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Exploring the Hidden Geometries of Time Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft • Harold E. Edgerton • 1938


Harold E. Edgerton was a master engineer, a pioneer of stroboscopic photography and a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His students, who revered him, called him “Doc.” Famed diver Jacques Cousteau, marveling at the scenes he captured by using a stroboscope—whose potent explosions of light subdivided time’s passage into a series of discrete events—christened him “Papa Flash.” Beginning in the 1930s, Edgerton explored a world that is right in front of our eyes and yet unseen: the second-by-second unfolding of everyday processes. Above, operating at 100 flashes per second for half a second, Edgerton’s camera turns the swing of noted 1930s golfer Densmore Shute into a series of frozen poses that form an Archimedian spiral. His images are both scientific triumphs and aesthetic wonders, delighting the eye as they inform the mind, and they appear in art museums across the world.


HAROLD E. EDGERTON—©HAROLD & ESTHER EDGERTON FOUNDATION, 2012, COURTESY OF PALM PRESS INC.


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