The Kentucky Derby: A Shared History of Horse Racing and Movies

The American Thoroughbred Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, but 3 years later another horse galloped into greater fame. This is where horse racing and movie history are intimately spun together by 24 frames of the first moving picture.

They call the Kentucky Derby the fastest 2 minutes in sports and the powerful grace of a horse in full motion is like none other. Visionary photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge forever changed our perception of a day at the races in 1878. Horses, like Aristides, had their feet on the ground for most people, but Muybridge's photographs of a horse named Sallie Gardner proved a moment of mid-flight.

Muybridge's experiment came about when California Governor Leland Stanford, who also happened to own a race horse, decided to settle a running debate. Some people had the lofty idea that all 4 of a horse's legs came off the ground mid-gallop. Muybridge's findings not only changed how the world would see the Kentucky Derby and Horse racing, but revolutionized how we saw the world.

This photographic experiment made Sallie Gardner the world's first movie star. Famous movie horses like "Black Beauty," "The Black Stallion," Silver from "The Lone Ranger," and "Flicka" owe their star-studded lineage to Sallie Gardner. The first movie set was a farm in Palo Alto, California, where Muybridge lined 24 cameras along a track at about 27 inches apart, set to snap a photo every 1/25 of a second.

As Sallie and her jockey Domm (the first human movie star), galloped into history, her hooves set off trip wires, which triggered the cameras. The experiment proved Stanford's assertion, settling the debate about horses, but also inspired the breakthrough of motion pictures.

2 years later, Muybridge screened presentations of "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop," which eventually caught the eye of Thomas Edison. It was Muybridge's moving pictures that helped inspire Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope, the first movie camera. Not only were a race horse and her jockey the first movie stars, but a race horse owner was the first movie producer. Technical innovations aside, the working relationship between Muybridge and Stanford also spurred the first squabble between a director and movie producer.

When Stanford published a book about the images, he barely acknowledged Muybridge's contributions. Muybridge did what any director would do; he went to the guild or in his case the Royal Society of Arts. In the end Muybridge got a steady flow of financing to further his filming of animal locomotion. This also led to his invention of the Zoopraxiscope, the first movie projector upon which Edison drew more inspiration.

As it seems with anything in history these days, the emerging ancient history of China reveals they discovered it first. This is true for moving pictures in the sense that the first Zoetrope was invented in China in 180 AD. The spinning wheel of the Zoetrope created an illusion of motion, which can be said to be the first moving pictures. Yet, Muybridge is undeniably the one to merge this idea with photography. As you watch the Kentucky Derby on TV or racing films like "Seabiscuit" or "Secretariat," hopefully you're reminded of this deep connection between horses and movies .