Photographer Harold Edgerton. Inventor of the flash (43 photos)

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Dr. Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) devoted his entire life to studying this invisible world of movement. With the help of his inventions, such as stroboscopic and super-speed photography, he removed the veil of “invisibility” from it.

Harold Edgerton first used a strobe light as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became interested in the operation of the motor and discovered that if you illuminate the motor with instantaneous flashes of light, it appears as if frozen. If a series of flashes are used at set intervals, the image appears as a series of rapidly scrolling photographs. This discovery formed the basis for his subsequent inventions.

In 1931, Harold Edgerton invented the electric flash for cameras and subsequently improved it for a long time. He takes photographs that captured the imagination of his contemporaries: “A Drop of Milk”, “Bullet Cutting Through a Map”, “Tennis Player” and many others. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is organizing the exhibition “Seeing the Invisible,” which featured 50 photographs of drops, splashes, flying bullets and explosions, people and animals in motion. Without any doubt, Edgerton's photographs aroused purely scientific interest, but besides this, they showed all the beauty of a previously invisible world.

A careful approach to composition, a certain drama emanating from the photographs and their novelty influenced the status of Harold Edgerton’s photographs as “works of photographic art.” The scientist himself opposed this in every possible way. “You don’t have to make an artist out of me,” he was indignant, “I’m interested in facts. Just the facts." But the fact also remains that reality can be beautiful. And the photographs of the talented scientist and photographer Harold Edgerton are the best proof of this.

He died in Cambridge on 4 January 1990.