Garrett Brown, an American inventor who revolutionized the way movies are made, was a student and graduate of Haverford High School, according to Wikipedia.

Brown is the inventor of the Steadicam, for which he won an Academy Award in 1978.

The Steadicam allows camera operators to film while walking without shaking or jostling the image. 

Brown didn’t jump into filmmaking right away. The cinematographer/inventor attended Tufts University after Haverford and formed the folk duo, Brown & Dana, with Al Dana.

Brown also sold Volkswagons and worked as a radio pitchman, producing and performing with advertising partner Anne Winn on award-winning radio commercials for Molson Beer, American Express, and others, according to Knowledge at Wharton.

He read all the books he could find on filmmaking and started working as a cameraman, director, and editor, making films for programs like Sesame Street out of his Gradyville studio barn.

He was inspired to create the Steadicam out of the frustration he had in his studio getting a moving camera image to look good on screen. At the time, the only solution was to put the camera on a 600-pound contraption and lay rails for it.

“My floor creaked on the studio, and it was not quite level—you constantly had to be leveling this thing while you drove it. It was a nightmare,” he told Knowledge at Wharton.

He debuted the Steadicam in a demo film having his girlfriend—now wife—run down the Philadelphia Art Museum steps and back. A version of that scene, replaced with Sylvester Stallone, later found its way into the film Rocky after director John G. Avildsen saw the demo.

The Steadicam made it into film for the first time in Hal Ashby’s 1976 film,  Bound for Glory. The picture won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Stanley Kubrick also made extensive use of the Steadicam in The Shining.

In Return of the Jedi. Brown walked through a Redwood forest with the Steadicam shooting film at 1 frame per second to achieve the illusion of high-speed motion during the speeder-bike chase.

In all, Brown’s Steadicam work has been used in more than 70 motion pictures.

Brown is also the inventor of the SkyCam used in football games, which won him a second Academy Award in 2006, the DiveCam to track Olympic divers, and MobyCam, an underwater camera to follow Olympic swimmers.

You can read an extended interview with Garrett Brown at Knowledge at Wharton.

Here are the first Steadicam test shots made by Garrett Brown, including the run on the Art Museum steps.