Hold your horses--no, let them run: It's Muybridge's birthday.

If you go to the Google homepage today, you'll see a Google-ized graphic not unlike the one above.  That's because on this day in 1830, Eadweard Muybridge was born.  Muybridge was the first photographer to create stop motion imagery and his Zoopraxiscope was the first device to display motion pictures.  Though Muybridge was born in England (under a different name; he had complicated relationship with monikers), he emigrated to the U.S. in 1855 and eventually built a  reputation as a photographer of the West.  In 1872, former California governor Leland Stanford hired him to prove the mechanics of a horse's gait.  Muybridge went on to make thousands of photographs of other animals.  He died in 1904 after a full and complicated life.  Wikipedia has a long entry on Muybridge, including various embeds of his stop motions.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge