Time is one of those concepts that has always been a mystery to us. It’s an uncontrollable force, something that has a mind of its own and a freedom that no civilization can mimic. Clocks have been created to measure it, novels have been written about it, and inventions have been dreamed up to master it. Nobody has been able to do a damn thing about it. Except for one guy.
Harold Eugene Edgerton was a genius. During his lifespan from April 6, 1903 to January 4, 1990, he revolutionized the worlds of science, art, and everything in between. He devoted his life to inventing, developing, and applying his work to the stroboscopic flash.
An electrical engineer with a doctorate of science from MIT, he couldn’t have known he was changing art forever. Before the strobe, photographers struggled with providing bright light and had to deal with the limits that shutters created. Edgerton replaced mercury vapor with xenon and argon in flash bulbs, which created brighter flashes for less than a microsecond. With his strobe he could create remarkable images that people had never seen before. Edgerton could essentially freeze time.
This included capturing multiple flashes in still photography, which created an image that showed the progression of something, such as several of the positions in a golfer’s swing in one frame.
He could also use motion photography to create stop-motion images or slow motion, like a boy running.
Edgerton’s flash did everything from creating spectacular images in National Geographic, helping science labs to study subatomic particles, gearing up World War II, aided Jacques Cousteau by inventing a sonar device called the “pinger” to measure distance to the sea floor and later the “boomer,” which mapped out layers of sediment beneath the ocean floor. Last but certainly not least, he revolutionized photography that would end up in well-known art galleries around the world and in the hands of 18-year old girls who grew up in small suburban towns such as myself.
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