ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Harold “Doc” Edgerton Invites “Seeing the Unseen”: From Milk Drop’s Coronet to MIT’s Formerly Enslaved Janitor

• In Event: Hidden Legacies of Slavery and Freedom in the History of Science

English Abstract

Science enables us to observe, and investigate, what was never evident before. Spinning electric motors, for example, appear blurred; when motor instabilities occur, we can’t see what is going on. In the late 1920s, MIT graduate student Harold Edgerton “stopped” motion with strobe lighting adjusted to synchronize with motors’ spin: the eye could see it. For closer study, Edgerton resorted to film. Opening the camera shutter in the dark, the strobe was the sole light source. With these techniques, successively improved and applied in endless variety to the everyday world, “Doc” Edgerton went on to immerse students and the public in “seeing the unseen”: milk drop’s coronet; balloon pop; bullet through apple. Doc’s democratic, participatory science – “You too!” – inspires students today at MIT’s Edgerton Center.
A 1926 photo predating Edgerton’s strobe experimenting, unseen until recently digitized at MIT Museum, now provokes into “seeing the unseen” in human identity and labor that science history omits. An elderly Black man stands in dignity, among barrel-sized motors in natural lighting at his MIT workplace. Experience grounded the young photographer’s respect for his subject, whom he later identified as “Carter?”. At age 7, Edgerton integrated Winnebago Indian Reservation’s school, riding there bareback on the same pony behind indigenous child “Tom”. As janitor for Aurora Nebraska’s electric plant, teenaged Edgerton had worked in Carter’s role. Respect formed mutually. Having shared his boyhood enslavement to William Barton Rogers, who brought him North before founding MIT, Carter gave Edgerton a spyglass (now at MIT Museum).
From this century-past relationship preserved by photo and instrument, what might we investigate and understand? Enslaved lives, janitors, laborers are “unseen” – in their time, in history, and in ours. Seeking to “see the unseen”, our questions branch widely. We invite you to make unseen seen, wherever you are.

Authors

• Elizabeth Cavicchi, Edgerton Center MIT

• Jia-Yi Andrea Lim, National University of Singapore

• Audrey Tao, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Nikki Yip, Massachusetts Institute of Technology