Book details of 'Seeing the Unseen: Dr. Harold E. Edgerton and the Wonders of Strobe Alley'

Title	Seeing the Unseen: Dr. Harold E. Edgerton and the Wonders of Strobe Alley
Author(s)	Roger R. Bruce
ISBN	0262023873
Language	English
Published	December 1994
Publisher	MIT Press

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Seeing the Unseen: Dr. Harold E. Edgerton and the Wonders of Strobe Alley':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Doc Edgerton, who developed the electronic flash and devoted his life to helping us "see the unseen," felt his photographic work was the byproduct of scientific investigation. The fact that the world is no longer amazed at many of the images he produced is testament to the impact his experiments have had on our culture. Douglas Collins captures the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor in a biographical essay as sharply as Edgerton captured a coronet of milk. This image--along with such sensational stop-motion studies as a dancer in mid-flight, a bullet slicing through a playing card, a child running and a cock fight--may be viewed on the accompanying portfolio photo CD-ROM.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
The book is quite unprepossessing in its translucent plastic cover. The feeling of someone's university paper is heightened by the handwritten notes on the end papers. This perception is appropriate: the work presents, in text and pictures, the life and experiments of Harold E. "Doc" Edgerton, who trailed his "down home" manner through the halls of MIT to "Strobe Alley". There, he and his students produced the devices and studies which let people "see the unseen" in activities too fast for human vision. Originally intended for the visual inspection of rotating machinery (some of his early work was supported by sales of devices to mills), Edgerton's work extended to stop-motion photography, high speed filming, high intensity illumination, and even sonar studies. The images produced supported scientific research ranging from surface stress analysis to animal studies to turbulent airflow. Almost from the beginning, however, the pictures captured the imagination of artists and public alike. An extract from Edgerton's notebooks mentions a discussion with an advertising agency--in 1935. The book is being published in conjunction with an exhibition of Dr. Edgerton's work which will be displayed at six venues around the United States between now and the end of 1997. (I'll be going to see it in Seattle in the spring of 1996--let's do lunch.) You don't expect them to publish the whole exhibit, but still, the restricted number of printed photographs is surprising. A CD-ROM included with the book provides a significant number of images, plus a limited use version of the Kodak viewer for Windows and the Mac. Unfortunately, the operation of the viewer is not exactly intuitive, and the picture quality can vary tremendously, depending upon your monitor. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995
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Book description:

"Microscopic animals, whirring machine parts, deep sea life, atomic blasts,speeding bullets, the wings of a hummingbird--a near universal list of reality in motion as apprehended by the unique problem-solving and powerfully focused curiosity of Dr. Edgerton." --James L. Enyeart in his introduction to Seeing the Unseen For over 60 years, the ultra high-speed photography of Harold E. "Doc" Edgerton has stopped time. His work makes visible the elusive gestures and trajectories of our world in action: from the dripping of water to a bullet's path. His experiments with stroboscopic flashes resulted in hundreds of --and not incidentally beautiful--images of a realm beyond human vision. Edgerton, a lifelong teacher and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is today celebrated as both a scientific innovator, and also as an astonishing photographer. Seeing the Unseen is an engaging new study of Edgertons's life and science. Designed to look like one of Doc's own laboratory notebooks, the book places his work in its historical technological context, and clarifies his motivations and methods. Edgerton, with his own plain-spoken and witty brand of genius, is vividly portrayed in a biographical essay by Douglas Collins. It covers Edgerton's early years in Nebraska, his beginnings at MIT as a graduate student in electrical engineering in 1926, the decades of inspired research and teaching in"Strobe Alley" (his MIT lab), and his fruitful collaborations with everyone from Hollywood filmmakers to Jacques Cousteau, until his death in 1990. Seeing the Unseen is profusely and colorfully illustrated with photographs of and by Harold Edgerton, and well as easily-understood technical diagrams of his methods. Included in the book is a Portfolio Photo CD, produced by George Eastman House and curator James Sheldon, which contains a gallery of 150 of Edgerton's most striking images, and is compatible with any CD-ROM player. Seeing the Unseen: Dr. Harold E. Edgerton and the Wonders of Strobe Alley is the official catalog for an exhibition of the same name currrently on display at George Eastman House in Rochester, and traveling to Winston-Salem NC, Seattle, Boston, Middlebury VT, and San Diego through 1997. Distributed for George Eastman House