Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, also known as Papa Flash (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990) was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device.
He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used by Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.
Harold Edgerton invented the electronic flash – which allowed him to capture things the human eye cannot see.
This photograph captures a sliver in time—1/10,000th of a second, to be exact—when a drop of milk splashes and curves upwards to form an opalescent crown.
The photographer spent two decades trying to capture the perfect milk coronet, until he snapped this color shot in 1957.
He was Harold “Doc” Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Known as “the man who made time stand still,” he laid the foundation for high-speed photography with his innovations in flash technology.
“Harold Edgerton combined modern electronics with improved flash tube technology to create very bright, short duration, precision control of light,” says Kim Vandiver, a former colleague and director of MIT’s Edgerton Center, founded in 1992 after Edgerton’s death in 1990.
The flash he developed was briefer than ever before, and allowed photographers to capture fleeting moments that go undetected by the human eye.
Edgerton revolutionized glass flash tubes, the capsules that illuminate subjects when photographs are taken.
He filled the tubes with xenon, a highly conductive gas that, when triggered by an electrical charge, fires off flashes that are exceptionally bright and brief—mere microseconds long.
(One microsecond is 1/1,000,000 of a second).
“The light itself essentially acts as a shutter,” Vandiver explains—the camera only captures what’s visible in that fleeting moment of illumination. (Source: Science Friday)
