Friday Morning In Strobe Alley

“Ya wanna see Edgerton’s lab?”

I had to chuckle at the way the question was posed, under her breath casually as if she had flashed the inside of her raincoat and said “Ya wanna buy a Rolex cheap?” But coming from Cheryl Vossmer, one of my students at New England School of Photography and a sergeant with the MIT Police Department, I knew those few words were ripe with possibility. Asking a photographer if he would like to see the workspace of the guy who made all those iconic stop-action images of impossibly fast-moving objects was like asking a short-order cook if he’d like to see where they invented the ham and cheese omelet.

“What do you THINK?!!” I whispered back conspiratorially, presumably so that jealous students in the class wouldn’t organize and riot.

“Friday morning. 8:30. Talk to Heratch”.

She smiled, slipped out of the room and was gone. I could only assume that Heratch Ekmekjian, my friend and colleague at NESOP, was in on the scheme and would have been at home that very moment polishing his lenses in giddy anticipation. A quick phone call, a few e-mails and a couple of days later, we pulled up 10 minutes tardy in front of MIT Police headquarters bearing a dozen hand-cuts from Ohlin’s in Cushing Square. Cheryl was waiting outside with her boss, Chief John DiFava, looking at her watch.

“How often do you get to bring donuts to a bunch of cops?” Heratch apologized.

Groans followed, handshakes were exchanged, and the hand-cuts were left inside at the dispatcher’s desk. A 15-minute walk in the brilliant early October sunshine brought us to Strobe Alley, Doc Edgerton’s suite of classrooms and labs in a building just east of the MIT dome.

Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton didn’t invent the strobe light or the electronic flash, and he wasn’t the first photographer or scientist to explore the potential of using strobes to stop rapid motion on film. But his genius transformed the strobe from a laboratory curiosity into an important tool for science, industry and photography. In their biographical memoir of Edgerton published in 2005 by the National Academy of Sciences, J. Kim Vandiver and Pagan Kennedy laid out his legacy in a paragraph:

“He made flashing light cheap and portable, and found endless applications for it, from the airport runway to the office copy machine. But despite his importance as an innovator, Edgerton is best known for the photographs he took: the drop of milk exploding into a crown, a bullet hovering beside an apple, an atomic blast caught the instant before it mushroomed, a smudge that might have been the flipper of the Loch Ness Monster. His strobe photographs illustrated scientific phenomena in a way that was instantly understandable to millions of people. Later in his career he developed sonar tools that revolutionized marine archeology, again using images to explore the unknown”

Joining MIT’s faculty in 1932, one of his earliest contributions to the science of photography was the introduction of argon gas into electronic flash tubes, a technical achievement that enabled brighter, faster flash output than had previously been available. Indirectly, this development would contribute far more to the esthetic of photography and to the popular visual perception of time and motion. Many of his experiments with high-energy, high-speed strobe lights took place in the room in which I was now standing, a room that looked more like a gadgeteer’s crowded basement workshop than a prominent point on the star map of the history of photography.

Vandiver and Kennedy described the place:

“The hallway echoed with the report of gunshots. Flashes jumped across the walls. Boxes spilled wires, capacitors, barnacled wood. By contrast, other wings of MIT seemed downright sterile. Strobe Alley, the hallway that cut a line between Edgerton’s labs, sucked visitors in and invited them to become part of the action. To make his lair even more inviting, Edgerton hung displays all along the hall: photographs, framed bits of equipment, buttons to push. [Former student and side-scan sonar expert Marty] Klein, who wandered into Strobe Alley as an undergraduate in 1961, loved the tantalizing smell of the place. It reminded him of the junk shops in lower Manhattan, the perfume of ‘connectors and coils and motors— sometimes motors that have burned out.’”

The pushbuttons, photographs and showcased exhibits of equipment are all still much as they were when Edgerton walked the hallway. On my left, I had immediately noticed a very old and possibly homemade device sitting on a workbench, looking like a prop from a 1950’s sci-fi flick. It also bore a passing resemblance to the Speedotron power packs that I once used to light countless bread-and-butter catalog photographs. But this thing was bigger, blacker and scarier looking with its knobs, dials, toggles and ammeter, and was plastered with various labels warning of the dangers of working alone with high voltage. I understood what that was all about. Years ago I was shooting in a studio with another photographer, who decided to straddle a 2400 watt-second Norman pack and rearrange its cables in order to change the power ratio of the flash heads he was using. Brazenly ignoring the standard practice of turning the pack off and dumping the energy stored in its capacitor before disconnecting a flash cable, he yanked on one of the thick black leads and the pack promptly responded by arcing and exploding in a flash of yellow light and white smoke between his legs. When the roiling mushroom cloud dissipated against the high ceiling a few seconds later, there he stood, scared stiff, still holding the cable in his hand and covered from head to toe with soot and pulverized electrical insulation. The misshapen power pack lay on its side a few feet away from where it had been. Fortunately, with injuries to nothing but his ego, I am pretty sure that to this day he follows directions carefully when working with electricity.

