography to create the bullet time slow-motion technique of the 1999 movie The Matrix.^[37]
• Steven Pippin — so-called Young British Artist who converted a row of laundromat washing machines into sequential cameras in the style of Muybridge
• Wayne McGregor - UK choreographer collaborated with composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and artist Mark Wallinger on a piece entitled Undance, inspired by Muybridge's 'action verbs'^[38]

On 9 April 2012, the 182nd birthday of Muybridge, Google honored him in a Google Doodle with an animation based on the photographs of the "horse in motion."^[39]

Exhibitions and collections[link]

A collection of Muybridge's equipment, including his original biunial slide lantern^[40] and zoopraxiscope projector, can be viewed at the Kingston Museum in Kingston upon Thames, South West London. The University of Pennsylvania Archives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania hold a large collection of Muybridge's photographs, equipment, and correspondence.^[41] Stanford University also holds numerous photographs of his work.^{[citation needed]}

In 1991, the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts hosted a major exhibition of Muybridge's work, which later traveled to other venues. A book-length exhibition catalogue was also published.^[42] The Addison Gallery has significant holdings of Muybridge's photographic work.^[43]

In 2000–2001, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History presented the exhibition Freeze Frame: Eadweard Muybridge's Photography of Motion, plus an online virtual exhibit.^[44]

From 10 April through 18 July 2010, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC mounted a major retrospective of Muybridge's work entitled Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. The exhibit received favorable reviews from major publications including The New York Times.^[45] The exhibition traveled in autumn 2010 to the Tate Britain, Millbank, London.^[46], and also appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

An exhibition of important items bequeathed by Muybridge to his birthplace of Kingston upon Thames, entitled Muybridge Revolutions, opened at the Kingston Museum on 18 September 2010 (exactly a century since the first Muybridge exhibition at the Museum) and ran until 12 February 2011.^[47]

See also[link]

• History of film
• The Photographer

References[link]

Sources[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eadweard Muybridge

• Eadweard Muybridge at the Internet Movie Database
• article on discovered Muybridge photos, March 2012
• Time Stands Still, exhibit on Eadward Muybridge and contemporaries, February-May 2003, Cantor Center, Stanford University
• Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion, via Boston Public Library's Flickr collections
• Eadweard Muybridge at Who's Who of Victorian Cinema
• The Eadweard Muybridge Online Archive, access to most of Muybridge's motion studies, at printable resolutions, along with a growing number of animations.
• "Tesseract", 20-Min experimental film expressing Eadweard Muybridge's obsession with time and its images at the turn of the century.
• Eadweard Muybridge, Valley of the Yosemite, Sierra Nevada Mountains, and Mariposa Grove of Mammoth Trees, 1872, online photo collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
• Muybridge, 1872, Yosemite American Indian Life, The Hive
• "The Muybridge Collection", Kingston Museum, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey
• Muybridge's 11-volume Animal Locomotion Studies and similar publications by E.-J. Marey, The University of South Florida Tampa Library's Special Collections Department
• Freezing Time, Film Website, the life of Muybridge, directed by Andy Serkis and written by Keith Stern
• "Eadweard Muybridge". Photography. Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/photographerframe.php?photographerid=ph043. Retrieved 11 November 2007. 
• Eadweard Muybridge stereoscopic photographs of the Modoc War, via Calisphere, California Digital Library, University of California, Berkeley
• Human and Animal Locomotion, via SC Digital Library, University of Southern California.
• Teacher's Guide: Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton, and Beyond: A Study of Motion and Time, 2-part introduction to the work of Muybridge and Edgerton, for high school level, Addison Museum
• The short film It Started With Muybridge (1965) is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• David Levy, "Muybridge and the Movies", Early American Cinema
• Carola Unterberger-Probst, Animation of the first moving pictures in film history, Rhizome
• Burns, Paul. The History of the Discovery of Cinematography: An Illustrated Chronology, Pre-cinema history
• The Compleat Eadweard Muybridge, extensive illustrated bibliography and links

Bill Nye
Nye at Bridgewater State University in 2007
Born	(1955-11-27) November 27, 1955 (age 56)[1] Washington, D.C.[1]
Residence	Los Angeles
Fields	Mechanical engineering
Institutions	Boeing Cornell University Planetary Society
Alma mater	Cornell University (BS)
Known for	Bill Nye the Science Guy
Signature

William Sanford "Bill" Nye (born November 27, 1955),^[2] popularly known as Bill Nye the Science Guy, is an American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, mechanical engineer, and scientist. He is best known as the host of the Disney/PBS children's science show Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993–1998) and for his many subsequent appearances in popular media as a science educator.

