Muybridge’s 1,000 frames a second soon became 10,000. By 1940, the patented design of a rotating mirror camera raised the rate to 1 million per second. In 1999, Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a spectrograph that could capture the transition states of chemical reactions on a scale of femtoseconds—that is, 10-15 seconds, or one-millionth of one-billionth of a second.
