Harold Edgerton

Known for: stroboscopic high-speed photography; the milk drop crown

Harold Edgerton was an MIT electrical engineer who developed the modern electronic stroboscope and used it to photograph events invisible to the human eye — the crown of a milk drop, a bullet passing through a playing card, the moment of impact in a golf swing. His images, published in Life magazine from the 1930s onward, made the physics of motion visible and created a photographic genre of scientific revelation that has had no successor of comparable technical originality. He cofounded the company that became EG&G, which manufactured stroboscopic equipment for industry and defense.