The California Wonder
by Lisa Harkema
The first world champion bred in California, Occident came out nowhere in the early 1870s and tied Goldsmith Maid’s absolute world record in 1873. It was very different to a few years earlier when he was living a life of abuse and ill-treatment. Later he would play a key role in the development of both picture technology but also our understanding of horse gaits.
In 1878, after being commissioned by the wealthy Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge created The Horse in Motion, the first example of chronophotography, the precursor of today’s motion pictures. The Horse In Motion consisted of sets of pictures showing four different horses; Occident and Abe Eddington trotting, and Mahomet and Sallie Gardner running. The very first recorded picture of a horse in motion had been taken five year earlier. Leland Stanford had commissioned Muybridge to somehow record or photograph Occident in action. Muybridge didn’t really think it could be done, but agreed to give it a go anyway.
According to an article in the Daily Alta California on Apr 7, 1873, “All the sheets in the neighborhood of the stable were produced to make a white ground to reflect the object, and Occident was after a while trained to go over the white cloth without flinching; then came the question how could an impression be transfixed of body moving at the rate of thirty-eight feet to the second. The first experiment of opening and closing the camera on the first day left no result; the second day, with increased velocity in opening and closing, a shadow was caught. On the third day, Mr Muybridge, having studied the matter thoroughly, contrived to have two boards slip past each other by touching a spring, and in so doing to leave an eighth of an inch opening for the five-hundredth part of a second, as the horse passed, and by an arrangement of double lenses, crossed secured a negative that shows Occident in full motion – a perfect likeness of the celebrated horse. The space of time was so small that the spokes of the wheels of the sulky were caught as if they were not in motion.” Despite the positive description, the best pictures were blurry and shadowy. Moreover, they were not published and the negatives were lost.