Harold eugene edgerton interesting facts
Nuclear explosion captured by Edgerton&#;s Rapatronic camera (U.S. Air Force nd Photographic Group)
On April 6, , Harold Eugene &#;Doc&#; Edgerton, professor for electrical engineering at the Massachussetts Institut of Technology was 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-seaphotography, and his equipment was used by Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness monster.
Harold Eugene Edgerton &#; Early Years
Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, the first of Frank and Mary Edgerton’s three children. His father was a lawyer, journalist, author and orator, as well as a descendant of Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower.
Harold grew up in Aurora, Nebraska and became interested in photography through his uncle, Ralph Edgerton, a studio photographer, who taught Harold how to take, develop, and print pictures.
Edgerton earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska in and received master’s () and doctoral () degrees in the same field from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.
Edgerton used stroboscopes to study synchronous motors for his doctoral thesis, which included a high-speed motion picture of a motorin motion, made with a mercury-arc stroboscope. He credited Charles Stark Draper with inspiring him to photograph everyday objects using electronic flash; the first was a stream of water coming out of a faucet.
He taught at MIT from , becoming a full professor there in
How to Slow Down Time
Though taking a &#;still&#; picture of a rapidly moving object had been accomplished by William Henry Fox Talbot in and had been improved upon by many others, Edgerton was not only the first to substitute a controlcircuitfor atube or lamp, but the first to make high-speed flash photography practical.
[4,5] In , as a graduate student, Edgerton began to experiment with flash tubes. He developed a tube using xenon gas that could produce high-intensity bursts of light as short as 1/1,, second. Edgerton’s tube remains the basic flash device used in still photography. The xenon flash could also emit repeated bursts of light at regular and very brief intervals and was thus an ideal stroboscope.
Harold edgerton Harold Edgerton (born April 6, , Fremont, Nebraska, U.S.—died January 4, , Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American electrical engineer and photographer who was noted for creating high-speed photography techniques that he applied to scientific uses.With his new flashEdgerton was able to photograph the action of such things as drops of milk falling into a saucer, a tennis racket hitting a ball, and bullets hitting a steel plate or traveling at speeds of up to m per second. The resulting images often possessed artistic beauty in addition to their value to industry and science.
The Stroboscobe
Perhaps the most famous early use of the stroboscope was in a lawsuit between the Lever Brothers and Procter & Gamble on their competitive methods of making soap powder.
High-speed, stroboscopic motion pictures provided visual proof that Lever Brothers’ methods were different from Procter & Gamble’s and the suit was dropped.[3] During the late s, Edgerton spent more and more time outside the laboratory. His photographs of stage shows, like the Follies, and sportsevents captured the imagination of newsphotographers.
Photo taken during a &#;freshman seminar&#; conducted by Harold Edgerton at MIT, using his lab&#;s equipment.
Science as Art
In Edgerton began a lifelong association with photographerGjon Mili, who used stroboscopic equipment, in particular, multiple studioelectronic flash units, to produce strikingly beautiful photographs, many of which appeared in Life Magazine.
When taking multiflash photographs this strobe lightequipment could flash up to times a second. Edgerton teamed up with Kenneth J. Germeshausen to do consulting work with different industrial clients.
Harold edgerton photography biography samples images In the last three decades of his life, Edgerton concentrated on sonar and underwater photography, illuminating the depths of the ocean for undersea explorers such as Jacques Cousteau, who dubbed his good friend "Papa Flash.".Together with HerbertGrier they founded &#;Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier&#; (EG&G) in , which should become a prime contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission and had a major role in photographing and recording nuclear tests for the United States.
The Nuclear Tests
For the nuclear tests, Edgerton and his colleagues soon realized that to take still pictures of such a huge release of light, they would have to make exposures of shorter duration than had even been imagined.
To solve this problem, they invented a camera they called the “rapatronic” (for rapid electronic). When light from the bomb hit the photocell in the camera, it triggered a mechanism that opened and then cut off the exposure in as little as two microseconds.[3]
The Life Aquatic
In , the National Geographic Society asked Edgerton to join them in underwater exploration, and Doc meet the leader of the expeditions, Jacques-Yves Cousteau who became a life-long friend.[6] Edgerton worked with the underseaexplorerJacques Cousteau, by first providing him with custom designed underwater photographic equipment featuring electronic flash, and then by developing side-scan sonartechnology, used to scan the sea floor for wrecks, by which they discovered the Britannic.
Edgerton participated in the discovery of the American Civil WarbattleshipUSS Monitor. While working with Cousteau, he acquired the nickname he is still known by in photographic circles, &#;Papa Flash&#;.
The Boomer
In , Edgerton invented the “boomer”, i.e.
Harold edgerton photography biography samples free
Edgerton revolutionized photography, science, military surveillance, Hollywood filmmaking, and the media through his invention of the strobe light in the early s. The photographs that resulted from his scientific experiments were championed in the s as representative of the New Objectivity, the American counterpart to the German Neue.an acoustic device similar to the pinger that could locate objects lying on and beneath the ocean floor and deliver seismic provides of them. He used the boomer to find an H-bomb off the coast of Spain, search for the ancient Greekcity of Helice (submerged about B.C.), and map various ocean trenches.
Death
Edgerton continued to be active at his university after he retired and died very suddenly at the age of 86 while attending the MIT Faculty Club.
He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Huge Nuclear Fireball in slow motion, Operation Teapot &#; Turk , [8]
References and Further Reading:
- [1] J.
Kim Vandiver, P. Kennedy: Harold Eugene Edgerton, A Biographical Memoir, National Academy of Sciences.
- [2] Harold E. Edgerton at BritannicaOnline
- [3] Harold &#;Doc&#; Edgerton, at Edgerton Digital
- [4] Photographic Pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, SciHi Blog
- [5] The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, SciHI Blog
- [6] The Edgerton Digital Collections website by the MIT Museum with thousands of photographs and scanned notebooks.
- [7] Harold Eugene Edgerton at Wikidata
- [8] Huge Nuclear Fireball in slow motion, Operation Teapot &#; Turk , The Centralnuclear youtube
- [9] Gray, Paul E.
(April ). &#;Obituary: Harold E. Edgerton&#;. Physics Today. 44 (4): –
- [10] Grundberg, Andy (January 5, ).
- Harold edgerton photography style
- When was harold edgerton born
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- [11] Timeline of Photographic Pioneers, via DBpedia and Wikidata
&#;H. E. Edgerton, 86, Dies. Invented Electronic Flash&#;. The New York Times.