American inventor and photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by Leland Stanford, then entrepreneur and horse breeder, later Governor of California, to study the motion of his horses at his ranch in Palo Alto through photographs. These images caused a sensation when they were published in the Daily Alta in April 1873 because they definitively proved that indeed all four legs of the horse leave the ground when in a full gallop. To capture these images, Muybridge set up a series of cameras triggered by trip wires through which the horse galloped. Over the following decades, Muybridge developed his motion picture projector, the zoopraxiscope, which used 16” glass disks to trace and project images of the horse. As the disk spinned in from of the light, the individual still frames of the horse were reanimated into a galloping silhouette.

Sixteen years later, French philosopher Henri Bergson published his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), later translated into English as Time and Free Will, apparently building his theories of time and space upon these and other photographic experiments: 

It follows from this analysis that space alone is homogeneous, that objects in space form a discrete multiplicity, and that every discrete multiplicity is got by a process of unfolding.