Doc originally developed the electronic stroboscope to study problems in large electrical motors. But his first subject outside the engine room was water flowing from a faucet. Perhaps this ignited his lifelong interest in the behavior of drops and splashes of all sorts.

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”.

When America entered the war, the US government very quickly discovered what Compton already knew: the union of MIT’s scientific resources and the nation’s specific military needs would prove to be mutually beneficial. In a sense the school itself was drafted into service.

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.

In addition to exploring terrestrial subjects, Doc Edgerton was intrigued by the unique engineering challenges of underwater research. In order to “see” underwater, Doc had to design tools that could withstand enormous and varying pressure, stay protected from salt contamination, and record information through remotely operated instruments that could be interpreted by scientists in their research vessels at the surface. Doc developed underwater cameras, lights and deep-sea recording instruments for imaging and detection efforts at the cutting edge of oceanographic research. His underwater instruments, which used light as well as sound to penetrate the dark depths, were applied to many disciplines including geophysics and physical oceanography, to marine biology and underwater archaeology.

Doc’s particular expertise with the generation and precise control of high-energy short pulses – whether for stroboscopes, high-speed flashes or for modulator switches for atom bombs – were turned towards the problems of underwater acoustic waves, to improve and shorten the sound pulse length and thereby improve resolution. His sound-based tools included so-called pingers, thumpers, boomers, sub-bottom profilers, sparkers and side scan sonar.

Limited accessibility – hard to reach areas – raised operating costs astronomically; thus oceanographic expeditions frequently featured several overlapping scientific missions, such as geologic mapping and shipwreck investigations. Doc collaborated with scientists from around the world, including ocean explorers Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Edwin Link, and top scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which has always had a close affiliation with MIT. Doc’s international reputation and promotion of scholarly exchanges led to his invitation in 1969 to join a Soviet oceanographic team investigating the mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Ever the inspiring teacher, Doc didn’t limit himself to the scientific or academic communities: public outreach was an important part of his mission. Through collaborations with organizations such as the National Geographic Society and the New England Aquarium (which maintains an active Edgerton Research Laboratory), Edgerton communicated with the broadest audiences. Edgerton’s research exemplifies his philosophy as a scientist and engineer: his belief in the primacy of hands-on field research; his appreciation for the potential to make serendipitous discoveries through careful observation; his openness to failure as inspirational challenge.
Friends claimed that Doc must have seen more new things for the first time than any other person in the world.