The MIT News Office honored Doc Edgerton with a story on January 4, 2013, describing how MIT Professor Harold Edgerton’s high-speed photography and sonar devices revolutionized ocean exploration.
“Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton was first drawn to underwater photography because of a leaky box. It all started in the mid-1930s, when E. Newton Harvey, a bioluminescence expert, approached him for advice on photographing phosphorescent deep-sea fishes for an upcoming book. Never one to refuse helping anyone, Edgerton assembled the camera and instructed Newton to encase it in a watertight box to lower into the depths. But soon, upon bumping into the author in Harvard Square, Edgerton learned that the box had distorted and cracked, allowing seawater in and ruining Newton’s project. From then on, Edgerton was determined to “see through” seawater with a camera of his own making. “Why not a spherical design or even a cylindrical one?” Edgerton wrote once. “Soon I was sketching all sorts of designs.”
Read the FULL ARTICLE on the MIT News Office website.
