Today s Google doodle pays homage to the photography of Eadweard J. Muybridge, pioneering photographer and inventor of the zoopraxiscope. If he had somehow survived to witness the multimedia era, Muybridge would be marking his 182 nd birthday.

The running horse video, which replaces the Google logo today, comes from Muybridge s most famous photographic experiment. Renowned for his landscape photography in the Yosemite Valley, Muybridge took on the challenge put forward by railroad baron, and former California governor Leland Stanford to answer a long-standing equine mystery. Stanford, founder of the eponymous university, was among those who contended that at a certain moment in a horse s gait the animal flew, with all four legs in the air.