“This Race Horse was the first Film ever, filmed in 1878 by Edward Muybridge.

Eadweard J. Muybridge (pronounced /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 — 8 May 1904) was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.

By 1878, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion. This series of photos taken in Palo Alto, California, is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, and shows that the hooves do all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse as it switches from “pushing” with the back legs to “pulling” with the front legs. This series of photos stands as one of the earliest forms of videography.”

— silentfilmhouse