Eadweard J. Muybridge, the subject of today’s Google Doodle, was a celebrated photographer, inventor and a killer. He was born 182 years ago today.

Google celebrates Muybridge’s life with an animated logo of running horses. Like all good inventors, Muybridge put in considerable time and energy to settle a bet. The intellectual debate during the 1870s surrounded horses and whether all four of its legs were off the ground at the time.

In 1872, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired Muybridge, an acclaimed landscape photographer, to prove his horse-trotting theory, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Muybridge’s initial efforts failed because he lacked the shutter speed to capture a horse’s movement. Then he got wind that his wife had taken a lover, so he showed up at Major Harry Larkins’ door and shot him dead. His defense said he was temporarily insane due to a recent head injury.

The jury didn’t buy the insanity argument, but acquitted him on grounds of a “justifiable homicide.” He returned to work for Stanford, who paid for Muybridge’s defense, and developed a camera with a shutter speed of 1/500 per second. This proved all four legs of the horse were in the air at one time as it trotted.

He later invented the zoopraxiscope, a lantern that projected photographs in rapid succession onto a screen, the precursor to movies. The invention gained worldwide attention at the World’s Columbian Exposition at the 1893 in Chicago.

Muybridge, who was born Edward James Muggeridge in England on April 9, 1830, emigrated to the United States as a young man and died on May 8, 1904. He used his invention to display human and animal locomotion.

Google has created more than 1,000 doodles. The ideas come from users and a team at Google. A recent doodle celebrated architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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