My thoughts were brought back to the here and now by a bearded, casually-dressed fellow welcoming us from the opposite corner of the room. Dr. Jim Bales is the assistant director of what is now known as the Edgerton Center, and the warmth of his greeting made it obvious to us that Cheryl and Chief DiFava were old friends. Heratch had told me earlier that we were not just going to be able to see the lab, but that there was a good chance we would actually see a demonstration of how Edgerton made his stop-action photographs of bullets piercing various objects. We were to bring along our cameras, tripods, and some “targets”.

“Ya know...” he started with the same two words that he has opened countless conversations with in the past, “...a Boston Cream donut might make a pretty good target.” It was an observation that I had enthusiastically agreed with at the time and which I now presented to Dr. Bales when he asked us what was in the small white box tied with string that I was carrying.

“You’d be surprised”, he said. “The bullet goes in and out and the donut absorbs all the energy and just sort of folds around it before any of the cream squirts out. We’ve never really gotten a very good shot of a bullet going through a cream donut.”

“Right, right, of course, that’s pretty fascinating.” I tried to make it sound as if I had never really believed the donut would work. In that moment the door to the enormous warehouse of topics that I don’t know the first thing about but venture a comment on anyway opened just a crack. Heratch shot a look at me; he knew that I had been planning to title this essay “Time To Shoot The Donuts”.

Jim showed us around the lab a bit and introduced us to the other scientist in the room, Dr. Bob Root. Bob told us that his company, Prism Science Works, designed and built the small strobe unit we would be working with. Its flash duration was astonishingly short, somewhere in the neighborhood of one-third of a microsecond, literally faster than a speeding bullet. Jim and Bob explained how a small microphone, positioned a few inches from the target, captures the sound of the shock wave (a miniature sonic boom) that precedes a supersonic projectile and fires the strobe as the bullet enters, is inside of, or exits the target, depending on where the mic is actually placed. With the room completely darkened, a digital or film camera with its shutter held open captures the infinitesimally brief burst of light and the scene that it illuminates; in one-third of a microsecond, a bullet and any ejected debris from the target appear to be stopped in mid-flight.

“And the thing that you shouldn’t forget” Bob continued, “is that your eyes are also a camera. Once you get used to what is going on, you will actually see the bullet stopped in midair the same way that your camera will record it.” The principle is the same as what happens when a strobe light is turned on in a darkened nightclub; fluid movement on the dance floor turns into what looks like a really bad Quicktime movie.

Jim told us that he would start by firing at the thin edge of a playing card, attempting to capture an image of a bullet tearing the card in half. He asked for a volunteer to help him sight down the bore of the rifle. Skip Hoyt, another photographer friend of Cheryl’s and an acquaintance of Jim’s from MIT’s Lincoln Labs, stepped forward to help. For the first time, I noticed the .22 caliber target rifle strapped along the length of a gray wooden sawhorse positioned next to a workbench on the far wall of the lab. I don’t know why, but I had thought the setup would be fancier and maybe just a bit safer. Jim stuck a Joker in the folds of an old felt blackboard eraser resting on a stand in the center of the room, and with Skip’s help, positioned it perfectly relative to the immobilized rifle. On the other end of the rifle range, a gaffer’s tape-covered metal cylinder about the diameter of a coffee can and twice as long appeared to be lined up to catch the bullet. From rifle muzzle to coffee can, our shooting gallery measured less than 8 feet in length. Anyone scoring a “Maggie's Drawers” in here would have some explaining to do to whoever happened to be in the room next door. Doc Edgerton’s safety issues had been even more serious; for some of his pictures he had used a .30 caliber military rifle firing heavy bullets at nearly 3 times the speed of sound.

“The first thing you should be asking, Skip, since you’re standing in the line of fire, is ‘where’s the bolt?’” Jim stood up from sighting-in the rifle. The bolt is part of the rifle’s loading mechanism and contains the firing pin. Shaking his pants pocket he said “Don’t worry, the bolt’s right here.”

