Gems from the Museum

Continued from page 2

By Sally Atwood

November 2004

Photographing The Bomb at Impact

Electrical engineer Harold Doc Edgerton loved solving problems, particularly the problem of making the invisible visible through photography. When the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission came to MIT in 1946 and asked the Institute to take part in a classified experiment photographing an atomic explosion, Doc was ready to contribute his understanding of stop-action photography. But within a year, the Institute banned all classified research from campus, so Doc and two of his former students, Kenneth Germeshausen 31 and Herbert Grier 33, SM 34, formed the company EG&G to do the work. The camera they developed to photograph the blast sits in one corner of the museums permanent exhibit Flashes of Inspiration, which showcases Docs work.

EG&Gs black-and-white images were captured in less than a millionth of a second from the top of a 23-meter tower 11 kilometers from ground zero. In the book Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton, Estelle Jussim says Doc and his associates rigged a series of mirrors, telescopes, relay lenses, wire-fuse shutters, mechanical capping shutters, and other devices needed to accomplish their task. Unlike the more typical images of the mushroom cloud following an atomic blast, Docs pictures show the bizarre events of the first few microseconds after detonation, with a fireball that looks more like a balloon from outer space hovering just above the ground. Seeing the explosion unfold in minute detail helped physicists understand other aspects of the deadly weapon.