Biographical Memoirs Volume 86 (2005) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Harold Eugene Edgerton
Harold Eugene Edgerton
Pages 96-117
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 97... ...
His images have become icons of the twentieth century: the drop of milk exploding into a crown, a bullet hovering beside an apple, an atomic blast caught the instant before it mushroomed, a smudge that might have been the flipper of the Loch Ness monster. His strobe photographs illustrated scientific phenomena in a way that was instantly understandable to millions of people.
|
From page 98... ...
In 1931 Esther had given birth to their first child, Mary Louise, and Harold had received his doctorate in electrical engineering fiom MIT. Now their baby slept in the fi ont of the car and in the back, among the bundles and suitcases, sat the first strobe he'd developed for commercial use.
|
From page 99... ...
In the late 1920s as an electrical engineering graduate student at MIT, he worked under Vannevar Bush, using rudimentary computers to predict the behavior of motors: Results could be verified by flashing a strobe at the motor. Edgerton, the consummate tinkerer, was more interested in the strobe itself than in
|
From page 100... ...
In his photos of athletes in motion he showed a tennis racquet curving under impact, the toe of a boot embedded deep inside a football, a baseball that melted against the bat, taking viewers on a tour of the secret world of highspeed impact, where hard objects turn to mush (1939, pp.
|
From page 101... ...
By the late 1920s he had already hatched the idea of taking his gear to downtown Boston and catching dancers in midleap, to use the flash as a new window onto popular spectacles.4 However, in those early years his equipment was not equal to the task of lighting cavernous arenas. But a decade later Edgerton and his partners—his former students Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier—had tweaked the machine, replacing the mercury gas with argon,
|
From page 102... ...
Even so, in 1939 Eastman Kodak struck a deal with Edgerton and his partners to develop a strobe for professional photographers, the Kodatron The next year, when a newspaper photographer named George Woodruff showed up at the lab, Edgerton hit on the gimmick that proved the commercial appeal of strobe once and for all. The two men hauled equipment to the Boston Garden, a sports arena with a busy schedule of races, rodeos, fights, and circuses.
|
From page 103... ...
Colonel George Goddard, the man in charge of the Army's aerial photography effort, had come to Edgerton for help with a problem that bedeviled the military. The Allies needed to illuminate vast areas during the nighttime, to take aerial photographs of roads and bridges in order to track the movements of the enemy.
|
From page 104... ...
Since the 1930s, he had been aiming his strobe at birds and bats, freezing them in the air to study the secrets of their flight. Now, because "he wanted to do something in the summertime with the family," according to Bob Edgerton, he organized an expedition around the country to photograph hummingbirds.
|
From page 105... ...
Edgel ton, dressed in his usual technician's outfit of rumpled khaki shirt and khaki pants, would use wire cutters to force his way into the stock room. When security guards stopped him, he told them that it was OK.
|
From page 106... ...
The men planned an expedition to the southern coast of France, to study clouds of living organisms in the ocean, called the deep scattering layer. In the summer of 1953 teenaged Bob Edgerton and his father flew to Marseille, where they squeezed into Cousteau's crowded ship; Bob slept in a 6-foot-long drawer in the boat's workshop.
|
From page 107... ...
From the 1960s on, shipwreck hunters and archeologists alike called Edgerton with endless invitations to join their expeditions: the Civil War ship Monitor, King Henry Vlll's flagship Mary Rose, the HMS Britannic, and even a site rumored to be Atlantis. Edgerton almost always said yes.
|
From page 108... ...
Someone who you have respect for, but he's friendly— like a country doctor."~5 The name brought together his two identities: MIT whiz and Nebraska burgher. His family moved around during his childhood, but by the time Harold Edgerton was in junior high school, they'd settled in Aurora, Nebraska, a farming community with a power plant at its center.
|
From page 109... ...
Like many freshmen, he didn't yet appear to have his moorings and I thought the exposure to Strobe Alley couldn't hurt ~17 Edgerton's hospitality didn't stop at the lab: He invited his students home to sample Esther's cooking and sing backup on 'Lou Are My Sunshine," which he twanged on the banjo. An assignment sheet from a 1946 class reads as follows: "Appear at 205 School Street, Belmont, about 6:30 p.m.
|
From page 110... ...
This time when I came to Edgerton with the slides in January 1973, he said, "Van, I think you've got it." In August of 1974 Scientific American ran the schlieren photographs: a heady turn of events for a graduate student. That same summer Edgerton wrote to the organizers of the Eleventh international Congress on High-Speed Photography and arranged for the pictures to be displayed in a gallery during the conference.
|
From page 111... ...
Strobe Alley, the hallway that cut a line between Edgerton's labs, sucked visitors in and invited them to become part of the action. To make his lair even more inviting Edgerton hung displays all along the hall: photographs, framed bits of equipment, buttons to push.
|
From page 112... ...
So that's how the Edgerton Center came to open its doors in 1992. Housed in the Strobe Alley and its surrounding rooms, the center strives to follow Edgerton's magnificent example of hands-on teaching and generous mentor ship.
|
From page 113... ...
Claire Calcagno allowed me to quote from her wonderful interview with Marty Klein and Sam Raymond. Marty Klein was kind enough to help with fact checking.
|
From page 114... ...
18. Harold Edgerton, "Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering," assignment sheet for May 3, 1946, Collection MC 25, MIT institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Mass.
|
From page 115... ...
:311-314. 1947 Airborne photographic equipment.
|
From page 116... ...
Optically efficient ruby laser pump.
|
From page 117... ...
Color schlieren photography of short-duration transient events. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress on High-Speed Photography, ed.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.