Crystallized Motion, Visible Time

 GJON MILI = Nora Kaye

H.E. EDGERTON = Splash of a Milk Drop

A drop of milk falls into a saucer; a del­icate coronet of liquid erupts and is gone. It happens too quickly for the eye to catch-but not too quickly for a cam­era equipped with an electronic flash. Harold E. Edgerton, who took this pic­ture, pioneered ultra-high-speed pho­tography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1930s. He developed an electronic flash of such high intensity and brief duration that it could make pictures at a speed of one millionth of a second-fast enough to stop a bullet in flight. Multiple expo­sures made with a rapid succession of these flashes produced an image of motion in progress across the film. Edgerton's "strobe light" provided sci­entists with a valuable tool with which to study everything from the movement of high-speed machinery to the strike of a rattlesnake. And in the hands of an artist like Gjon Mili it can capture the beauty of motion in the graceful sweep of a ballet dancer