Muybridge rocks my socks. Great links.

That kiss isn't a film, it's actually a photographic motion study. Muybridge's work was a progenitor to film and he wasn't alone in making motion studies at the time. Another photographer Étienne-Jules Marey made some really incredible work. These guys were interested in using photography for the advancement of science.

Would also have been nice of your guest slogger to have mentioned the outstanding work of Paul Dorpat who originally stumbled upon this piece of esoterica, or at least published about it in his book Then And Now, back in 2011.

Here's his site:http://pauldorpat.com/seattle-now-and-then/seattle-now-then-madison-trolley-accident/

And to quote Dorpat, one of Seattle's finest historians, on the veracity of this particular curio "While revealing in its several parts this early 1890s look east up Madison Street from the trolley line’s terminal turntable is also a puzzle. A friend found this image in the Kingston Museum at Kingston on the Thames, England. It is attributed to Kingston’s most famous son, Eadweard Muybridge. The photographer-inventor returned to his hometown in 1895 after more than forty years of mostly taking photographs in the American West and performing some of the earliest experiments in motions pictures.

The puzzle is this. As far as I have been able to determine none of Muybridge’s biographers have ever put him in Seattle. The famous photographer was on Puget Sound in 1871 taking photographs for the U.S. Lighthouse service but that is at least 20 years before this lanternslide was recorded.

The best chance for having Muybridge here in time to take this photograph would be in the spring of 1893 when he left the West Coast for the last time. He was heading to Chicago to show his rudimentary “animal locomotion” pictures in his own “Zoopraxographical Hall” at the 1893 World Columbia Expedition in. But the Expo opened in May and this presents another problem for this scene includes a street broadside advertising an event for July 18. Perhaps the Englishman was late in getting to Chicago.

Another curiosity of this image is this; it is the only identified Seattle scene of any sort included with the Muybridge bequest of his life’s work to his hometown museum. The caption “Washington, Seattle, Madison Street Terraces” does have a Muybridge fit. San Francisco was the photographer’s west coast home base, so the Madison street cable line would have interested him, especially this part of it climbing to First Hill. Locals claimed that this was the second steepest incline in the trolley industry. Of course, the steepest trolley ride of all was in San Francisco."

@3 Thanks for the info. I love Dorpat's Now and Then work. I have one of his books and went to a reading - or, really, viewing - of his many years ago. He's a very engaging speaker. I also spied him taking a photograph of the New Year's Eve crowd at the Seattle Center House a handful of years ago. He is something of a city treasure.