In 1872, railroad magnate and racehorse owner Leland Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge, then famous for his photographs of Yosemite Valley, to capture evidence on film that at a certain point in a horse’s trot, all four of its legs were simultaneously off the ground. Five years later, Muybridge developed a camera with a shutter speed of 2/1000 of a second, fast enough to prove Stanford correct. Muybridge went on a lecture tour with a device of his own design, the zoopraxiscope, which, through the rapid projection of photographic images, created the illusion of continuous movement.

In 2012, twelve zoos in the U.S. and Canada introduced iPads for use during the enrichment times allotted to orangutans as part of a program called Apps for Apes. Richard Zimmerman, director of Orangutan Outreach, said of the animals in the program, “We’re finding that, similar to people, they like touching the tablet, watching short videos of David Attenborough, for instance, and looking at other animals and orangutans.”