[Atomic Bomb Explosion]

Harold Edgerton

1946–52 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In the late 1930s Harold Edgerton, a professor of engineering at MIT, pioneered techniques of ultra-high-speed stroboscopic photography to reveal aspects of the moving world previously invisible to the naked eye-a speeding bullet eviscerating an apple, the graceful spiral of a golf stroke, the coronet formed by a falling drop of milk. During World War II, Edgerton worked with the Atomic Energy Commission to develop a camera, the Rapatronic, capable of capturing the fleeting incandescent flash of a nuclear explosion. Edgerton and his assistants set up their equipment on a tower seven miles from a nuclear test site and, using exposures as short as one-billionth of a second, recorded this ominous glowing shape hovering like an alien life-form or a colossal balloon. Made when the dream of technology threatened to turn into a nightmare, Edgerton's haunting images of nuclear explosions help us visualize the inconceivable.

Artist

Harold Edgerton

Date

1946–52

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of The Harold and Esther Edgerton Family Foundation, 1997