1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:02,470 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,470 --> 00:00:04,000 Commons license. 3 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:06,320 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,320 --> 00:00:10,690 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,690 --> 00:00:13,300 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,300 --> 00:00:17,025 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,025 --> 00:00:17,650 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:21,930 --> 00:00:25,210 [FELICE FRANKEL] So I'm sitting here in Kim Vandiver's office. 9 00:00:25,210 --> 00:00:31,120 And actually, Kim was the very first person who 10 00:00:31,120 --> 00:00:33,090 got what I was trying to do. 11 00:00:33,090 --> 00:00:35,180 I knocked on his door, basically. 12 00:00:35,180 --> 00:00:36,160 Isn't that right? 13 00:00:36,160 --> 00:00:39,340 Basically knocked on your door and said, "can I 14 00:00:39,340 --> 00:00:42,000 please come here and make science pictures?" 15 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:44,210 This was in 1994. 16 00:00:44,210 --> 00:00:48,140 You were the director of the new Edgerton Center 17 00:00:48,140 --> 00:00:50,130 that just formed. 18 00:00:50,130 --> 00:00:55,230 And you said sure, let's give it a shot. 19 00:00:55,230 --> 00:01:00,220 And I just started making more science pictures. 20 00:01:00,220 --> 00:01:04,129 And that kind of grew into something more wonderful 21 00:01:04,129 --> 00:01:05,630 here at MIT. 22 00:01:05,630 --> 00:01:08,730 So thanks, Kim, for giving us some time. 23 00:01:08,730 --> 00:01:12,510 We're really eager to see this little story 24 00:01:12,510 --> 00:01:15,120 about Doc, and certainly about the pictures 25 00:01:15,120 --> 00:01:17,880 that he made, what he's known for, and some of your pictures, 26 00:01:17,880 --> 00:01:18,460 too. 27 00:01:18,460 --> 00:01:21,969 It would be fun to tell a bit of a story for us. 28 00:01:21,969 --> 00:01:23,010 [KIM VANDIVER] Thank you. 29 00:01:23,010 --> 00:01:25,470 I'm really looking forward to talking with you. 30 00:01:25,470 --> 00:01:26,740 It should be a lot of fun. 31 00:01:26,740 --> 00:01:27,680 [FF] You bet. 32 00:01:27,680 --> 00:01:29,690 So what drew me to the Edgerton Center 33 00:01:29,690 --> 00:01:31,720 is that people knew about it. 34 00:01:31,720 --> 00:01:35,590 And that's really where very exciting photography of science 35 00:01:35,590 --> 00:01:37,130 was taking place. 36 00:01:37,130 --> 00:01:40,481 And so it was a natural place for me to at least start. 37 00:01:40,481 --> 00:01:40,979 [KV] Right. 38 00:01:40,979 --> 00:01:46,930 It had the Doc Edgerton history, and lots of famous photographs. 39 00:01:46,930 --> 00:01:50,261 And she didn't know me from Adam. 40 00:01:50,261 --> 00:01:50,759 Right? 41 00:01:50,759 --> 00:01:54,020 I was just the director of the Edgerton Center at the time. 42 00:01:54,020 --> 00:01:55,930 [FF] What gave me the impetus was 43 00:01:55,930 --> 00:02:02,310 that I had been starting playing around at Harvard with George 44 00:02:02,310 --> 00:02:03,200 Whitsides' work. 45 00:02:03,200 --> 00:02:08,620 And I did, in fact, have a very small portfolio 46 00:02:08,620 --> 00:02:12,070 of some pictures that I made in a science lab. 47 00:02:12,070 --> 00:02:13,860 And so I had something to show. 48 00:02:13,860 --> 00:02:15,991 It wasn't that I just came in and said, hire me. 49 00:02:15,991 --> 00:02:16,490 [KV] Right. 50 00:02:16,490 --> 00:02:18,364 You had the Whitesides' pictures at the time. 51 00:02:18,364 --> 00:02:20,130 [FF] I had the Whitesides' pictures. 52 00:02:20,130 --> 00:02:22,745 And I think I might have had a cover at that point. 53 00:02:22,745 --> 00:02:23,620 [KV] I think you did. 54 00:02:23,620 --> 00:02:28,590 You had the cover of the liquids on 55 00:02:28,590 --> 00:02:31,281 the hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. 56 00:02:31,281 --> 00:02:32,030 [FF] You remember? 57 00:02:32,030 --> 00:02:32,260 [KV] Absolutely. 58 00:02:32,260 --> 00:02:33,210 [FF] Oh my gosh. 59 00:02:33,210 --> 00:02:34,150 Yeah. 60 00:02:34,150 --> 00:02:38,880 But still, I'll be forever indebted to Kim 61 00:02:38,880 --> 00:02:40,660 for opening up the doors. 62 00:02:40,660 --> 00:02:43,250 That's basically what you did for me. 63 00:02:43,250 --> 00:02:45,420 [KV] That's what we intended to do. 64 00:02:45,420 --> 00:02:50,040 That's what the Edgerton Center was supposed to be for. 65 00:02:50,040 --> 00:02:55,610 So Doc first published his photographs in a book 66 00:02:55,610 --> 00:02:56,890 in the 1930's. 67 00:02:56,890 --> 00:03:03,010 And the first book was edited by Jim Kelly, who, at that time, 68 00:03:03,010 --> 00:03:06,170 was the director of Technology Review. 69 00:03:06,170 --> 00:03:08,969 And he later became the president of MIT. 70 00:03:08,969 --> 00:03:09,510 [FF] Killian. 71 00:03:09,510 --> 00:03:10,009 OK. 72 00:03:10,009 --> 00:03:10,970 There we go. 73 00:03:10,970 --> 00:03:12,210 I know that name somewhere. 74 00:03:12,210 --> 00:03:14,060 [KV] And so Killian-- and if you had 75 00:03:14,060 --> 00:03:16,500 noticed, even this book is-- this one 76 00:03:16,500 --> 00:03:19,470 was published in the late '70s. 77 00:03:19,470 --> 00:03:22,502 And again, it's still Edgerton and Killian. 78 00:03:22,502 --> 00:03:23,210 [FF] Interesting. 79 00:03:23,210 --> 00:03:27,940 [KV] So Killian edited the first three books with Doc. 80 00:03:27,940 --> 00:03:30,090 [FF] And where do you come in? 81 00:03:30,090 --> 00:03:36,800 [KV] Well, where I came in was I was a grad student 82 00:03:36,800 --> 00:03:37,960 here for a year in 1968. 83 00:03:37,960 --> 00:03:43,250 And when you come here to MIT in the '60s, you heard about Doc. 84 00:03:43,250 --> 00:03:47,160 He was a phenomenon at MIT. 85 00:03:47,160 --> 00:03:49,540 But then I left and went those two years in the Army, 86 00:03:49,540 --> 00:03:51,954 and I took up photography as a hobby 87 00:03:51,954 --> 00:03:55,940 and developed my own-- built in Trang, Vietnam 88 00:03:55,940 --> 00:04:00,330 in 1970, a darkroom that anybody could use, but then developed 89 00:04:00,330 --> 00:04:06,360 my own color slides while I was there. 