Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known as the "Grandfather of Motion Pictures" for his pioneering work capturing motion photographically. His experiments in the 1870s used multiple cameras to study animal locomotion, and his 1882 work "The Horse in Motion" was the first to capture a galloping horse's hooves leaving the ground. Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope in 1879, which projected images in rapid sequence to simulate motion, influencing early film innovators like Edison and laying the foundations of modern cinema.