Blasting with power but flawlessly still, Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s 1964 image of a .30-caliber bullet ripping via an apple revealed an otherwise hidden moment in captivating detail. The scene took on a serene, sculptural attractiveness as the disintegrating apple’s skin exploded open against an in-depth blue backdrop.
The image is widely watched as a work of art. More significantly to its maker, while, it was also an accomplishment of electrical engineering. The longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) instructor utilized it to illustrate a lecture, famously titled “How to make applesauce,” in which he described the pioneering flash technology that supported him take the shot.
Edgerton, who actually died in 1990 at the age of 86, is assumed the father of high-speed photography. Camera shutter speeds were excessively slow to capture a bullet passing at 2,800 feet per second, but his stroboscopic flashes — a predecessor to modern-day strobe lights — created explosions of light so short that a well-timed photograph, taken in an otherwise dark room, made it seem as if time had stood motionless. The results were interesting and, often, messy.
We used to joke that it took a third of a microsecond (one-millionth of a second) to take the photograph — and all morning to cleanse up and remembered his former student and teaching associate, J. Kim Vandiver, on a face/video call from Massachusetts.
While earlier camera operators had tested with pyrotechnic “flash powders” that combined metallic fuels and oxidizing agents to deliver a short, bright chemical reaction, Nebraska-born Edgerton developed a moment that was far shorter and more comfortable to control. His breakthrough was more a matter of physics than chemistry: After he came to MIT in the 1920s, he created a flash tube filled with xenon gas that, when subjected to high voltage, would cause electricity to leap between 2 electrodes for a fraction of a second.
By the time he released the shutter for his now-favorite apple photo, Edgerton had created a micro flash that used plain air rather than xenon. He had also delivered decades’ worth of well-known pictures: hummingbirds in mid-flight, golf clubs striking balls, and even nuclear bomb explosions. (During World War II, Edgerton created a unique “rapatronic” — or quick electronic — camera for the Atomic Energy Commission that could handle the amount of light entering the camera during the blasts.)
However, it was his 1960s bullet images that proved some of this most unforgettable. According to Vandiver, who always works at MIT as a mechanical engineering professor, the challenge wasn’t producing a flash but setting the camera off at just the right moment. Human responses were too slow to take the picture manually, so Edgerton used the audio of the bullet itself as a trigger.
There would be a microphone out of the image, just down below, Vandiver said. So, when the shock wave from the bullet hit the microphone, the microphone tripped the flash, and then you’d shut the (shutter afterward).”
Making an icon
Over the years, Edgerton and his investigators took a rifle to objects including bananas, balloons, and playing cards. For Vandiver, the cause why the apple — along with a 1957 image of a splashing milk droplet — evolved into one of Edgerton’s defining pictures is, in part, its clarity and simplicity. It notices your strategy and you instantly understand what it is, he said.
There was another aspect at play: Edgerton’s creative eye. The compositional beauty of his pictures saw them republished in newspapers and magazines throughout the world, and over 100 of his photographs are maintained by the Smithsonian American Art Museum today. Yet Edgerton refused the additional title.
Don’t make me out to be an artist, he has been mentioned as telling. I am an engineer. I am after the realities, only the truths. While Vandiver said “there’s clearly a creative legacy” to Edgerton’s visual investigations, which increased the area of photography, his research has significantly impacted science and industry, too. His hands-on approach lives on at MIT’s Edgerton Center, which was launched in his honor in 1992. Vandiver, who serves as the center’s director, stated every learner is inspired to take a bullet picture of their own.
We always teach the course, and learners still think of strange things to take pictures of, he told, recalling recent pictures of colored chalk and lipstick ripped apart by bullets. “Apples are uninteresting now.”
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