The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences

8 Educating the High-Speed Eye

186 By 1932, a young mit electrical engineer, Harold E. Edgerton, had developed a portable, inexpensive light source, capable of generating flashes of extremely short durations, approaching one microsecond (one-millionth of a second) at regular intervals of up to several thousand pulses per second . Unlike earlier spark sources that could produce only a single flash at a weak intensity, requiring their use in a dark room, Edgerton’s flashes were so intense that his stroboscope could expose photographic film even in relatively bright ambient light. And unlike earlier electronic flash lamps (commercially available from several French and American firms by 1930), Edgerton’s lamps produced actinic light, weighted toward the violet end of the spectrum, which nicely suited the sensitivity of film then commercially available. Furthermore, after experimenting with standard movie cameras (twenty-four frames per second [fps]) and high-speed cameras with mechanical shutters (several hundred fps), Edgerton modified a shutterless camera manufactured by the General Radio Company so that it could record up to several thousand fps, with the film moving continuously at speeds reaching seventy-five feet per second. By synchronizing his stroboscopic flash lamp to the sprockets of the camera, he created a robust system for making high-speed motion pictures. Edgerton’s technological innovations are well known.1 But how should high-speed photographs or motion pictures look? What chaptereight EducatingtheHigh-SpeedEye Harold E. Edgerton’s EarlyVisual Conventions RichardL.Kremer Don’t make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts. —harold e. edgerton Educating the High-Speed Eye • 187 knowledge, information or affectation should they impart to their viewers? If Edgerton’s new technology did indeed allow one to “see the unseen,” as he entitled one of his early films, would the content of the images be immediately recognized, or even recognized at all, by their viewers? Must viewers be instructed on how to look at the images, either by captions or by supplemental markings added directly to the prints? Could high-speed images rely on visual conventions established by previous photography or cinematography, which captured considerably longer chunks of time in their images and hence could not record crisp outlines of rapidly moving phenomena? Could Edgerton freely arrange the conventions of his images, or did his technological system of flash lamps and cameras or his adherence to earlier visual vocabularies constrain his freedom to innovate ? Even if Edgerton’s photographs presented “only facts” (and we shall see that they presented rather more than that), what conventions might be implicitly required before such facts could be “understood?” How, in other words, would one educate the high-speed eye? In a now classic study of scientific illustrations printed on paper, Michael Lynch argued that laboratory researchers deploy normalizing conventions to construct their images, conventions that “reflect the disciplinary organization of scientific labour as much as they do the organization of natural objects and relationships.”2 His examples came from an electron microscopy laboratory that studied brain tissue. More recently, Luc Pauwel has proposed a general typology for visual representations in science, suggesting that the production of such images is invariably shaped by three types of constraints. Physical or material processes constrain the “transcription” of the referent as representation; structural processes constrain the selection of samples, of resolution or tonal range, of available human expertise or skill; and cultural processes of professional ethics, disciplinary practices, or broader scientific traditions constrain what a “good” image should look like. Given these constraints, Pauwel argued, visual representations always reflect a “style of execution.” Such styles “have to do with genre conventions , cultural schemata, scientific traditions, specific circumstances of the production process, skill, preferences and idiosyncrasies of the maker, as well as the specific purposes the representations need to serve.”3 This chapter seeks to explore such processes by considering the introduction of a new image-making technology to both scientific/technical and wider public audiences, that is, by examining Edgerton’s first decade of making high-speed images. In 1932 he published his first photographs in Electrical Engineering, one of the most prominent journals in his chosen 188 • TheEducatedEye discipline. By 1937, his photographs would hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. In 1939, he would publish a book of high-speed photographs and short strips of movie film. The next year, Edgerton and his high-speed equipment would appear in a Pete Smith short...