90 00:04:06,360 --> 00:04:08,340 [FF] Kodachrome or E6? 91 00:04:08,340 --> 00:04:08,840 [KV] No. 92 00:04:08,840 --> 00:04:09,810 The only thing-- 93 00:04:09,810 --> 00:04:10,950 [FF] That couldn't have been Kodachrome. 94 00:04:10,950 --> 00:04:11,450 [KV] No. 95 00:04:11,450 --> 00:04:15,900 I think it was-- the only one that you could get the process 96 00:04:15,900 --> 00:04:17,950 for, I think, was Ectochrome. 97 00:04:17,950 --> 00:04:19,260 [FF] Which is E6. 98 00:04:19,260 --> 00:04:20,730 [KV] Yeah. 99 00:04:20,730 --> 00:04:25,490 And so built this photo lab on my spare time in Trang, Vietnam 100 00:04:25,490 --> 00:04:29,020 in 1970 and taught myself to develop color film, which 101 00:04:29,020 --> 00:04:30,440 is a painful process. 102 00:04:30,440 --> 00:04:31,240 [FF] Awful. 103 00:04:31,240 --> 00:04:33,490 [KV] Temperature controls and all of that. 104 00:04:33,490 --> 00:04:38,070 So then I show up back at MIT in January of 1972, 105 00:04:38,070 --> 00:04:41,850 and I'm facing taking my doctoral exams 106 00:04:41,850 --> 00:04:44,870 to qualify for the PhD program. 107 00:04:44,870 --> 00:04:49,560 And I was taking all these hard, dreary subjects to prepare. 108 00:04:49,560 --> 00:04:52,080 And I wanted to do one thing for fun. 109 00:04:52,080 --> 00:04:54,190 And so I went and knocked on Doc's door. 110 00:04:54,190 --> 00:04:57,530 Didn't know him, but told him about what I had been doing 111 00:04:57,530 --> 00:05:01,380 and said, I really want to learn how to do strobe photography. 112 00:05:01,380 --> 00:05:04,130 Can I take your undergraduate course? 113 00:05:04,130 --> 00:05:06,380 And he said, sure, we'll let anybody in. 114 00:05:08,889 --> 00:05:10,680 [FF] "Anybody", even you, right? [laughing] 115 00:05:10,680 --> 00:05:11,180 [KV] Yeah. 116 00:05:11,180 --> 00:05:11,940 Even me, right? 117 00:05:11,940 --> 00:05:16,000 And so I took the subject that spring, 118 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:18,140 which is called Strobe Project Lab, which we still 119 00:05:18,140 --> 00:05:20,290 teach today. 120 00:05:20,290 --> 00:05:23,140 I was a grad student, and I had had dozens of lab courses. 121 00:05:23,140 --> 00:05:25,150 And so the lab work was a lark. 122 00:05:25,150 --> 00:05:26,410 It was just fun. 123 00:05:26,410 --> 00:05:27,960 And I just had a blast. 124 00:05:27,960 --> 00:05:31,460 And he needed a TA the following year, 125 00:05:31,460 --> 00:05:34,000 and so hired me to be his teaching assistant. 126 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:36,650 And that's when we really got to know one another. 127 00:05:36,650 --> 00:05:37,450 [FF] What a story. 128 00:05:37,450 --> 00:05:39,659 A little like-- not quite our story, 129 00:05:39,659 --> 00:05:45,170 but I met you when I, too, knocked on your door. 130 00:05:45,170 --> 00:05:45,870 [KV] Same door. 131 00:05:45,870 --> 00:05:47,190 [FF] Same door. 132 00:05:47,190 --> 00:05:49,675 I said, I'd really like to make science pictures. 133 00:05:49,675 --> 00:05:53,760 And you said, we'll take anybody. [laughing] 134 00:05:53,760 --> 00:05:56,700 And at that point, you were terrific. 135 00:05:56,700 --> 00:05:58,850 You just said, yeah, let's see what we could do. 136 00:05:58,850 --> 00:06:02,350 And it expanded through the years. 137 00:06:02,350 --> 00:06:06,370 [KV] Well, and that's the spirit of Doc 138 00:06:06,370 --> 00:06:10,680 that I wanted to have in what we call the Edgerton Center. 139 00:06:10,680 --> 00:06:13,650 When Doc died in January of 1990, 140 00:06:13,650 --> 00:06:17,370 I proposed to MIT that, as a legacy to Doc, 141 00:06:17,370 --> 00:06:19,700 we turn his laboratory into a place 142 00:06:19,700 --> 00:06:23,050 where MIT students could come knocking on the door 143 00:06:23,050 --> 00:06:26,280 and get help to be able to pursue 144 00:06:26,280 --> 00:06:30,230 hands-on experiential projects that they wanted to do. 145 00:06:30,230 --> 00:06:34,250 And essentially, that was the beginning. 146 00:06:34,250 --> 00:06:37,140 And the Edgerton Center was formally 147 00:06:37,140 --> 00:06:40,420 founded in August of '92. 148 00:06:40,420 --> 00:06:43,534 And no now we're pushing 25 years. 149 00:06:43,534 --> 00:06:44,284 [FF] That's right. 150 00:06:44,284 --> 00:06:46,076 You might have a celebration at some point. 151 00:06:46,076 --> 00:06:46,620 [KV] Yeah. 152 00:06:46,620 --> 00:06:48,120 We have to think about that. 153 00:06:48,120 --> 00:06:54,010 So we're almost 25 years old, and the initial vision 154 00:06:54,010 --> 00:07:01,040 was to have it continue to be a go-to place for know how 155 00:07:01,040 --> 00:07:03,110 in high speed photography. 156 00:07:03,110 --> 00:07:05,120 So we continue to teach the subjects. 157 00:07:05,120 --> 00:07:07,400 We continue to do a professional development 158 00:07:07,400 --> 00:07:10,410 course in the summer. 159 00:07:10,410 --> 00:07:12,680 [FF] It's the go-to place, no question. 160 00:07:12,680 --> 00:07:15,250 [KV] We try to still do that. 161 00:07:15,250 --> 00:07:19,260 But we also wanted to help MIT students who had projects 162 00:07:19,260 --> 00:07:22,470 that they wanted to work on outside of the classroom. 163 00:07:22,470 --> 00:07:26,715 And so today, the way that is embodied in the Edgerton Center 164 00:07:26,715 --> 00:07:33,050 is, we sponsor about a dozen student clubs and teams that 165 00:07:33,050 --> 00:07:35,159 build stuff-- so the Solar Electric Vehicle 166 00:07:35,159 --> 00:07:40,310 Team and Underwater Autonomous Vehicle Team, Formula 167 00:07:40,310 --> 00:07:45,330 SAE, Robotics, Aerial Vehicles, a team 168 00:07:45,330 --> 00:07:49,760 that rides coast to coast called Spokes. 169 00:07:49,760 --> 00:07:52,860 They ride bikes across the country in the summertime, 170 00:07:52,860 --> 00:07:55,909 stopping along the way to teach middle school 171 00:07:55,909 --> 00:07:57,120 lessons in science. 172 00:07:57,120 --> 00:07:58,180 [FF] Oh, man. 173 00:07:58,180 --> 00:07:59,060 I love that. 174 00:07:59,060 --> 00:08:00,500 That's wonderful. 175 00:08:00,500 --> 00:08:04,969 Let's turn to some of Doc's pictures. 