First some History from Wikipedia:
1877 - French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud improved on the Zoetrope idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. He called his invention the Praxinoscope. Reynaud developed other versions of the Praxinoscope, too, including a Praxinoscope Theatre (where the device was enclosed in a viewing box) and also the Projecting Praxinoscope. Eventually, he created the "Theatre Optique", a large machine based on the Praxinoscope, but was able to project longer animated strips.
In the USA, the McLoughlin Bros from New York released in 1879 a simplified (and unauthorized) copy of Reynaud's invention under the name "Whirligig of Life".
1878 - Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four of its feet off the ground. Muybridge successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of 12 cameras controlled by trip wires. Muybridge's photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground. Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope. Muybridge's experiments inspired French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to invent equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. Marey called his invention the chronophotographic camera, which was able to take multiple images superimposed on top of one another.
1879 - American George Eastman invents the emulsion-coating machine which enables the mass-production of photographic dry plates.
Today we have a thousand frames a second to witness a moment in time, slow motion. Now for whatever reason that brings you to the track just like Muybridge we get to see the true force and abuse man and machine undergo during race day. Like the horse, there is times a race machine does not have all four on the ground and the real prize here needs to go out to the engineers of these machines.
Some great editing done here by RacingInSlowMotion
RacingInSlowMotion
