The photographic career of Edward Mugbridge almost came to an end when he discovered his wife was having an affair with a man from the circus. Mugbridge tracked the man down to a cabin on the slopes of Mount St. Helena.

The outraged husband burst into the cabin and shot the circus man as he was playing cribbage. Mugbridge was arrested and tried for murder. At the trial, his defense attorney appealed to the sympathies of the all-male jury.

The attorney said they must acquit Mugbridge, if they loved "good women, home and fireside." Apparently this appeal was effective, for after thirteen hours of deliberation, the jury found Mugbridge not guilty.

In 1872 Leland Stanford invited Mugbridge to come to his Palo Alto stock farm and take a series of stop-action photographs of his horse Occident. Stanford had bet he could prove that a horse running at full tilt lifts all four of its feet off the ground at the same time.

Most experts thought otherwise. They believed it was impossible for a horse to be fully airborne. Mugbridge set up twenty-four sequentially arranged cameras to photograph Occident as he raced by. He rigged the cameras so that their shutters were tripped automatically by strings strung across the track. Sure enough, when the photos were developed they showed that ol' Occident really had defied gravity. Stanford won his bet.  

As it turned out, Edward Mugbridge's horse pictures were a major breakthrough in the development of motion pictures. Mugbridge found that by projecting his twenty-four images of Occident, the horse appeared to move. Even today the twenty­-four-frames-per-second speed developed by Mugbridge is the standard operating speed for the projection of all motion pictures.

Of course, not everyone was too thrilled to go and see pictures of Leland Stanford's horse running around a track. But Edward Mugbridge went on to take thousands of photographs of "nude men and women in action." When those photos were published, his place in history was assured!