176 00:08:04,969 --> 00:08:05,510 [KV] Alright. 177 00:08:05,510 --> 00:08:10,810 [FF] And maybe if we can concentrate on what have become 178 00:08:10,810 --> 00:08:13,220 iconic, in a way. 179 00:08:13,220 --> 00:08:15,210 This is your story. 180 00:08:15,210 --> 00:08:17,470 We're looking at books on the desk, 181 00:08:17,470 --> 00:08:22,920 and Kim is going to look with me at some images. 182 00:08:22,920 --> 00:08:25,430 And I might ask some questions. 183 00:08:25,430 --> 00:08:27,500 We'd like to teach our students taking 184 00:08:27,500 --> 00:08:30,270 our course-- we'd like to introduce them 185 00:08:30,270 --> 00:08:31,770 to some of the techniques. 186 00:08:31,770 --> 00:08:35,250 We don't want to go too deeply, because we're not actually 187 00:08:35,250 --> 00:08:37,440 doing this in this course. 188 00:08:37,440 --> 00:08:40,049 But I felt it was important for them 189 00:08:40,049 --> 00:08:43,705 to be aware of this kind of photography for later on, 190 00:08:43,705 --> 00:08:44,205 maybe. 191 00:08:44,205 --> 00:08:45,950 [KV] Right. 192 00:08:45,950 --> 00:08:47,500 I thought mostly what I would talk 193 00:08:47,500 --> 00:08:50,260 about today doesn't actually have a lot to do 194 00:08:50,260 --> 00:08:52,510 with high speed techniques. 195 00:08:52,510 --> 00:08:57,419 It has more to do with why was Doc a great photographer. 196 00:08:57,419 --> 00:08:58,239 [FF] OK, great. 197 00:08:58,239 --> 00:08:59,159 Let's go. 198 00:08:59,159 --> 00:09:02,600 [KV] And that's relevant to anybody 199 00:09:02,600 --> 00:09:04,620 who's trying to take a picture. 200 00:09:04,620 --> 00:09:09,070 So I'm going to do it a little bit chronologically. 201 00:09:09,070 --> 00:09:13,050 Doc was fascinated with liquids and water 202 00:09:13,050 --> 00:09:15,440 and taking pictures of those things, for some reason, 203 00:09:15,440 --> 00:09:16,290 very early on. 204 00:09:16,290 --> 00:09:18,480 And he claims the very first picture 205 00:09:18,480 --> 00:09:21,810 that he took of that wasn't of an electric motor. 206 00:09:21,810 --> 00:09:24,250 And he was taking pictures of electric motors 207 00:09:24,250 --> 00:09:27,290 because that was his PhD thesis, and he needed the strobe 208 00:09:27,290 --> 00:09:29,160 to help him understand motors. 209 00:09:29,160 --> 00:09:30,660 He claimed the first picture that he 210 00:09:30,660 --> 00:09:32,740 took using a flash, of something else, 211 00:09:32,740 --> 00:09:34,850 was water coming out of a faucet. 212 00:09:34,850 --> 00:09:38,880 And for the rest of his life, he took pictures of water. 213 00:09:38,880 --> 00:09:40,380 Water is tricky. 214 00:09:40,380 --> 00:09:41,940 It's hard to take pictures of it. 215 00:09:41,940 --> 00:09:46,430 And then his iconic photograph is the crown splash, 216 00:09:46,430 --> 00:09:49,010 called "Coronet," the splash of the milk drop. 217 00:09:49,010 --> 00:09:51,410 And the original black and white of it, 218 00:09:51,410 --> 00:09:52,990 which we're looking at right here, 219 00:09:52,990 --> 00:09:57,190 was included in the first ever photographic exposition 220 00:09:57,190 --> 00:09:58,990 at the Museum of Modern Art. 221 00:09:58,990 --> 00:10:00,690 And I guess before that, they didn't 222 00:10:00,690 --> 00:10:04,110 consider photography art. 223 00:10:04,110 --> 00:10:04,880 But it's there. 224 00:10:04,880 --> 00:10:05,880 It's in the collections. 225 00:10:05,880 --> 00:10:09,160 And it was 1937. 226 00:10:09,160 --> 00:10:11,720 So there's that picture, and that's liquid again. 227 00:10:11,720 --> 00:10:14,260 But really, an amazing picture that nobody 228 00:10:14,260 --> 00:10:15,820 had ever seen before. 229 00:10:15,820 --> 00:10:20,450 Because really good stop motion pictures hadn't existed before. 230 00:10:20,450 --> 00:10:22,760 But actually, in fact, that's a lie. 231 00:10:22,760 --> 00:10:25,260 I went back recently and did a little work, 232 00:10:25,260 --> 00:10:28,910 because I helped with somebody giving a talk in Cambridge. 233 00:10:28,910 --> 00:10:32,680 And there's some pictures of splashes of milk drops 234 00:10:32,680 --> 00:10:35,360 that go back to about the turn of the century. 235 00:10:35,360 --> 00:10:35,860 [FF] I know. 236 00:10:35,860 --> 00:10:37,740 [KV] And now I've forgotten the name of the guy who did it. 237 00:10:37,740 --> 00:10:38,440 Famous guy. 238 00:10:38,440 --> 00:10:39,840 [FF] I wrote it down somewhere. 239 00:10:39,840 --> 00:10:44,020 I just saw it at the Victoria-- no, I'm sorry. 240 00:10:44,020 --> 00:10:47,990 I saw it at the London-- it's at the Science Museum in London. 241 00:10:47,990 --> 00:10:49,010 [KV] That's right. 242 00:10:49,010 --> 00:10:50,740 [FF] And I just saw it a month ago. 243 00:10:50,740 --> 00:10:52,700 I said, wait a second. 244 00:10:52,700 --> 00:10:54,010 That's before Doc. 245 00:10:54,010 --> 00:10:54,760 [KV] That's right. 246 00:10:54,760 --> 00:10:58,930 So I think Doc had to have known about those and seen them. 247 00:10:58,930 --> 00:11:01,470 But the fellow who had done them, 248 00:11:01,470 --> 00:11:06,330 this was before good electronic triggering. 249 00:11:06,330 --> 00:11:09,190 And this is about all I'll say about high speed photography-- 250 00:11:09,190 --> 00:11:12,340 the key to high speed photography 251 00:11:12,340 --> 00:11:15,370 is to have a very short duration flash, 252 00:11:15,370 --> 00:11:19,480 but to have a way of knowing when to make it go off. 253 00:11:19,480 --> 00:11:21,290 In the trade, we call that "triggering". 254 00:11:21,290 --> 00:11:24,600 How do you trigger the flash to make it go off? 255 00:11:24,600 --> 00:11:26,940 And the way you take a bullet picture is you 256 00:11:26,940 --> 00:11:27,950 use a microphone. 257 00:11:27,950 --> 00:11:31,140 And when the shock wave from the bullet passes the microphone, 258 00:11:31,140 --> 00:11:33,800 the microphone sets off the flash. 