In the 1870s, horse lovers attending events were preoccupied with the question of whether a galloping horse always had at least one leg on the ground, or whether there was a moment when all four legs were in the air. Leland Stanford, president of the Southern Pacific Railway, whose son died at the age of 15 and became the namesake of Stanford University, was also preoccupied with this question.

How fortunate that he crossed paths with photography pioneer (and murderer of his wife’s lover) Eadweard Muybridge, who saw an opportunity here to further develop photographic technology. At Stanford Ranch, he set up a device with 12 cameras and a white background. A horse running along the racetrack triggered the cameras via wires stretched across the ground, and thus, on June 19, 1878, the now famous series of images, The Horse in Motion, was created.

And it proved that a galloping horse regularly hovered in the air with all four hooves off the ground.

137 years later, at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, the problem most humanoid robots struggled with was stability. You can see them stumbling, suddenly collapsing, and not even being able to stand still while performing tasks.

But ten years later, in 2025, there are several humanoids that can not only stand and walk steadily, but also jog. Both Tesla and Figure.AI have just released videos of their naturally running humanoids, whose running motion is almost indistinguishable from that of human runners.

Similar to Eadweard Muybridge’s photo series, we can see that these humanoid robots actually have both feet in the air when jogging. From flying hooves, we have now arrived at humanoids taking off, at least a little bit.