by Joyce Bedi

Drops and splashes were among Edgerton’s favorite subjects. For decades, he sought the “perfect” drop. While images like the milk drop hitting a red plate are among Doc’s best known, there was a serious side to these photographs as well.

An entrepreneur at heart, Edgerton campaigned for the strobe’s use among his MIT colleagues, members of local industries, and professional and amateur photographers. In this way, he gained a broad range of experience with the abilities and deficiencies of the strobe and fed this knowledge back into further experimentation. Within a few years of putting the strobe on the market, he had a long list of companies and government agencies that had hired him to look into one problem or another.

For example, in 1939 he collaborated with the U.S. Soil Conservation Dept. on a study of soil erosion. In his notebook he wrote, “Germeshausen and Mr. Laws have been taking 1000/second movies of drops striking soil for the last several days. The drops of H2O come from the ceiling and hit samples below.” He added an image a few pages later about how the movies were created.

But Doc wasn’t all business all the time. His sense of play led to some unusual experimental set-ups. In 1936, he put his camera and strobe at the base of an elevator shaft, and then photographed drops released through a hole in the elevator floor—from the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and eighth floors! When his kind of curiosity and sense of wonder was combined with a keen understanding of photography and electrical engineering, the result was a blurring of the line between technology and art.

Studying the behavior of drops and splashes added to knowledge about surface tension and had both scientific and commercial applications. But Doc’s fascination with such a simple event as a falling drop of liquid is testament to his belief that learning is a lifelong occupation. A gifted teacher, Edgerton was a keen student as well. “I have always empathized with the student who sees new discoveries and knowledge that were not anticipated flowing from the laboratory,” he wrote in 1987. “There is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ result or a complete study of a phenomenon. For example, although I’ve tried for years to photograph a drop of milk splashing on a plate with all the coronet’s points spaced equally apart, I have never succeeded.”

Browse additional notebook pages related to “drops of water”.

Like every corner of MIT, the Strobe Lab was highly mobilized to serve the military. Major Goddard of Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio visited Edgerton during the summer of 1939 and asked Edgerton to consider the problem of nighttime aerial photography and the need for Edgerton’s control circuits and powerful flash.

This soon opened a whole new line of applications for Edgerton to explore and a whole new value network for his technology. Without doubt, Edgerton’s imagination and free spirit as well as the technical curiosity, which was highly nurtured by the atmosphere and people of MIT, made him highly successful during the war years.

Both Compton and Killian were faced with the challenge of reversing the direction of research from military applications to pure research. Compton started a very strict re-deployment for peace, which affected Edgerton as well as Germeshausen and Grier. Their unofficial partnership was asked to change into a corporation serving mainly the government, specifically the Atomic Energy Commission.

In his unpublished autobiography, Edgerton narrates this decision as:

After the war, the then Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) requested MIT to set up a comprehensive test system at Eniwetok Island with Grier in charge. MIT said “No,” why not have the partners (Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier) form a corporation to do the job? This was done and as a consequence, EG&G, INC. was started in 1947.8

Bernard O’Keefe, a later partner to EG&G, also talks about the formation of the corporation as a result of MIT’s focus on pure academic research in his book Nuclear Hostages, 1983:

At the time, most of the MIT faculty was back in force, ready to resume teaching and nonmilitary research. MIT and other universities had had a gutful of military research. When the MIT director of research programs heard about the proposed tenfold expansion of our little project [firing of nuclear bombs], he balked, saying that MIT was trying to get out of military research, not into it. He suggested to Grier he and his partners form a corporation to take over the government business and move it off campus. Edgerton and Germeshausen did not care much one way or the other, but Grier thought it was a great idea, so the corporation Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier Inc, was formed. (p.126-7)

But despite the incorporation of the company, Edgerton was still as active on the MIT front as he used to be. His desire to teach and discover more did not go away and was even more supported by the variety of things he worked on during the war. The scale of his projects had increased immensely.

Read more: Harold E. Edgerton in World War II by Roozbeh Ghaffari, Ozge Nadia Gozum, Katherine Koch, Amy W. Ng, Hua Fung Teh, and Peter Yang.

by Claire Calcagno

by Claire Calcagno

Over the decades Doc worked on underwater cameras ranging from hand-held types to stereo, deep-sea, and elapsed time movie cameras and cameras for silhouette photography. Specialized optical lenses were required, as well as effective electrical connections well protected from the corrosive salt water environment.

Fieldwork out in the oceans was extremely demanding and unforgiving, but Doc seemed to maintain unflagging enthusiasm and optimism in the face of the direst technological mishaps – and bouts of debilitating seasickness. 

by Claire Calcagno

Acoustic waves provide the means to make observations and measurements, as well as to communicate, under water. By measuring the time it takes for a sound pulse to reach an observer, it is possible to measure the distance between that source and the observer. Distances can be similarly calculated by timing the return echo of a sound pulse emitted by the observer.

For the next several decades Edgerton worked on improving his sonar instrument, or sub-bottom profiler, which he nick-named a ‘mud penetrator’, to probe the sea floor seeking to identify and record what lay beneath the sediments. The constant challenge he faced was to balance the competing desires for precision and range: higher acoustic frequency gives greater precision but lower distance range, and vice versa. Sound is also absorbed differentially according to the type of sediment being examined and the interference such as caused by gas bubbles. So Edgerton sought as many opportunities as possible to field-test his experimental instruments in the greatest variety of conditions to determine their working parameters and optimize their performance.