259 00:11:33,800 --> 00:11:36,250 And in a darkened room, you can look at where 260 00:11:36,250 --> 00:11:37,620 the bullet is supposed to be. 261 00:11:37,620 --> 00:11:39,550 You shoot the gun, the flash goes off, 262 00:11:39,550 --> 00:11:41,830 your eye sees it exactly where it is. 263 00:11:41,830 --> 00:11:44,610 And if you want your picture to have the bullet three inches 264 00:11:44,610 --> 00:11:46,830 to the left, you take the microphone-- which 265 00:11:46,830 --> 00:11:48,367 is down below, out of sight-- move 266 00:11:48,367 --> 00:11:50,075 it three inches to the left, do it again, 267 00:11:50,075 --> 00:11:51,703 and it's exactly where you want it. 268 00:11:51,703 --> 00:11:52,619 [FF] That's brilliant. 269 00:11:52,619 --> 00:11:55,890 [KV] So triggering is a lot of the story about high speed 270 00:11:55,890 --> 00:11:58,710 once you have a source of a high speed flash. 271 00:11:58,710 --> 00:12:01,230 [FF] So you're actually triggering the light. 272 00:12:01,230 --> 00:12:03,010 [KV] Triggering the timing and the light. 273 00:12:03,010 --> 00:12:06,810 It takes two things-- good timing and a very short 274 00:12:06,810 --> 00:12:09,230 duration burst of light. 275 00:12:09,230 --> 00:12:13,590 So one of the two inventors of photography 276 00:12:13,590 --> 00:12:16,060 was William Henry Fox Talbot. 277 00:12:16,060 --> 00:12:20,000 And in 1859, he took a flash picture. 278 00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:22,950 So the first flash photograph is 1859, 279 00:12:22,950 --> 00:12:27,200 and it was an air gap spark of a capacitor discharge. 280 00:12:27,200 --> 00:12:31,200 And it was a piece of newspaper spinning on a disc. 281 00:12:31,200 --> 00:12:33,720 So flash photography goes back a long way. 282 00:12:33,720 --> 00:12:36,730 [FF] Do I remember correctly that he tried it with water 283 00:12:36,730 --> 00:12:37,945 and eventually decided to-- 284 00:12:37,945 --> 00:12:39,070 [KV] I honestly don't know. 285 00:12:39,070 --> 00:12:42,650 My guess is he-- I'm sure he tried it wither water first. 286 00:12:42,650 --> 00:12:46,640 And in fact, my guess is he saw it in water 287 00:12:46,640 --> 00:12:49,070 and he said, oh, that is cool. 288 00:12:49,070 --> 00:12:51,290 How can we really do it? 289 00:12:51,290 --> 00:12:53,600 [FF] So is this just milk? 290 00:12:53,600 --> 00:12:54,900 [KV] Yeah. 291 00:12:54,900 --> 00:12:56,450 I know they used milk early on. 292 00:12:56,450 --> 00:12:59,162 And of course, milk turns sour in the lab in not very long. 293 00:12:59,162 --> 00:13:00,620 And so pretty soon after that, they 294 00:13:00,620 --> 00:13:02,670 figured out how to do it with fake milk, 295 00:13:02,670 --> 00:13:04,740 so that it would last a little bit longer. 296 00:13:04,740 --> 00:13:09,000 So that picture, then, was taken in the mid '30s. 297 00:13:09,000 --> 00:13:11,450 And then when color film came out, 298 00:13:11,450 --> 00:13:13,920 then Doc took the picture again in color. 299 00:13:13,920 --> 00:13:18,320 And that's the iconic one in red that's on postcards everywhere. 300 00:13:18,320 --> 00:13:20,847 [FF] I sort of like this one better myself. 301 00:13:20,847 --> 00:13:22,180 [KV] I'll tell a lot of stories. 302 00:13:22,180 --> 00:13:24,510 A couple of other stories about Doc-- 303 00:13:24,510 --> 00:13:27,410 he knew he had a good thing, but the world 304 00:13:27,410 --> 00:13:29,380 didn't know he had a good thing. 305 00:13:29,380 --> 00:13:34,440 And he went Kodak and said, you ought 306 00:13:34,440 --> 00:13:40,640 to make a product out of this and sell cameras with flash 307 00:13:40,640 --> 00:13:42,740 units, with electronic flash. 308 00:13:42,740 --> 00:13:45,440 And at that time, people were using flashbulbs. 309 00:13:45,440 --> 00:13:48,920 And they said, well, we looked into it. 310 00:13:48,920 --> 00:13:51,210 We figured we could sell about 50 units a year. 311 00:13:51,210 --> 00:13:54,330 It just isn't worth it. 312 00:13:54,330 --> 00:13:55,870 This is in the '40s. 313 00:13:55,870 --> 00:13:59,580 And so Doc set out then to prove them wrong 314 00:13:59,580 --> 00:14:03,350 and to generate so much demand that they couldn't ignore it. 315 00:14:03,350 --> 00:14:06,550 And so he started building the first portable units, battery 316 00:14:06,550 --> 00:14:07,540 operated. 317 00:14:07,540 --> 00:14:13,670 He equipped sports photographers with portable units. 318 00:14:13,670 --> 00:14:16,465 And so there's a picture I didn't dig out today. 319 00:14:16,465 --> 00:14:19,970 It's in the Boston Garden, and it's an indoor track meet. 320 00:14:19,970 --> 00:14:22,790 And it's a runner coming around the curve. 321 00:14:22,790 --> 00:14:28,210 And it's just absolutely crisp stop motion shot of this guy. 322 00:14:28,210 --> 00:14:31,860 And it was the first high speed flash sports photograph 323 00:14:31,860 --> 00:14:35,990 to go out on AP wire photo. 324 00:14:35,990 --> 00:14:40,300 And then after that, there's another fantastic image. 325 00:14:40,300 --> 00:14:42,910 So Doc, he said, I'm going to prove them wrong. 326 00:14:42,910 --> 00:14:46,360 I'm going to show people that this is the way to do it. 327 00:14:46,360 --> 00:14:49,770 And the other picture that I didn't pull out today 328 00:14:49,770 --> 00:14:56,810 is the absolutely classic sports shot, 329 00:14:56,810 --> 00:15:01,400 which is the knockout punch from Joe Lewis. 330 00:15:01,400 --> 00:15:04,070 It's the Joe Lewis shot. 331 00:15:04,070 --> 00:15:10,070 When that went out on AP, that was a show-stopper picture. 332 00:15:10,070 --> 00:15:10,570 OK. 333 00:15:10,570 --> 00:15:11,680 There we go. 334 00:15:11,680 --> 00:15:18,529 And that is the Chilean Arturo Godoy in 1940. 335 00:15:18,529 --> 00:15:20,070 [FF] Can you imagine seeing something 336 00:15:20,070 --> 00:15:22,070 like that for the first time? 337 00:15:22,070 --> 00:15:23,530 Opening up a whole new world. 338 00:15:23,530 --> 00:15:24,320 Very exciting. 339 00:15:24,320 --> 00:15:27,312 [KV] So it didn't take, I think, too many pictures like that. 340 00:15:27,312 --> 00:15:28,520 [FF] No, that's all you need. 341 00:15:28,520 --> 00:15:31,720 [KV] And the photography industry started to say, 342 00:15:31,720 --> 00:15:34,330 there's something important here. 343 00:15:34,330 --> 00:15:37,540 So then he got really fascinated with speed. 344 00:15:37,540 --> 00:15:40,390 And what would impress people more 345 00:15:40,390 --> 00:15:42,720 than to be able to stop a bullet in flight? 