The crew of Jacques Cousteau's sea research vessel, Calypso, affectionately dubbed Nebraska native Harold E. Edgerton, "Papa Flash." Renowned photographer Gjon Mili called him an "American original." To his students and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was simply known as "Doc."

In a spectacular career spanning nearly six decades, Edgerton and his "magic lamps" stopped bullets mid-flight and revealed the secrets of ocean depths. By photographing the usual in an unusual way, Edgerton brought to the world what James R. Killian, Jr., coined "sudden wonder."

Edgerton's love was the stroboscopic flash-a glass tube filled with exotic gases and excited with an electric jolt that would freeze the action of any moving thing. Edgerton measured time in millionths of a second, revealing the symmetry of a drop of milk striking a flat place, or showing the other worldly structure of an atomic explosion in its first microsecond of creation.

Born in Fremont, Edgerton's family lived briefly in Washington, D.C., but returned to Nebraska, settling in Aurora. After earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska in 1925, Edgerton enrolled at MIT and received his master's and doctorate degrees. It was during those years that he perfected the stroboscopic flash.

 During an interview with Nebraska Education Television in 1985, Edgerton recalled how his invention "stopped" the moving parts of an engine so efficiently, he wondered what would happen if the strobe lamp was turned on every day objects. A water spigot was nearby. Suddenly, a stream of water was revealed to be nothing more than individual globs of water generated by a city water pump miles away. Besides being an inventor, Edgerton could see the entrepreneurial possibilities of his lamps.

In the early 1930s, Edgerton formed a partnership with Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier, which resulted in an international company that, still today, provides electronics for commercial and federal clients, contract research and industrial components. In 1988, the National Geographic Society awarded Edgerton its Centennial Award, naming him one of 15 people worldwide who has made major contributions to the knowledge of the earth, its inhabitants, and the natural environment during the Society's first century.

It is fitting that Nebraska's award for quality carries the name of Harold E. "Doc" Edgerton; a man who strived for uncommon answers to everyday problems. As MIT colleague Harold Hazen once said, Doc Edgerton left a legacy of "curiosity, enthusiasm, down-to-earth realism, superb experimental ability, and sheer productivity in new, untried areas…."
 

• Links
  
• The Edgerton Center
• The Edgerton Explorit Center
• Dr. Harold E. "Doc" Edgerton - Biography

The Nebraska Edgerton Quality Awards
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