Zoopraxiscope disc of athletes boxing, 1893. The zoopraxiscope was invented by Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904), a British-American photographer, in 1879. It was an early movie projector, projecting images from a glass disc in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. In this case, the individual images on the disc, when spun, give the illusion of two men boxing. Muybridge pioneered the use of photography to study human and animal locomotion, employing ingenious new techniques. In the late 1870s he proved that a cantering horse has all its feet off the ground at certain times by using 24 small cameras to photograph it.