346 00:15:42,720 --> 00:15:45,710 I think that Doc said, we got to do that. 347 00:15:45,710 --> 00:15:48,234 And so he took lots of bullet pictures. 348 00:15:48,234 --> 00:15:49,650 So people know pictures of bullets 349 00:15:49,650 --> 00:15:52,490 through apples and all sorts of things. 350 00:15:52,490 --> 00:15:54,640 [FF] And people are doing it in classes. 351 00:15:54,640 --> 00:15:55,690 [KV] Yeah. 352 00:15:55,690 --> 00:15:58,330 And we show our students how to take a bullet 353 00:15:58,330 --> 00:16:02,430 picture every year, because it's just so cool. 354 00:16:02,430 --> 00:16:05,590 But the picture that I pulled out to talk about 355 00:16:05,590 --> 00:16:08,910 is a picture that has three balloons 356 00:16:08,910 --> 00:16:12,890 in a row with a bullet passing one after another 357 00:16:12,890 --> 00:16:13,640 through the third. 358 00:16:13,640 --> 00:16:17,750 And so the first one is in almost complete disintegration. 359 00:16:17,750 --> 00:16:19,810 The second one is partially gone, 360 00:16:19,810 --> 00:16:21,890 and the third one is just barely showing 361 00:16:21,890 --> 00:16:24,280 the effects of being shot. 362 00:16:24,280 --> 00:16:27,160 This essentially, in a single photograph 363 00:16:27,160 --> 00:16:30,200 with a single flash of light, does a wonderful job 364 00:16:30,200 --> 00:16:32,680 of showing the passage of time. 365 00:16:32,680 --> 00:16:36,470 So I think this is just a brilliantly crafted photograph 366 00:16:36,470 --> 00:16:40,480 to tell a story in a single picture. 367 00:16:40,480 --> 00:16:42,550 [FF] That's mind blowing. 368 00:16:42,550 --> 00:16:45,911 [KV] He was really clever at that kind of thing. 369 00:16:48,877 --> 00:16:50,460 And they took lots of bullet pictures, 370 00:16:50,460 --> 00:16:52,251 but this is one of my favorites, because it 371 00:16:52,251 --> 00:16:53,930 was so cleverly done. 372 00:16:53,930 --> 00:16:57,550 And this was before the development 373 00:16:57,550 --> 00:17:02,810 of high-speed, multiple flash cameras. 374 00:17:02,810 --> 00:17:06,460 So Doc's contribution to high-speed photography 375 00:17:06,460 --> 00:17:09,510 was the perfection of two things. 376 00:17:09,510 --> 00:17:12,730 The electronic controls-- so now you 377 00:17:12,730 --> 00:17:14,660 had transistors and modern things 378 00:17:14,660 --> 00:17:17,470 that you could switch current very quickly-- 379 00:17:17,470 --> 00:17:21,220 and also, very short duration sources of light, 380 00:17:21,220 --> 00:17:23,180 and in particular, the xenon flash 381 00:17:23,180 --> 00:17:27,160 tube, which is in every camera that you buy. 382 00:17:27,160 --> 00:17:29,369 So he perfected the xenon flash tube, 383 00:17:29,369 --> 00:17:34,250 which gives out very bright, daylight color spectrum light 384 00:17:34,250 --> 00:17:36,269 in a very short duration. 385 00:17:36,269 --> 00:17:39,510 [FF] Kim, around what year are we talking about, roughly? 386 00:17:39,510 --> 00:17:45,730 [KV] Well, there were strobes available 387 00:17:45,730 --> 00:17:48,180 when he was doing his PhD work in the late-- 388 00:17:48,180 --> 00:17:49,730 he started about 1928. 389 00:17:49,730 --> 00:17:52,660 Then these pictures, like the one 390 00:17:52,660 --> 00:17:56,440 in the Museum of Modern Art, early and mid '30s, 391 00:17:56,440 --> 00:17:59,070 by that time, I think he was using Xenon. 392 00:17:59,070 --> 00:18:02,390 He was developing flash tube technology back then. 393 00:18:02,390 --> 00:18:07,900 And I was a TA in 1972, one of the labs 394 00:18:07,900 --> 00:18:10,290 that you did is you went in the lab 395 00:18:10,290 --> 00:18:12,730 and made your own flash tube. 396 00:18:12,730 --> 00:18:15,920 Doc really understood flash tube technology. 397 00:18:15,920 --> 00:18:17,130 You had made your own. 398 00:18:17,130 --> 00:18:22,290 And so we had Pyrex glass and glass blowing setup. 399 00:18:22,290 --> 00:18:25,570 And you took the glass, and you learned 400 00:18:25,570 --> 00:18:27,590 how to embed the electrodes in it 401 00:18:27,590 --> 00:18:29,830 to conduct the electricity inside. 402 00:18:29,830 --> 00:18:32,920 You filled it with xenon at the right pressure, 403 00:18:32,920 --> 00:18:36,570 and then you pinched it off, and you had your own tube. 404 00:18:36,570 --> 00:18:37,920 [FF] Talk about hands on. 405 00:18:37,920 --> 00:18:39,074 [KV] Yeah. 406 00:18:39,074 --> 00:18:40,490 [FF] That's what he was all about. 407 00:18:40,490 --> 00:18:42,323 [KV] When you took the course in those days, 408 00:18:42,323 --> 00:18:43,860 you tested flash tubes. 409 00:18:43,860 --> 00:18:45,800 You made your own. 410 00:18:45,800 --> 00:18:49,790 And you also then went and took pictures of bullets, 411 00:18:49,790 --> 00:18:52,300 and had to do a project of your own. 412 00:18:52,300 --> 00:18:54,260 It was called Strobe Project Lab. 413 00:18:54,260 --> 00:18:55,980 In the second half of the course, 414 00:18:55,980 --> 00:18:59,250 you had to choose something of your own to do. 415 00:18:59,250 --> 00:19:03,820 And so students, by that time, had pushed multiple pianos 416 00:19:03,820 --> 00:19:06,790 off the top of dorms and taken pictures of them 417 00:19:06,790 --> 00:19:08,900 and stuff like that. 418 00:19:08,900 --> 00:19:12,060 But I was an ocean engineer, and I 419 00:19:12,060 --> 00:19:17,060 took on a project of taking high speed technical photographs 420 00:19:17,060 --> 00:19:21,210 for quantitative purposes of propellers in a water tunnel. 421 00:19:21,210 --> 00:19:24,355 Because propellers under certain conditions generate bubbles, 422 00:19:24,355 --> 00:19:27,220 and you may see this helix going downstream, 423 00:19:27,220 --> 00:19:28,500 and it's called cavitation. 424 00:19:28,500 --> 00:19:31,460 The propeller cavitates, it erodes it very fast 425 00:19:31,460 --> 00:19:32,090 and damages it. 426 00:19:32,090 --> 00:19:33,670 And if you're a submarine, it makes 427 00:19:33,670 --> 00:19:37,110 a horrendous amount of noise and makes it easy to detect you. 428 00:19:37,110 --> 00:19:39,230 So cavitation is important. 