Edison likely had seen descriptions of the work of Muybridge in Scientific American, La Nature and journals specializing in photography.[2]
Edison might have attended a demonstration of Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography the following summer in Paris. Marey had developed a technique for the analysis of motion in precise temporal units which he displayed at the Paris exposition. Edison met Marey and the Lumieres at a dinner commemorating the 50th anniversary of photography.[3]
In the work of Marey, whose chronophotography pre-dated both the Lumiere camera and the multi-barrelled Gatling gun, we find the beginning of the verbal affinity of cameras and guns, of pictures and weapons that are "shot":
