Milk Drop Coronet

As a professor in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Harold Edgerton often claimed his photographic work was only an incidental result of scientific experimentation. Edgerton invented modern stroboscopic photography, which utilizes a rapid succession of light flashes in order to capture a quickly moving object. His graphic images—a bullet piercing a playing card, a football being kicked, a golfer's swing—gained popular acclaim as well, and were featured often in Life magazine throughout the 1940s. Edgerton began trying to photograph drops of milk in 1932, and in 1936 produced an image almost identical to the one here, but in black and white, of two milk drops colliding in a crown-like splash. He must have had an aesthetic as well as a scientific goal in mind, for he continued to experiment with this subject for two decades until he finally achieved visual clarity in vivid color.