Chapter 11: Flash Photography

In 1931, a professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Harold E. Edgerton (affectionately nicknamed “Doc”) invented a tool that would forever change the face of photography, art, science, and human vision. Edgerton’s invention was the first repeatable short-duration light source — more popularly known as electronic flash — and it fired at incredibly brief durations as fast as one-millionth of a second (today’s flashes, by comparison, fire at relatively slower speeds of from 1/1000 to 1/20000 second). Photos made using this revolutionary lighting technology revealed secrets in the motion of high-speed subjects that had never been witnessed by human eyes before. One famous early photo from 1964 showed a bullet passing through a playing card, with the bullet frozen in midair. Other Edgerton photos captured the intricate nuance of a drop of milk splashing in a dish, a bullet piercing an apple, and a light bulb being smashed by a hammer (you can clearly see each fragment of glass as it explodes into space).