Christian Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum clock, invented the magic lantern in 1659. The magic lantern does not use real magic but instead is a box with a light inside that will project a picture through the lens and onto a wall or curtain. This magic lantern was the first big step to a motion picture projector. Phenakistiscope was made in the 1830s and was a wheel that had a lot of pictures on it so that when you spun it fast enough it looked like the image was moving. Edward Muggeridge was an old bookshop owner who was born in England in 1830. He immigrated to the United States when he was 20 and lived in San Francisco where he set up shop. In 1860 he was going to go to England to buy some books for his shop, but he missed his boat. He couldn’t get another boat to take him to England so he traveled to New York to get another boat, but on his way his stagecoach crashed and left him severely hurt. His brain got damaged and his personality changed. His doctor told him of photography, and so Edward became a photographer. He became a very good photographer and got the attention of Leland Stanford who asked Muggeridge to help him put an end to the argument of whether a galloping horse takes all 4 feet off the ground at any time. Muggeridge set up 20 cameras in a row so that they could take a picture of the horse with 4 legs in the air at once. When Muggeridge played through all the pictures quickly it looked like a video. Motion pictures were born.
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