MUYBRIDGE’S FEAT

Regarding “Vive le Cinema!” (by Scott Kraft, Dec. 24): Please recall that moving photo images, “movies,” were first shown commercially in California, 1880, not in France, 1895.

San Franciscan Eadweard Muybridge photographed horses and people running in Palo Alto in the 1870s. He exhibited these brief, 16-frame movies at the San Francisco Art Assn. for 50-cents admission.

Muybridge did not use strip film pulled by claws, since it had not yet been invented. He projected his photography on a rotating glass disc with a shutter disc turning counter-clockwise. The Guinness Book of Records says that his images were blurred. Nevertheless, Muybridge presented his blurred movies in, yes, Paris, to cheering crowds in 1881, years before Lumiere did.

JULIAN (BUD) LESSER Los Angeles