429 00:19:39,230 --> 00:19:43,805 But pictures of things with bubbles around them in water 430 00:19:43,805 --> 00:19:45,300 are actually kind of hard to take. 431 00:19:45,300 --> 00:19:48,490 So we have a propeller tunnel here in the Ocean Engineering 432 00:19:48,490 --> 00:19:52,410 department, and they had been taking pictures in it, 433 00:19:52,410 --> 00:19:53,830 but they weren't very good. 434 00:19:53,830 --> 00:19:56,110 And so I actually took a lot of pictures 435 00:19:56,110 --> 00:19:59,870 and then wrote the manual on how to actually take good pictures. 436 00:19:59,870 --> 00:20:02,190 [FF] Fantastic. 437 00:20:02,190 --> 00:20:04,640 [KV] I think it's still in the drawer over there. 438 00:20:04,640 --> 00:20:06,740 Lighting is the most critical part. 439 00:20:06,740 --> 00:20:08,810 Bubbles reflect so much. 440 00:20:08,810 --> 00:20:11,790 And the windows, you've got to take pictures through windows, 441 00:20:11,790 --> 00:20:13,320 which is a problem. 442 00:20:13,320 --> 00:20:14,630 [FF] Major problem. 443 00:20:14,630 --> 00:20:16,490 [KV] So you learn all about how to take 444 00:20:16,490 --> 00:20:20,050 the things that reflect on you, and bubbles reflect like crazy. 445 00:20:20,050 --> 00:20:25,240 So getting the lighting, the exposure correct 446 00:20:25,240 --> 00:20:26,016 is a tricky part. 447 00:20:26,016 --> 00:20:26,516 [FF] Yeah. 448 00:20:26,516 --> 00:20:28,190 We talk a lot about that. 449 00:20:28,190 --> 00:20:33,130 [KV] Doc was an opportunist, but he was also very creative. 450 00:20:33,130 --> 00:20:35,780 Another thing that Doc did-- he was an MIT professor, 451 00:20:35,780 --> 00:20:40,690 and to this day, high speed photography's probably greatest 452 00:20:40,690 --> 00:20:43,560 use is in industrial settings. 453 00:20:43,560 --> 00:20:47,860 Doc soon was sought out by people in industry 454 00:20:47,860 --> 00:20:52,130 to use high speed photography to troubleshoot. 455 00:20:52,130 --> 00:20:54,440 All through his life, he did lot of what 456 00:20:54,440 --> 00:20:57,030 turned out to be really interesting consulting jobs. 457 00:20:57,030 --> 00:20:59,220 So he was always carrying his camera. 458 00:20:59,220 --> 00:21:01,594 And he would take pictures of opportunities 459 00:21:01,594 --> 00:21:03,760 when he thought they were just really cool pictures. 460 00:21:03,760 --> 00:21:06,270 And this is one of my favorite ones. 461 00:21:06,270 --> 00:21:13,775 This shows a mill worker sometime in 1937. 462 00:21:13,775 --> 00:21:15,660 This is the paper mill. 463 00:21:15,660 --> 00:21:18,650 And paper mills are notorious for-- have you ever 464 00:21:18,650 --> 00:21:21,190 seen a newspaper being printed or something like that? 465 00:21:21,190 --> 00:21:25,300 The paper is streaming across rollers at very high speed. 466 00:21:25,300 --> 00:21:28,670 And if something goes wrong, you get an enormous mess 467 00:21:28,670 --> 00:21:30,210 in a hurry. 468 00:21:30,210 --> 00:21:31,930 And it's going so fast. 469 00:21:31,930 --> 00:21:33,630 The paper is moving so fast. 470 00:21:33,630 --> 00:21:36,290 You can't see with your eye what the problem is. 471 00:21:36,290 --> 00:21:39,360 And so Doc's new high speed photography 472 00:21:39,360 --> 00:21:42,580 was a real blessing for people in industry 473 00:21:42,580 --> 00:21:47,340 with things that were very high speed and could get in trouble. 474 00:21:47,340 --> 00:21:48,700 But this is an example of that. 475 00:21:48,700 --> 00:21:51,200 He was no doubt working on a consulting job. 476 00:21:51,200 --> 00:21:54,884 You can see in the background these big rolls of paper that 477 00:21:54,884 --> 00:21:56,050 are going through this mill. 478 00:21:56,050 --> 00:21:58,860 He had probably been taking very technical pictures, 479 00:21:58,860 --> 00:22:01,250 probably trying to get them to understand something. 480 00:22:01,250 --> 00:22:05,650 And then he saw this fellow, this worker, with a pitchfork 481 00:22:05,650 --> 00:22:08,590 with this enormous mass of trimmings 482 00:22:08,590 --> 00:22:12,310 off the edges of a paper roll forking this big-- like it's 483 00:22:12,310 --> 00:22:13,710 hay, but it's not hay. 484 00:22:13,710 --> 00:22:14,690 It's paper. 485 00:22:14,690 --> 00:22:16,140 But it's a beautiful picture. 486 00:22:16,140 --> 00:22:17,540 [FF] It's wonderful. 487 00:22:17,540 --> 00:22:20,400 [KV] And so his sense of seeing a good picture and saying, 488 00:22:20,400 --> 00:22:23,260 I've got to do this, and then his craftsmanship 489 00:22:23,260 --> 00:22:26,149 of being able to make it a great picture, not 490 00:22:26,149 --> 00:22:27,190 just an ordinary picture. 491 00:22:27,190 --> 00:22:29,148 [FF] What kind of camera was he lugging around? 492 00:22:29,148 --> 00:22:32,360 [KV] This was probably a four by five. 493 00:22:32,360 --> 00:22:34,375 He used a lot of four by five. 494 00:22:36,850 --> 00:22:37,850 I've forgotten the term. 495 00:22:37,850 --> 00:22:38,660 I haven't used one in so long. 496 00:22:38,660 --> 00:22:39,451 [FF] Cassettes or-- 497 00:22:39,451 --> 00:22:40,429 [KV] Yeah. 498 00:22:40,429 --> 00:22:42,970 With the back on it, and you put it in and pull the slide out 499 00:22:42,970 --> 00:22:44,160 and took you picture. 500 00:22:44,160 --> 00:22:47,070 [FF] Which is considerably cumbersome. 501 00:22:47,070 --> 00:22:50,080 This is without a tripod? 502 00:22:50,080 --> 00:22:53,382 [KV] My guess is-- I don't know. 503 00:22:53,382 --> 00:22:55,340 He would also, then-- he would just carry along 504 00:22:55,340 --> 00:22:59,840 a 35-millimeter of what camera was available at the time just 505 00:22:59,840 --> 00:23:02,664 to be able to take setup pictures and quick stuff. 506 00:23:02,664 --> 00:23:04,580 But when he then really wanted a good picture, 507 00:23:04,580 --> 00:23:07,455 he'd get out the four by five, and he'd put it on a tripod 508 00:23:07,455 --> 00:23:10,120 if he had one there and do it right. 509 00:23:10,120 --> 00:23:12,620 And this is a big version of this picture in the hallway 510 00:23:12,620 --> 00:23:13,160 outside. 511 00:23:13,160 --> 00:23:15,110 [outside Kim's office] You were standing almost in front 512 00:23:15,110 --> 00:23:15,776 of if out there. 