Early life and career[link]

William Sanford Nye was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Jacqueline (née Jenkins; c. 1920–2000), a codebreaker during World War II, and Edwin Darby "Ned" Nye (died 1997), also a World War II veteran whose experience in a Japanese prisoner of war camp led him to become a sundial enthusiast.^[3][4][5] Nye is a fourth-generation Washington, D.C. resident on his father's side of the family. After attending Lafayette Elementary and Alice Deal Junior High in the city, he was accepted to the private Sidwell Friends School on a partial scholarship, graduating in 1973.^[6][7] He studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University, where one of his professors was Carl Sagan,^[8] and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1977.^[9] He was awarded an honorary doctorate by The Johns Hopkins University in May 2008. In May 2011, Nye was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Willamette University where he was the keynote speaker for that year's commencement exercises.^[10]

Nye began his career in Seattle at Boeing, where, among other things, he starred in training films and developed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor still used in the 747. Later he worked as a consultant in the aeronautics industry. Nye told the St. Petersburg Times in 1999 that he applied to be a NASA astronaut every few years but was always rejected.^[11]

The Science Guy[link]

Nye began his professional entertainment career as an actor on a local sketch comedy television show in Seattle, Almost Live!; Nye attempted to correct the host of Almost Live! after the host pronounced "gigawatt" as "jigowatt."^[12][13] The character name came from the host's comment "Who do you think you are—Bill Nye the Science Guy?" and Nye was thereafter known as such on the program. His other main recurring role on Almost Live! was as Speedwalker, a speedwalking Seattle superhero.

Coincidentally, in 1991–93 he appeared in the live-action educational segments of Back to the Future: The Animated Series with a nonspeaking role as an assistant to Dr. Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, in which he would demonstrate science with Lloyd's voice-over. The segments' national popularity led to Nye's hosting the educational television program Bill Nye the Science Guy from 1993 to 1998. Each of the 100 episodes aimed to teach a specific topic in science to a preteen audience, yet it garnered a wide adult audience as well. The show was very popular as a school resource and is still used to this day. He has written several books as The Science Guy. In addition to hosting the show, he was also a writer and producer for the series, which was filmed entirely in Seattle.

When portraying "the Science Guy", Nye wears a light blue lab coat and a bow tie and takes on the persona of an excited, jocular science educator. This popular image of Nye has been parodied by numerous sources, including the webcomic xkcd^[14] and the satirical news organization The Onion.^[15][16] In response to the fake headline "Crack Nearly Killed Me," Nye took the joke in good humor and sent The Onion an email thanking them for "dealing compassionately with this matter."^[17]

He appeared in his Science Guy persona alongside Ellen DeGeneres and Alex Trebek in Ellen's Energy Adventure, an attraction that has played since 1996 at the Universe of Energy pavilion inside Epcot at Walt Disney World. He also has a voice-over at the DINOSAUR attraction in Disney's Animal Kingdom park, where he tells guests about the dinosaurs while they queue for the ride. In addition, he appears in the "Design Lab" of CyberSpace Mountain inside DisneyQuest at Walt Disney World, where he refers to himself as "Bill Nye the Coaster Guy."

[edit] Post-Science Guy career

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Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and Executive Director of The Planetary Society received the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's "In Praise of Reason" Award at CSICON 2011 in New Orleans

Nye remained interested in science education through entertainment. He created a 13-episode PBS KCTS-TV series about science, called The Eyes of Nye, aimed at an older audience than his previous show had been. Airing in 2005, it often featured episodes based on politically relevant themes such as genetically modified food, global warming, and race.

He played a science teacher in Disney's 1998 TV movie The Principal Takes a Holiday; he made a hovercraft in order to demonstrate science in an unusual classroom manner. From 2000 to 2002, Nye was the technical expert in BattleBots. In 2004 and 2005, Nye hosted 100 Greatest Discoveries, an award-winning series produced by THINKFilm for The Science Channel and in high definition on the Discovery HD Theater. He was also host of an eight-part Discovery Channel series called Greatest Inventions with Bill Nye.

Nye has guest-starred in several episodes of the crime drama Numb3rs as an engineering faculty member. A lecture Nye gave several years ago on exciting children about math was an inspiration for creating the Numb3rs show.^[18]

Bill joined the American Optometric Association in a multimedia advertising campaign to educate parents on the importance of getting their children a comprehensive eye examination.^[19]

He was a regular in TV Land discussions. He has also made guest appearances on the VH1 reality show America's Most Smartest Model.^[20]

Nye appears in segments of The Climate Code on The Weather Channel, telling his personal ways of saving energy. He still makes regular appearances on the show, often asking quiz questions.

As of fall 2008, Nye also appears on the daytime game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire as part of the show's reintroduced "Ask the Expert" lifeline. In 2008, he also hosted Stuff Happens, a show on the then new Planet Green network.

In November 2008, Nye appeared in an acting role as himself in the fifth-season episode "Brain Storm" of Stargate Atlantis alongside fellow television personality and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.^[21]

Nye has appeared numerous times on the talk show Larry King Live, speaking about topics such as global warming^[22] and UFOs.^[23] He argued that global warming is an issue that should be addressed by governments of the world in part because it could be implicated in the record-setting 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. On UFOs he has been skeptical of extraterrestrial explanations for sightings such as those at Roswell and Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967.

