How Harold Edgerton’s ‘Bullet through Apple’ Made Time Stand Still
Exploding with energy but perfectly still, Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s 1964 image of a .30 caliber bullet tearing through a city block showcased an otherwise invisible moment in captivating detail. The scene took on a serene, sculptural beauty as the disintegrating apple skin burst open against a deep blue background.
Edgerton, who died in 1990 at the age of 86, is considered the father of high-speed photography. The camera’s shutter speeds were too slow to capture a bullet flying at 2,800 feet per second, but its strobe flashes, a precursor to modern strobes, created such short bursts of light that a well-timed photograph, taken in a room dark, made it seem as if time had stopped. The results were fascinating and often messy.
“We used to joke that it took a third of a microsecond (a millionth of a second) to take the picture, and all morning to clean up,” his former student and teaching assistant, J. Kim Vandiver, recalled in a video call from Massachusetts.
Whereas early cameramen had experimented with pyrotechnic “flash powders” that combined metallic fuels and oxidizing agents to produce a brief, bright chemical reaction, the Nebraska-born Edgerton created a flash that was much shorter and easier to control. His breakthrough was more a matter of physics than chemistry: After arriving at MIT in the 1920s, he developed a flash tube filled with xenon gas that, when subjected to high voltage, caused electricity to jump between two electrodes for a split second. .
Another of Edgerton’s famous photos, taken in 1957, shows the crown-shaped splash made by drops of milk. Credit: Harold Edgerton/MIT; courtesy of Palm Press
However, it was his vignette photos from the 1960s that demonstrated some of this most memorable. According to Vandiver, who still works at MIT as a professor of mechanical engineering, the challenge was not to produce a flash but to turn on the camera at just the right moment. Human reactions were too slow to take the photo manually, so Edgerton used the sound of the bullet as the trigger.
“There would be a microphone out of the picture, just below,” Vandiver said. “So when the shock wave from the bullet hit the microphone, the microphone fired the flash and then you closed (the shutter afterwards).”
Making an icon
There was another factor at play: Edgerton’s artistic eye. The compositional beauty of his images led to them being republished in newspapers and magazines around the world, and more than 100 of his photos are in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art today. However, Edgerton refused the additional title.
“Don’t pass me off as an artist,” he has been quoted as saying. “I’m an engineer. I look for the facts, just the facts.”
“We still teach the course, and students still think of weird things to take pictures of,” she said, recalling recent images of bullet-shattered colored chalk and lipstick. “Apples are boring now.”