Artist of the day, August 23: Harold Edgerton, an American electrical engineer and photographer (#779)

Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton also known as Papa Flash (1903 – 1990) was an American electrical engineer and photographer who was noted for creating high-speed photography techniques that he applied to scientific uses. He was 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

After completing a master's degree in the subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1927, he joined the university faculty; he was awarded a PhD in 1931. Between 1933 and 1966, Edgerton applied for forty-five patents for various strobe and electrical engineering devices. He obtained a patent for the stroboscope--a high-powered repeatable flash device--in 1949. His photographs were exhibited for the first time in 1933, at the Royal Photographic Society in London, and Beaumont Newhall included his work in the first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937. Edgerton was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, and he was given ICP's Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987.

Edgerton revolutionized photography, science, military surveillance, Hollywood filmmaking, and the media through his invention of the strobe light in the early 1930s. The photographs that resulted from his scientific experiments were championed in the 1930s as representative of the New Objectivity, the American counterpart to the German Neue Sachlichkeit. Edgerton's photography of split-second motion may be seen as an expansion beyond the nineteenth-century locomotion studies of by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey.

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Mr Harold Edgerton

Human Baseball Batter

1934, Motion Study of Smoke Vortices Caused by Electric Fan

Golf

Golf

Drop

Dog jumping

Gun Toss (1936)

 Death of a lightbulb (1936)

Moving Skip Rope

The Anatomy of Movement, diving

Watertap

Nuclear explosion

Nuclear explosion

Tennis

Drum majorette

Bullet through Banana

Bullet through Crayola

Gun and bullet (1938)

Bullet through the apple (1954)

Football Kick

Owl

Propeller Cavitation

Hammer and Glass

Gun

Cards

Coin Toss, (1965)

Bullet Shock Wave (1970)

Dancer

Milk drop

Bullet and rubber bands