In 2009, portions of Bill Nye's shows were used as lyrics and portions of the second Symphony of Science science education music video by composer John Boswell.

Nye recorded a short YouTube video (as himself, not his TV persona) advocating clean energy climate change legislation on behalf of Al Gore's Repower America campaign in October 2009.^[24]

Nye (as his TV persona) also made a guest appearance on The Dr. Oz Show.

On March 12, 2011, Nye made an appearance on CNN to discuss the evolving nuclear incidents in Japan as a result of the devastating earthquake and tsunami there. Nye erroneously stated that cesium is used to "slow and control" the nuclear reaction. ^[25] In reality, cesium (specifically cesium-137) is a nuclear fission product, not a control rod material. Nye also erroneously stated that the nuclear reactor involved in the Three Mile Island incident is still running and that the use of boron to slow the nuclear chain reaction is uncommon, when in fact boron-10 is commonly used in control rods, and is circulated in the coolant of reactors in the United States, as well as stored on site as a method of emergency shutdown.^[26][27]

A solar noon clock atop Rhodes Hall was gifted from Nye to Cornell on Aug. 27 following a public lecture that filled the 715-seat Statler Auditorium. Nye talked about his father's passion for sundials and timekeeping, his time at Cornell, his work on the sundials mounted on the Mars rovers and the story behind the Bill Nye Solar Noon Clock. ^[28]

Life outside television[link]

Nye speaking in 2010.

In the early 2000s, Nye assisted in the development of a small sundial that was included in the Mars Exploration Rover missions. Known as MarsDial, it included small colored panels to provide a basis for color calibration in addition to helping keep track of time.^[29] From 2005 to 2010 Nye was the vice president of The Planetary Society, an organization that advocates space science research and the exploration of other planets, particularly Mars.^[30] He became the organization's second Executive Director in September 2010 when Louis Friedman stepped down.^[31][32]

In November 2010, Nye became the face of a new permanent exhibition at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA. Bill Nye’s Climate Lab features Nye as commander of the Clean Energy Space Station, and invites visitors on an urgent mission to thwart climate change. Beginning with a view of Planet Earth from space, visitors explore air, water, and land galleries to discover how climate change affects Earth’s connected systems, and how to use the Sun, wind, land, and water to generate clean energy. In an interview about the exhibit, Nye said, “Everything in the exhibit is geared to showing you that the size of the problem of climate change is big. Showing you a lot about energy use... It’s a huge opportunity... We need young people, entrepreneurs, young inventors, young innovators to change the world.” ^[33]

He holds several United States patents,^[34] including one for ballet pointe shoes^[30] and another for an educational magnifying glass created by filling a clear plastic bag with water.^[35][36] From 2001–2006 Nye served as Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 University Professor at Cornell University.^[9][37] Nye supported the 2006 reclassification of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union.^[38]

Since 2006, Nye has lived in Los Angeles in a house with modifications, though has owned a house on Mercer Island.^{[citation needed]} As of July 2007, Nye and environmental activist Ed Begley, Jr. are engaging in a friendly competition "to see who could have the lowest carbon footprint," according to Begley.^[39] In a 2008 interview, Nye joked that he wants to "crush Ed Begley" in their environmental competition.^[40] Nye and Begley are neighbors in Los Angeles, and sometimes dine together at a local vegetarian restaurant.^[40] Nye often appears on Begley's Planet Green reality show Living with Ed.

Nye made an appearance in Palmdale's 2010 video "Here Comes the Summer"^[41]; the band's lead singer Kay Hanley is his neighbor.

Nye is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a U.S. non-profit scientific and educational organization whose aim is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.^[42]

Interviewed by John Rael for the Independent Investigation Group IIG, Nye stated that his "concern right now... scientific illiteracy... you don't [the public] have enough rudimentary knowledge of the universe to evaluate claims."^[43]

Personal life[link]

Nye announced his engagement during an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and was married briefly to his fiancée of five months, author Blair Tindall, on February 3, 2006. The ceremony was performed by Rick Warren at The Entertainment Gathering at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Yo-Yo Ma provided the music.^[44] Nye left the relationship seven weeks later when the marriage license was declared invalid;^[45] their impromptu ceremony, which preceded the license purchase, violated California state law, said Tindall in a radio interview.^[46] Nye later secured a temporary restraining order against Tindall after she entered his property late at night to pour weed killer in his garden.^[45]

Nye enjoys baseball and occasionally does experiments involving the physics of the game. As a longtime Seattle resident before becoming an entertainer, he is said to have been a fan of the Seattle Mariners, although recently he has voiced his preference (as a D.C. native) for the Washington Nationals.^[6]

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (January 2012)

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bill Nye

• Official website
• Bill Nye at the Internet Movie Database
• Bill Nye on Twitter
• Nye-Tindall wedding video
• An interview/discussion with Nye as guest on the radio show Loveline
• "Changing The World With Science Education" interview on Point of Inquiry.
• Seattle Times interview (April 26, 2004)
• Science Channel interview