The workers would watch as Edgerton froze the motor in time, allowing them to take sharp pictures of the gears in motion. Edgerton isn't the first to make a strobe. Rather he took new bits of technology that existed so he could make a better strobe. A strobe that was brighter, shorter flash duration. But he was not unique in that.
be bright enough to take a reconnaissance photo. Edgerton pulled out some paper, did a few calculations and said: "We can do that." The flash released about 60,000 joules in a single millisecond. A peak power of roughly 60 megawatts, which is comparable to the output of a large solar farm.
I think it's a brilliant way to solve the problem and I get to say that because I did not invent it. Edgerton was very inventive and had projects all over the place. He was teaching at MIT, but then he had companies for things like underwater cameras and he was making movies, and oh, he even won an Oscar.
well then he would get a sharp photograph. All Edgerton needed was a way to reliably create these flashes. So he started by using a high voltage power source to load electrons onto a capacitor where they piled up onto one of the plates.
On their own they would not have the energy to get through that gas. So Edgerton added a trigger that sent a high voltage pulse through a wire wrapped around the tube and the electric field from that pulse would rip electrons off the gas atoms inside the chamber, ionizing the gas and turning it into a conductor.
So we started to get to know these two groups, Ekso Bionics and the scientists at UCLA, led by a visionary scientist called Reggie Edgerton. And I know it's all a little bit abstract, so perhaps I'll show you a video to show you what kind of impact these technologies were having when I was using them.
Then, most notably, there are all the really beautiful pictures produced by Harold Edgerton in the mid 20th century. And Edgerton's high speed images, made by very high speed bursts of light from electrically controlled neon tubes, created the illusion of stopped motion. Whether he's showing milk drops falling or bullets piercing playing cards or bananas or balloons
Then the electrons would recombine with the gas atoms stopping the current and the circuit would go dark again. This was Edgerton's strobe. By the early 1930s, he was eager to test it outside the lab, so he packed up a strobe and hit the road with his wife.
Okay, so there's always this trade off. Either you go for very high pixel counts and bring the frame rate down. At the Edgerton Center we pushed this as far as it goes with one frame and that's it. But you can also push it the other way, one pixel and very high FPS. 1 trillion FPS in fact.
The close relationship of flash photography to actual weaponry is explicitly referenced in British photographer Sarah Pickering's "Celestial Objects" series. Unlike Harold Edgerton, who uses the strobe light to turn the flight of a bullet into a disconcerting thing of beauty rather than a display of force, Pickering opens up her camera's shutter and photographs a bullet fired from a revolver in the complete dark.
A power surge, like from a lightning strike made them behave unpredictably. So one MIT engineer named Harold "Doc' Edgerton, set out to find a solution. He had a setup that could induce these power surges in a lab, but no matter what he tried, Edgerton just couldn't see what was going on with the motors because the
"Do you happen to have any motors in there that don't work right? I'd like to show you something." More often than not, he ended up inside setting up the strobe next to one of the motors. The workers would watch as Edgerton froze the motor in time, allowing them to take sharp pictures of the gears in motion. Edgerton isn't the first to make a strobe. Rather he took new bits of technology that existed so he could make a better strobe.
or dressing up, or being weird and wonderful and embarrassing themselves without too much shame. You've got Meryl Streep and Joel Edgerton, C.J. and John Tolz as your DP, and you can shoot it in your hometown."
Their exposure times were too slow, so any photograph of a running motor would come out blurry. But one day, Edgerton noticed that every time he triggered a power surge, his equipment gave off a bright flash of light. And when that flash hit the motor, the moving parts appeared to stand perfectly still as if frozen in time, which gave him an idea.
There were lots of electrical engineers in the world at that time who could have done that. No, what Edgerton uniquely brought to the table was his eye for photography. He took photos of synchronous motors, and I think in part because he just thought synchronous motors were cool.
And the answer is we use sound. So we're gonna try and recreate one of Edgerton's photos, popping a balloon and freezing it in time. Is it okay if we walk through the setup?
into the air and then capturing the forms as they fall. Ori Gersht's work simultaneously references old master paintings and Harold Edgerton when, for example, he shows a bullet exploding a freeze-dried pomegranate into an airy bowl of shards.
Female speaker: Hi, my name is Claire Stapleton. I'm delighted to welcome Peter Hedges and Joel Edgerton to Google today, and to talk about their new film which you just saw the trailer for, The Odd Life of Timothy Green which Peter wrote and directed, and Joel stars in.
Peter: I think there will come a time in your lives, those of you sitting here, when you remember back, not just when Peter Hedges was here talking about himself, but when you sat in the presence of Joel Edgerton and I really felt it when I met him, was so thrilled Disney let me cast him. And then he gives this great performance and now I get to tour the country with him, and realize that I'm playing with the Silversteins, he just happens to be about fifteen years
Big problem... Right? So totally exposed. Goddard wanted a safer way. So he asked Edgerton whether he could develop a strobe powerful enough to illuminate the ground from a plane that was a mile or so up in the sky. A strobe that would be bright enough to take a reconnaissance photo.
or dressing up, or being weird and wonderful and embarrassing themselves without too much shame. I have to get a bit more Baz Buhrmann and less Joel Edgerton.
Oh, wow. Now, once Edgerton showed the world how powerful strobe photography was, he attracted some unexpected attention. In 1939, a US major named George Goddard walked into Edgerton's lab unannounced. He was working in the Army's photographic lab, developing ways to photograph enemy movements from a plane during the nighttime.
This way they could confirm that German troops were unprepared for the attack. It's hard to ignore just how sharp these strobe photos are, especially the ones Edgerton took in the 1930s. So we got a research grade slow-mo camera from 2020 that shoots at 20,000 FPS, and we're gonna compare its quality to Edgerton's technique by shooting a bullet through a playing card.
Is now, yeah. Okay, and now let's do the same with Edgerton's method. Light's going out. Shutter.
So I want to thank Hostinger for sponsoring this part of the video. And now let's go look at pictures of that card we shot. So here are the two techniques side-by-side, and here's Edgerton's original as well. So why does a research grade camera from 2020 struggle to get the same resolution as a camera from decades ago?
So one MIT engineer named Harold "Doc' Edgerton, set out to find a solution. He had a setup that could induce these power surges in a lab, but no matter what he tried, Edgerton just couldn't see what was going on with the motors because the machines would spin too fast for the human eye to see.
Come around and have a look here. Right, it's translucent here. You're seeing through it. Oh, wow. Now, once Edgerton showed the world how powerful strobe photography was, he attracted some unexpected attention. In 1939, a US major named George Goddard walked into Edgerton's lab unannounced.
It's hard to ignore just how sharp these strobe photos are, especially the ones Edgerton took in the 1930s. So we got a research grade slow-mo camera from 2020 that shoots at 20,000 FPS, and we're gonna compare its quality to Edgerton's technique by shooting a bullet through a playing card. So let's do the slow-mo camera first.
He showed us what a splash really looks like by using electrical spark photography. Then, most notably, there are all the really beautiful pictures produced by Harold Edgerton in the mid 20th century. And Edgerton's high speed images, made by very high speed bursts of light from electrically controlled neon tubes, created the illusion of stopped motion.