Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,837

This is the grave of Harold Edgerton.

Born in 1903 in Fremont, Nebraska, Edgerton grew up in a prominent Nebraska political family. His father was state assistant attorney general in the 1910s. Edgerton went to the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1925, majoring in electrical engineering. He then went to MIT for a master’s degree, which he achieved in 1927, and then a PhD in 1931.

But Edgerton’s real passion was photography and he wanted to use the advanced training he had received to expand the parameters of the types of photography that were possible. His mentor at MIT, Charles Stark Draper, was already involved in this sort of thing and gave Edgerton a lot of the necessary training. He started experimenting and he was really good at it. In 1936, he started working with May Rogers Webster, the hummingbird expert and environmental educator. Together, they figured out how to take pictures of hummingbirds flapping their wings, which happens a mere 60 times per second. He was able to use a photographic exposure of a thousandth of a second to capture this amazing phenomena and the pictures were published in National Geographic. Here’s one of them:

Now, Edgerton was really more a tech guy than a photographer and he knew that. But professional photographers were fascinated at what he could do and of course he was fascinated with what they could so. So shortly after the hummingbird project, the photographer Gjon Mili started working with him and that would continue for decades. Mili was a staff photographer for Life and so that gave Edgerton a forum for his work too. Using short duration electronic flash, he and Mili were able to do all sorts of crazy things, such as photograph the process of a balloon popping or what happened when a bullet hit an apple.

Not surprisingly, Edgerton could monetize all this. Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, or EGG, was Edgerton and his partners creating a very successful corporation to sell their technological innovations to corporate and government clients. This was with two of his students, Kenneth J. Germeshausen and Herbert E. Grier. One of their biggest clients beginning in the mid 1940s was the American government, who hired him to use his powers and film American nuclear tests in so many different ways. A lot of those famous photographs of above ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, such as the mannequins placed in homes at various distances from the detonation are at least partly EGG work. When I was lucky enough to get a tour of the NTS a few years ago, the ruins of the houses are still out there, which is incredibly creepy, like at a level that is hard to describe. But then everything at the Nevada Test Site is hard to describe. Anyway, this was through the development of the rapatronic camera, which has an exposure of as little as 10 nanoseconds.

But Edgerton also continued using his inventions for things a lot more fun than nuclear testing. That included a long collaboration with Jacques Cousteau to develop photography that could work in the deep oceans. Not surprisingly, this became tremendously useful in finding and documenting shipwrecks as well. He was part of the team that discovered the location of the Monitor, the American ironclad from the Civil War. He did a bunch of sports photography work. He also was part of an expedition to find the Loch Ness Monster, which was ridiculous. But I’ve known a couple of people in my years in the academy who are often part of “expeditions” to look for this and that and while some of this has real value, ridiculousness is often a big part of it, because it’s rich people paying people to go look for whatever they want to find, which are often stupid things that don’t exist or something that does exist but they have some “theory” and are willing to pay a lot of money for it.

Oh, and when he wasn’t the field, Edgerton had an academic home at MIT. He won just about every award one can win. He won photography awards. He won an Oscar. He won every academic award. Evidently, he was actually a good teacher, not so common for an MIT tech guy. Part of it is that he was having a lot of fun and that was contagious. He taught all the way until 1977, when he gave his last class, on photographing birds and insects. I don’t even know if we could photograph hummingbirds without Edgerton’s innovations.

Edgerton never actually left MIT. He stayed on campus after he retired, enjoying being a senior scholar. In fact, he collapsed and died at the MIT Faculty Club in 1990. He was 86 years old.

Harold Edgerton is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other photographers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mary Anna Draper is in Brooklyn and William Oliphant is in Austin, Texas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.