513 00:23:15,776 --> 00:23:17,020 [FF] Oh, OK. 514 00:23:17,020 --> 00:23:19,740 [KV] So that's one of my favorite Doc "opportunity" 515 00:23:19,740 --> 00:23:22,190 kind of pictures that came from his consulting. 516 00:23:25,450 --> 00:23:27,840 So what's that? 517 00:23:27,840 --> 00:23:30,480 Stonehenge. 518 00:23:30,480 --> 00:23:31,060 [FF] Wow. 519 00:23:31,060 --> 00:23:31,560 [KV] Yeah. 520 00:23:31,560 --> 00:23:33,400 It's a "wow" picture of Stonehenge 521 00:23:33,400 --> 00:23:35,970 that was another opportunity. 522 00:23:35,970 --> 00:23:37,940 He had to plan this rather carefully. 523 00:23:37,940 --> 00:23:40,790 Here's this sister picture to this that's upstairs. 524 00:23:40,790 --> 00:23:42,450 And if we go upstairs, you can see it. 525 00:23:42,450 --> 00:23:44,720 It's this dull looking, why do you bother to put 526 00:23:44,720 --> 00:23:47,080 that image on the wall picture. 527 00:23:47,080 --> 00:23:50,700 But this photograph is taken at midnight, thereabouts. 528 00:23:50,700 --> 00:23:53,360 And the sister companion picture that goes with it 529 00:23:53,360 --> 00:23:58,360 is a photograph from a night reconnaissance aircraft. 530 00:23:58,360 --> 00:24:03,970 The pilots are practicing for taking photographs using 531 00:24:03,970 --> 00:24:10,340 brand new Edgerton strobe equipment to take photographs 532 00:24:10,340 --> 00:24:15,110 of Normandy in June of 1944. 533 00:24:15,110 --> 00:24:16,740 So this is leading up to that. 534 00:24:16,740 --> 00:24:20,030 They've installed these brand new electronic means 535 00:24:20,030 --> 00:24:22,510 of taking reconnaissance photographs 536 00:24:22,510 --> 00:24:25,550 and put them in US Army Air Force airplanes 537 00:24:25,550 --> 00:24:27,140 and are teaching the pilots to do it. 538 00:24:27,140 --> 00:24:29,560 Prior to the use of flash, you would 539 00:24:29,560 --> 00:24:33,550 have one plane fly over high altitude-- like 5,000 or 10,000 540 00:24:33,550 --> 00:24:36,386 feet-- and drop flares on parachutes, 541 00:24:36,386 --> 00:24:37,760 and then the reconnaissance plane 542 00:24:37,760 --> 00:24:42,960 would have to fly in at 1,500 feet illuminated, 543 00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:47,940 backlit by the flares so that people with guns could see it. 544 00:24:47,940 --> 00:24:49,590 And so it was really dangerous work. 545 00:24:49,590 --> 00:24:52,040 And then you'd fly over with the lights from the flares, 546 00:24:52,040 --> 00:24:54,610 taking the pictures, but also getting shot at. 547 00:24:54,610 --> 00:24:56,210 So that had been the standard way 548 00:24:56,210 --> 00:24:58,360 to do reconnaissance photographs. 549 00:24:58,360 --> 00:25:00,810 The Army Air Force came to him early in the war and said, 550 00:25:00,810 --> 00:25:05,470 can we use your flash technology to take pictures at nighttime? 551 00:25:05,470 --> 00:25:09,900 And so they started developing really powerful flashes. 552 00:25:09,900 --> 00:25:13,040 So your typical camera flash might 553 00:25:13,040 --> 00:25:17,600 be five watt seconds of energy. 554 00:25:17,600 --> 00:25:19,680 That's a measure of electric power. 555 00:25:19,680 --> 00:25:20,960 So five. 556 00:25:20,960 --> 00:25:24,540 So by the end of the war, Edgerton flash units 557 00:25:24,540 --> 00:25:27,460 that were being carried in reconnaissance aircraft 558 00:25:27,460 --> 00:25:30,145 were 50,000 watt seconds. 559 00:25:30,145 --> 00:25:31,850 [FF] I can't even imagine. 560 00:25:31,850 --> 00:25:34,520 [KV] And one of the movies about Doc 561 00:25:34,520 --> 00:25:37,490 that shows him in a classroom, and he's 562 00:25:37,490 --> 00:25:40,970 got a yardstick with a sheet of newspaper taped to it, 563 00:25:40,970 --> 00:25:43,955 hanging from it, and he's standing about as far from you 564 00:25:43,955 --> 00:25:44,480 to here. 565 00:25:44,480 --> 00:25:48,520 So the 50,000-watt second flash unit has a reflector about this 566 00:25:48,520 --> 00:25:53,720 big around, and a flash tube with the xenon in it. 567 00:25:53,720 --> 00:25:56,650 It's a coil, a helix about this big around. 568 00:25:56,650 --> 00:25:59,750 And you shoot it off, and the piece of newspaper 569 00:25:59,750 --> 00:26:02,060 would just burst into flames. 570 00:26:02,060 --> 00:26:03,850 That's how much heat is coming off 571 00:26:03,850 --> 00:26:05,370 of this thing with the light. 572 00:26:05,370 --> 00:26:08,060 So they were installing units. 573 00:26:08,060 --> 00:26:10,850 They wanted to send the pilots out to practice with it. 574 00:26:10,850 --> 00:26:13,080 And he said, let's take a picture of Stonehenge. 575 00:26:13,080 --> 00:26:16,560 And so he was on the ground, and he set his four by five camera 576 00:26:16,560 --> 00:26:18,960 on a fence post, and he knew when they were coming. 577 00:26:18,960 --> 00:26:21,160 And he just opened the shutter and waited 578 00:26:21,160 --> 00:26:23,349 for the night reconnaissance. 579 00:26:23,349 --> 00:26:25,640 [FF] Are you telling me the light was coming from the-- 580 00:26:25,640 --> 00:26:27,480 [KV] The light comes from the airplane. 581 00:26:27,480 --> 00:26:30,810 [FF] And it traveled that far? 582 00:26:30,810 --> 00:26:33,282 It was so strong. 583 00:26:33,282 --> 00:26:34,740 [KV] Because the airplane is trying 584 00:26:34,740 --> 00:26:36,480 to take a picture of what's on the ground. 585 00:26:36,480 --> 00:26:37,855 So the photograph that's upstairs 586 00:26:37,855 --> 00:26:41,800 is the photograph of Stonehenge taken by the aircraft. 587 00:26:41,800 --> 00:26:43,610 So you can see the aircraft photograph, 588 00:26:43,610 --> 00:26:46,190 and this is the companion photograph that goes with it. 589 00:26:46,190 --> 00:26:47,940 [FF] That's an absolutely fabulous story. 590 00:26:47,940 --> 00:26:50,370 [KV] So taking photographs of things in wartime 591 00:26:50,370 --> 00:26:52,540 is pretty commonplace. 592 00:26:52,540 --> 00:26:57,560 But knowing to be here with your camera on the fencepost and get 593 00:26:57,560 --> 00:27:01,190 this image that no one else before or since has been able 594 00:27:01,190 --> 00:27:01,780 to take... 595 00:27:01,780 --> 00:27:03,113 [FF] That's absolutely fabulous. 596 00:27:03,113 --> 00:27:08,070 [KV] So this just shows his brilliance as a photographer. 