Fighting Finches, Dr. Harold Eugene Edgerton

Archive Label 2003: The rapid movements of birds’ wings are stopped in these two photographs taken by Harold Edgerton, examples of the many photographs he took in the course of his early efforts to record continuous motion. Those efforts led to development of the electronic stroboscopic flash by “Doc” Edgerton, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His early work on the strobe advanced by light years the 19th-century motion studies of photographers Eadweard Muybridge and E. J. Marey, studies that were pioneering in their time. Scientists immediately used Edgerton’s strobe flash to study ultra-high speed subjects, a world previously unavailable to them. His flash revolutionized sports photography, allowing a camera to capture motion with an incredible degree of detail. Its use was adopted in Hollywood for movie making under Edgerton’s supervision. And, he oversaw military development of the strobe for nighttime aerial reconnaissance photography especially important to successes in the initial period of United States involvement in World War II. While Edgerton did not make any of his photographs with an idea of entering consumer pop- culture, his photographs of a crown-like milk-drop splash did just that.