Aristotle seems to be the first philosopher to compare animal locomotion to mechanical movement. In his treatise ‘On the Motion of Animals’, he writes:

Aristotle was limited to observation as his measuring tool, but subsequent scientists wanted to develop more accurate ways to measure animal locomotion, leading to the invention of an array of mechanical devices for recording human movement as a mechanical phenomenon. Of primary interest to anatomists was measuring the forces involved in walking, especially those inherent in the human gait to discover how forward momentum is produced. One of the first to create an experiment for measuring these was the Renaissance Italian physiologist Giovanni Borelli, a pioneer of iatromechanics and considered the father of biomechanics. Like Aristotle, Borelli's analogue for human motion was the machine. He imagined human bones as ‘mechanical levers moved by muscles according to mathematical principles’ and performed an experiment using a prismatic pivot to prove that the centre of a human body's mass indicates a ‘lateral sway during gait’ (quoted in Medved 2000: 6). In 1836, the German brothers Wilhelm and Eduard Weber published Mechanics of Walking in Humans, the first scientific study of the human gait. The Weber brothers anticipated photographer Eadweard Muybridge's later photographic studies of motion using optical instruments combined with time-measuring devices, including the chronograph, to isolate and mathematically model the specific positions of limbs and muscle groups during the phases of walking (Medved 2000: 6).