Harold Eugene Edgerton was born on April 6, 1903, in Fremont, Nebraska, to Mary Nettie Coe and Frank Eugene Edgerton. His family carried threads of American history: through his mother's line he was a great-great-grandson of Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, a passenger on the Mayflower, and a descendant of Richard Edgerton, one of the founders of Norwich, Connecticut. His father was a lawyer, journalist, and orator who served as assistant attorney general of Nebraska from 1911 to 1915. Harold grew up in Aurora, Nebraska, with additional time spent in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln, Nebraska, during his formative years.
He pursued electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska, where he joined the Acacia fraternity and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1925. Moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1927 and then turned his doctoral research toward the behavior of synchronous motors, using stroboscopes as a key tool of investigation. He was awarded his ScD from MIT in 1931, by which time he had already begun to see that the stroboscope held possibilities far beyond the laboratory applications for which it had traditionally been employed.
Edgerton's great contribution to visual science lay in his transformation of the stroboscope. Before his work, the instrument was largely confined to specialist laboratory settings, a device known to engineers and physicists but inaccessible to the broader world of photography and visual documentation. Edgerton saw it differently. He understood that extremely brief, precisely controlled flashes of electronic light could freeze moments invisible to the human eye, creating images of extraordinary clarity from phenomena that ordinarily blur past perception before the brain can process them.
The acknowledgment of Charles Stark Draper, one of his MIT colleagues, as an inspiration for photographing everyday objects with electronic flash led Edgerton to his first such experiment: a stream of water from a faucet, captured in a fraction of a second. The results were startling in their beauty and scientific value. In 1936, he visited hummingbird expert May Rogers Webster and demonstrated that by using an exposure of one hundred thousandth of a second, it was possible to photograph hummingbirds beating their wings sixty times per second. A photograph of Webster surrounded by these birds in flight appeared in National Geographic, bringing Edgerton's techniques to a wide public audience.
The collaboration with photographer Gjon Mili, which began in 1937 and continued for the rest of Edgerton's life, produced some of the most celebrated images of the twentieth century. Mili used stroboscopic equipment capable of flashing up to 120 times per second to create multi-exposure photographs that tracked the arc of human movement with ghostly precision. Many of these images appeared in Life magazine, reaching tens of millions of readers. Edgerton himself continued to push the boundaries of high-speed photography, capturing balloons at different stages of bursting, bullets at the moment of impact with an apple, and the complex trajectories of objects in motion.
The honors that followed were substantial. He received a bronze medal from the Royal Photographic Society in 1934, the Howard N. Potts Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1941, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1966, the David Richardson Medal from the Optical Society of America in 1968, the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1969, and the National Medal of Science in 1973.
Edgerton's commercial instincts matched his scientific creativity. He partnered with Kenneth J. Germeshausen for industrial consulting work, and later Herbert Grier joined them. Their firm, originally known by their three names, was shortened to EG&G in 1947 and became a prime contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission. Through the 1950s and 1960s, EG&G and its collaborators, including Charles Wykoff, developed the Rapatronic camera, capable of photographing the first milliseconds of nuclear detonations with extraordinary precision.
His contributions to underwater science were equally remarkable. Working with the French oceanographer and explorer Jacques Cousteau, Edgerton first designed custom underwater photographic equipment featuring electronic flash, then developed the side-scan sonar techniques that Cousteau's team used to locate and document shipwrecks on the ocean floor, including the discovery of the Britannic. He also participated in the discovery of the American Civil War warship USS Monitor. The same equipment was later used in the search for wrecks and even, famously, in expeditions investigating the Loch Ness Monster. Known affectionately as Papa Flash, Edgerton died on January 4, 1990, leaving behind a body of work that fundamentally changed how humanity sees the unseen.
