for commercial use in apparatus ranging from
lighthouses to copying machines.
Edgerton’s first foray into exhibiting his photo-
graphs was at the London Royal Photographic
Society’s annual exhibition in 1933. The next
year, 10 of the photographs made with the strobo-
scope were exhibited, and Edgerton, Germeshau-
sen, and Grier received their first photography
award, a bronze medal, from the Society for the
revolutionary new imaging. It was during this time
that his achievements first received recognition as
fine-arts photography: the photograph Coronet
(the famous drop of milk frozen in midair splash)
was chosen by Beaumont Newhall for inclusion in
the Museum of Modern Art’s initial exhibition of
photography in New York City in 1937.
Edgerton’s first book,Flash! Seeing the Unseen
by Ultra High Speed Photography, co-authored
with James R. Killian, Jr., was published in 1939.
For the popular audience it was a revelation. E.F.
Hall, reviewing Flash! in the New York Times,
wrote, ‘‘This whole book...covering the fields of
nature, sport, and industry, is a compilation of
magic and of things undreamed, calculated to
excite the most sluggish mind.’’ Edgerton subse-
quently published three more books that featured
the results of his discoveries.
Always driven to put his inventions to practical
use, Edgerton perfected multiflash photography of
athletes in action and tried to sell the concept of
electronic flash to major U.S. camera manufac-
turers, but was received with limited interest. He
then offered sports photographers his services and
equipment. Soon, sports photography was allowing
the camera to capture high-speed motion and pre-
serve an unprecedented degree of detail, revolutio-
nizing how sports were portrayed through
photography. Electronic flash photographs of sports
events were regularly published in major newspapers
after 1940.
As World War II broke out in Europe, Edger-
ton briefly worked for the film industry in Holly-
wood. At MGM Studios he collaborated on the
Academy Award-winning short,Quicker Than a
Wink(1940), which featured his high-speed photo-
graphy techniques. Following the United States’
entry into the war, the U.S. Army Air Force com-
missioned Edgerton to design and deliver strobe
lamps powerful enough to be used for nighttime
aerial photography, and he served in Europe as
their technical representative. He directed the use
of the strobes, enabling intelligence about troop
movements in enemy territory to be collected that
had not been obtainable through other means. In
the European theater, Edgerton’s strobes were
used on the nights immediately preceding the D-
day invasion of Normandy and during the Battle
of Monte Cassino; they were also applied in cam-
paigns in the Far East. Edgerton received the
Medal of Freedom from the War Department in
recognition of these achievements.
In 1947, Edgerton, through EG&G Inc., began
work toward specialized electronic technology. As
a prime contractor for the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion, EG&G designed and operated systems that
timed and fired U.S. nuclear bomb tests. They also
invented a camera (the Rapatronic) capable of
photographing nuclear explosions from a distance
of seven miles.
Edgerton was also important to the develop-
ment of nature photography. His work reached a
wide public through the pages ofNational Geo-
graphic magazine, the first of his many articles
appearing in 1947. Typical of these isHumming-
birds in Action, containing high-speed photographs
that for the first time captured the tiny birds’
intricate movements.
Edgerton was also a pioneer in the area of under-
water photography. Among his innovations were
the first undersea time-lapse images and sonar and
sounding devices that helped place underwater
cameras. He had begun his association with French
underwater explorer and fellow inventor Jacques-
Yves Cousteau in 1953 and together they explored
and photographed a wide variety of sea beds. To
position his cameras, he developed a device he
dubbed a ‘‘pinger’’ to attach to the submerged
camera. The pinger emitted sound waves that
bounced off the ocean floor and returned as echoes,
indicating the camera’s distance to the bottom. He
also developed a ‘‘thumper’’ device, which was cap-
able of sub-bottom penetration of the sea floor.
Although this was not a photographic technique,
the thumper was used to locate ancient rocks from
the deepest layers of the earth’s crust, advancing
scientific research in the arena of geology. Later,
Edgerton designed the ‘‘boomer,’’ a sonar device
useful for continuous seismic profiling of the bot-
tom of the sea.
Using these and other sonar tools, Edgerton pio-
neered ‘‘photo excavation’’ for the underwater
Greek city of Helice, located the sunken warships
Mary Rose, and the Civil War battleship USS
Monitor. Later, in 1987, he used the Edgerton-
Benthos underwater camera to photograph the sun-
ken RMSTitanic, discovered earlier off the coast of
Nova Scotia. Edgerton also participated in an
inconclusive search for the Loch Ness monster.
Edgerton aimed his camera everywhere. He
developed elapsed-time to photograph slow events,EDGERTON, HAROLD