Étiquette : Harold Edgerton

Deep media

O.2016-14

This article considers the pre-history and history of EG&G, Inc., a key contractor in America’s nuclear weapons programme in the Cold War. EG&G was cofounded by M.I.T.’s Harold Edgerton, Kenneth J. Germeshausen, and Herbert E. Grier after World War II in order to serve the nuclear weapons timing and firing needs of the U.S. Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission. The three men began their collaboration in the 1930s at M.I.T. with work on flash photography. Indeed, their partnership began in high-speed ‘stroboscopic’ photography in the 1930s, became focused on nuclear weapon timing and firing in 1945–50, and eventually re-focused on high-speed photography in the 1950s. Instead of emphasizing, as others have, the reproduction and circulation of photographic images of nuclear detonations, this article examines how the convergence of photographic and ballistic regimes was constructed around what we call the ‘deep media’ of timing, firing, and exposing.

aram Kebabdjian

Wyckoff

O.1995-9

INTERVIEWER 1: Today is Wednesday, February 15, 1995. And we’re talking with Charles Wyckoff about his work with Harold Edgerton. By way of introduction, could you tell us about how you came to MIT, and got into Doc’s lab. And tell us your story from the beginning. WYCKOFF: OK, there is a beginning. I went… Lire la suite Wyckoff

aram Kebabdjian

Papa Flash

O.1931-14

In 1932, the General Radio Company of Cambridge, Massachusetts, began selling its first stroboscope, consisting of a portable power unit connected by cable to a mercury-arc flash lamp. A capacitor discharged into the lamp ionized its gas and produced a brief, intense flash of light. The nineteenth-century Geissler tube, discharged intermittently, had become a stroboscopic flash tube. Listed under the code word “MAGIC” in the company’s catalogue, the 1932 GR strobe was capable of generating powerful, short flashes of light (5 microsecs) at precisely timed, variable rates of up to 180 flashes/sec. Over the next three decades, the company would develop and market a series of faster, more portable and relatively inexpensive strobes (see Table 1).

aram Kebabdjian

Flash Bomb

O.1925-7

Goddard’s dream finally became a reality on November 20, 1925, when he set up a test over Rochester, New York. His crew consisted of the pilot, two lieutenants from the Army Ordnance Corps, his research partner « Doc » Burke, and himself. Armed with a super-size powder bomb, fourteen feet long and eight inches in diameter, packed with eighty pounds of explosive, the crew took off. They dropped the bomb around 11 o’clock at night over the city. Twenty seconds later it exploded with a tremendous blast and brilliant light which was so fast it took the place of a shutter in the camera. The results took awhile to process, since they had to land the plane in darkness, get to their hotel – difficult because of the mass panic the explosion had caused. Later that day, the newspapers proudly displayed the world’s first photograph ever taken at night from an airplane.

aram Kebabdjian

Rapatronic

A.1952-1

À la fin des années 1930, Harold Edgerton, ingénieur au MIT, a été le pionnier des techniques de photographie à ultra-haute vitesse, pour révéler une balle éviscérant une pomme, la spirale d’un coup de golf ou la chute d’une goutte de lait. Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Edgerton a travaillé avec la Commission de l’énergie atomique au développement d’une camera, le Rapatronic, capable de fixer le flash incandescent d’une explosion nucléaire jusqu’au milliardième de seconde. Sur une tour, à dix kilomètres du site d’essais, Edgerton et ses assistants ont ainsi pu enregistrer cette forme rougeoyante comme une forme de vie extraterrestre.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/281785

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