At that point we arranged our digital SLR's in a tripod-mounted scrum a couple of feet away from the playing card. The squarish white strobe, about the size of a lunch box, was perched on a light stand to the left of the cameras. A small black box containing the microphone was suspended slightly to the left of and below the playing card, poised to trip the strobe as the bullet tore the card in half. The sawhorse holding the rifle was to the right of the whole arrangement, about 3 feet away from where my camera was and where my right ear would soon be. As we all fumbled with the settings on our cameras, Jim tripped the strobe by clapping his hands once near the microphone so we could determine the proper f-stop to set on our lenses.

“I always wanted a clapper strobe”, Heratch quipped, beating everyone else in the room to the obvious.

Finally, it was show time. Jim distributed headphones and protective eyeglasses to everyone as we all crouched down in a little huddle behind our cameras, right index fingers poised on shutter releases. Being closest to the rifle, I felt the nerve endings tingling on the right side of my face as Jim got into position. After checking to make sure everyone was ready and where they were supposed to be, he started his very deliberate countdown.

“OK. Bolt’s in the pocket. Eyes and ears on? Loading. Loaded. Lights out.”

The lab was plunged into total darkness. Remembering what Bob had said about trying to see the bullet with my eyes, I stared at where I thought the card was.

“Shutters open.”

The sound of 5 camera shutters snapping open came faintly through the protective headphones.

“3...2...1...BANG!”

For the briefest instant imaginable, I saw the perfectly bisected white card brilliantly illuminated less than 4 feet in front of my face. Suspended in space on its left side was a jagged field of bits of torn paper, and, perfectly frozen against the blackness just beyond, the unmistakable oblong shape of a dull gray bullet. I saw it with my eyes, and a few seconds later I saw it again on the LCD screen on my Nikon D200. That instant digital preview appearing on the back of our cameras was the one fundamental thing that differed from Doc Edgerton’s experiments 70 years earlier. How hard it must have been for him to have to wait while his film was processed and printed! How lucky we were! We all knew it, and the room erupted in spontaneous, amazed laughter.

“Shutters closed. Lights on. How’d we do?” Surely Jim had seen this reaction a thousand times in his years at Strobe Alley, but he smiled nonetheless as he checked the thumbnails on each of our cameras. We repeated the process 7 or 8 more times, firing at more playing cards and each other’s business cards. At one point Heratch, realizing he didn’t have a business card with him, started looking through his wallet for a photo of his family. Jim stopped him.

“Sorry. We don’t do pictures of people or pets. No ex-wives. It sends the wrong message.”

The last target we used was a particularly plump green grape perched on top of a plastic film canister. Jim’s first shot was a little low, resulting in an interesting but less-than-spectacular image. He adjusted the height of the next grape by placing it on a wad of bright blue modeling clay, and the ensuing explosive impact left us all wiping grape juice off our faces and lenses while marveling at the images we had made. Packing up my camera as we were getting ready to leave, I looked up above the general area where the targets had been placed and saw bits of dried Jell-O, egg, peanut butter and who knows what else splattered like a gravity-defying Pollack on the ceiling.

While researching Edgerton and his work for this essay, I was surprised to learn that he had once lived down the street and around the corner from my apartment. I was reminded of the time I sat just a table away from Philip Morrison, a principal physicist on the Manhattan Project and a colleague of Edgerton’s at MIT, dining with friends on chicken kabobs at a local Greek joint. My own dinner companions that evening were mildly interested when I tried to explain who the lively old guy in the wheelchair was, but, frankly, seemed more impressed with the nice tomato sauce on their fluffy white rice. The devastating effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 haunted Morrison, who went on to become a leading proponent of nuclear nonproliferation. Edgerton, meanwhile, directing his expertise and scientific curiosity toward the same subject, produced unforgettable high-speed photographs recording the awesome, apocalyptic beauty of H-bomb tests in the 1950’s and 60’s with a camera of his own design. Until Morrison became a minor TV celebrity with his popular PBS series The Ring Of Truth, neither of these guys were easily recognizable as they lived their extraordinary lives in our midst. Yet the work that they did became an indisputable part of the iconography of the twentieth century.

Doc Edgerton died on January 4, 1990 after suffering a heart attack at the MIT Faculty Club. “Papa Flash”, as his friend and collaborator Jacques Cousteau had nicknamed him, was 86 years old. “I performed CPR on him”, Cheryl mentioned quietly as we left Strobe Alley. I just looked at her, not quite knowing what to say. But afterwards I found something that he liked to say, and I can’t get it, or the rare privilege of having spent a couple of hours seeing firsthand what few before him had even imagined, out of my mind.

“If you don’t wake up at three in the morning and want to do something, you’re wasting your time.”

I haven’t been sleeping quite as much ever since.