Written by Oscar Holland, CNN
At Snap, we look at the power of a single photograph, telling stories about how both modern and historical images have been made.
Bursting with energy, yet perfectly still, Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s 1964 image of a .30-caliber bullet shattering an apple showed an otherwise invisible moment in riveting detail. The scene took on a serene, sculptural beauty as the disintegrating apple skin opened against a deep blue backdrop.
The image is widely seen as a work of art. Most importantly for its creator, however, it was also a feat of electrical engineering. The professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used it to illustrate a lecture, entitled “How to make applesauce”, in which he explained the pioneering flash technology that helped him make the photography
Edgerton, who died in 1990 at the age of 86, is considered the father of high-speed photography. The camera’s shutter speeds were too slow to capture a bullet flying at 2,800 feet per second, but its strobe flashes, a precursor to today’s strobe lights, created such short bursts of light that a timely photograph, taken in a dark room. , made it seem as if time had stopped. The results were fascinating and often messy.
“We used to joke that it took a third of a microsecond (one millionth of a second) to take the picture, and all morning to clean up,” recalled his former student and teaching assistant, J. Kim Vandiver. in a video call from Massachusetts.
While early camera operators had experimented with pyrotechnic “flash powders” that combined metallic fuels and oxidizing agents to produce a short, bright chemical reaction, Nebraska-born Edgerton created a much shorter and easier flash to control His breakthrough was more a matter of physics than chemistry: after arriving at MIT in the 1920s, he developed a flash tube filled with xenon gas that, when subjected to a high voltage, would cause the electricity jumps between two electrodes for a fraction of a second. .
By the time he fired the shutter for his now-famous apple photo, Edgerton had developed a microflash that used regular air instead of xenon. It had also produced decades of familiar images: hummingbirds in mid-flight, golf clubs hitting balls and even nuclear bomb explosions. (During World War II, Edgerton developed a special “rapatronic,” or fast electronic, camera for the Atomic Energy Commission that could control the amount of light entering the camera during explosions.)
Another of Edgerton’s famous photos, taken in 1957, shows the crown-like spatter produced by drops of milk. Credits: Harold Edgerton/MIT; courtesy of Palm Press
However, it was his bullet photos from the 1960s that proved some of these things most memorable. According to Vandiver, who still works at MIT as a professor of mechanical engineering, the challenge was not to produce a flash but to turn off the camera at the right time. Human reactions were too slow to take the photo manually, so Edgerton used the sound of the bullet as a trigger.
“There would be a microphone out of the picture, right below,” Vandiver said. “So when the shock wave of the bullet hit the microphone, the microphone fired the flash and then you closed the shutter.”
Making an icon
Over the years, Edgerton and his students took a rifle to objects like bananas, balloons and cards. For Vandiver, the reason why the apple, along with a 1957 image of a splashing drop of milk, became one of Edgerton’s defining photographs is, in part, its simplicity. “It catches your imagination … and you immediately understand what it is,” he said.
There was another factor at play: Edgerton’s artistic eye. The compositional beauty of his images saw them republished in newspapers and magazines around the world, and more than 100 of his photos are today in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. However, Edgerton declined the additional title.
“Don’t make me look like an artist,” he said. “I’m an engineer. I’m after the facts, just the facts.”
While Vandiver said there is “definitely an artistic legacy” to Edgerton’s visual experiments, which advanced the field of photography, his research has also had a major impact on science and industry. His hands-on approach continues at MIT’s Edgerton Center, which was established in his honor in 1992. Vandiver, who serves as the center’s director, said every student is encouraged to take a photo own
“We still teach the course, and the students still think of weird things to take pictures of,” he said, recalling recent images of chalk and colored lipstick shattered by bullets. “Apples are boring now.”