Sacramento's Role In The Birth of Filmmaking

Why Sacramento-based filmmakers need look no farther than their own hometown to find one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets

PART TWO: In the 1870s, Leland Stanford was one of a small group of Sacramento Businessmen—including Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington and Charles Crocker—who built the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific, later to become the Southern Pacific, began at the Sacramento Embarcadero, snaked over the Sierra and linked up to the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869.

Sacramento's Leland Stanford scored another coup besides participating in the development of California: He played a key part in the birth of film's history as the man behind what is now considered the first movie.

In 1872, Stanford decided to settle a bet once and for all about his contention that all four hooves of a trotting horse leave the ground at the same time.

He enlisted the help of San Francisco photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. They met at Stanford's ranch and rigged up a series of cameras attached to trip wires that, when struck by a horse, would each shoot one image. They hoped that this would produce a series of pictures depicting proof, for Stanford's bet, that the horse's hooves did leave the ground simultaneously for at least a fraction of a second.

When viewed in rapid succession, however, these images reproduced the event not as a series of pictures, but as a fluid motion. Initially intended to stop the motion of the horse, Stanford's experiment actually could be used to reproduce that same motion. Today, those Stanford/Muybridge images are collectively considered to be the first motion picture. However, the the first motion picture to be copyrighted as such would not come for another 22 years: the "short" was an Edison film documenting The Birth of a Sneeze, 7-January-1894; Its running time: a whopping five seconds.

...to be continued.