597 00:27:08,070 --> 00:27:10,390 So I really love that picture. 598 00:27:10,390 --> 00:27:15,160 Then this is the more recent typical bullet through apple 599 00:27:15,160 --> 00:27:16,280 making applesauce. 600 00:27:16,280 --> 00:27:19,285 Doc's comment was, it takes a microsecond 601 00:27:19,285 --> 00:27:23,940 to take the picture and all morning to clean up. 602 00:27:23,940 --> 00:27:28,920 And so I was his teaching assistant in '73 - 603 00:27:28,920 --> 00:27:33,950 '74 in this subject we called Stobe Project Lab. 604 00:27:33,950 --> 00:27:39,600 And he was exactly my age now when I was working for him. 605 00:27:39,600 --> 00:27:44,240 He had just retired, and he was 69. 606 00:27:44,240 --> 00:27:47,140 Retirement meant to him that he got to keep his lab, 607 00:27:47,140 --> 00:27:50,410 but he only had to do what he wanted to do, basically. 608 00:27:50,410 --> 00:27:51,754 He was so important MIT. 609 00:27:51,754 --> 00:27:53,170 He said, look, I'll tell you what. 610 00:27:53,170 --> 00:27:55,800 I'll stop drawing salary, but you let me keep my lab. 611 00:27:55,800 --> 00:27:56,620 And they said fine. 612 00:27:56,620 --> 00:27:59,850 And so he kept coming to work every day until 1990. 613 00:27:59,850 --> 00:28:04,040 So this was 1972. 614 00:28:04,040 --> 00:28:07,665 So I had been in the class in the spring. 615 00:28:07,665 --> 00:28:09,165 In the summertime, I'd talked to him 616 00:28:09,165 --> 00:28:11,720 and found out he needed a TA. 617 00:28:11,720 --> 00:28:14,950 I was a doctoral student in ocean engineering. 618 00:28:14,950 --> 00:28:17,800 In May of '72, I did pass the exams. 619 00:28:17,800 --> 00:28:19,670 And my one fun thing for the term 620 00:28:19,670 --> 00:28:22,790 had been taken the high speed photography course. 621 00:28:22,790 --> 00:28:25,370 And Doc and I agreed that I'd be the TA in the fall. 622 00:28:25,370 --> 00:28:28,350 So I showed up about Labor Day, and there 623 00:28:28,350 --> 00:28:29,860 was a letter waiting for me. 624 00:28:29,860 --> 00:28:32,360 And the letter said, Doc says, sorry I can't be there, Kim. 625 00:28:32,360 --> 00:28:34,130 My mother's not feeling well. 626 00:28:34,130 --> 00:28:36,317 And at the time I said-- he's 69 years old. 627 00:28:36,317 --> 00:28:37,650 Your mother is not feeling well? 628 00:28:37,650 --> 00:28:39,550 She was 98 or something like that, 629 00:28:39,550 --> 00:28:41,820 and he was off visiting with her in Nebraska. 630 00:28:41,820 --> 00:28:44,710 And he said, well, I'd like you to think 631 00:28:44,710 --> 00:28:47,660 about working on a project while you're my TA. 632 00:28:47,660 --> 00:28:48,690 That's kind of unusual. 633 00:28:48,690 --> 00:28:51,910 TAs usually grade the lab books and helps in the lab, 634 00:28:51,910 --> 00:28:55,570 but you don't do some research as well. 635 00:28:55,570 --> 00:28:57,450 Doc says, why don't you do a project? 636 00:28:57,450 --> 00:29:01,190 And he says, I've never done Color Schlieren photography. 637 00:29:01,190 --> 00:29:03,930 Now, Schlieren photography had already 638 00:29:03,930 --> 00:29:07,880 been used for many, many years in the aircraft industry 639 00:29:07,880 --> 00:29:14,080 to take photographs of aircraft models in supersonic speeds. 640 00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:16,390 Because at supersonic speeds, everybody 641 00:29:16,390 --> 00:29:18,670 knows about sonic booms-- you have a shock wave 642 00:29:18,670 --> 00:29:20,940 that comes off of the aircraft. 643 00:29:20,940 --> 00:29:24,420 And a shock wave is a high intensity sound wave. 644 00:29:24,420 --> 00:29:27,160 In the aircraft industry, you could study the shock waves 645 00:29:27,160 --> 00:29:30,900 in a wind tunnel if you had a photographic technique that 646 00:29:30,900 --> 00:29:33,360 would make shock waves visible. 647 00:29:33,360 --> 00:29:36,540 So it was called Schlieren, and they did it in black and white. 648 00:29:36,540 --> 00:29:39,747 And there were a few color techniques. 649 00:29:39,747 --> 00:29:41,580 But Doc says, so I've done Schlieren before, 650 00:29:41,580 --> 00:29:43,380 but I've ever done color Schlieren. 651 00:29:43,380 --> 00:29:46,090 Why don't you see if you can do that? 652 00:29:46,090 --> 00:29:48,690 So that was September. 653 00:29:48,690 --> 00:29:51,110 I want to the library, found four different ways 654 00:29:51,110 --> 00:29:54,340 of doing Schlieren photography in color, 655 00:29:54,340 --> 00:29:56,250 all the technical journals. 656 00:29:56,250 --> 00:29:58,910 Built my first setup, took my first pictures. 657 00:29:58,910 --> 00:30:01,000 And Doc has come back by now. 658 00:30:01,000 --> 00:30:02,820 And I take them in to him, and he 659 00:30:02,820 --> 00:30:04,810 takes that his 10 power loop, which he 660 00:30:04,810 --> 00:30:06,460 always carried with him. 661 00:30:06,460 --> 00:30:09,820 And he holds the 35-millimeter film up, and he looks at it 662 00:30:09,820 --> 00:30:14,640 and he says, Van, it looks a little out of focus to me. 663 00:30:14,640 --> 00:30:17,640 And it wasn't because I couldn't focus a camera. 664 00:30:17,640 --> 00:30:21,860 But that's just the nature of that particular method. 665 00:30:21,860 --> 00:30:24,680 So then I went back to the library 666 00:30:24,680 --> 00:30:29,180 and built another system and did it differently, 667 00:30:29,180 --> 00:30:33,330 and walked in a couple weeks later and showed Doc 668 00:30:33,330 --> 00:30:33,890 the pictures. 669 00:30:33,890 --> 00:30:35,920 And remember, this is color. 670 00:30:35,920 --> 00:30:37,790 Black and white was easy in Schlieren. 671 00:30:37,790 --> 00:30:38,830 This was color. 672 00:30:38,830 --> 00:30:41,990 So I walk in, and Van, I don't like the color. 673 00:30:44,550 --> 00:30:47,480 So you have to understand that one 674 00:30:47,480 --> 00:30:51,220 of the reasons it took so long is you get the system set up, 675 00:30:51,220 --> 00:30:53,100 you take some black and white pictures just 676 00:30:53,100 --> 00:30:54,480 to make sure it was looking OK. 677 00:30:54,480 --> 00:30:56,730 Because you could take three or four frames 678 00:30:56,730 --> 00:30:59,180 of 35-millimeter black and white film, 679 00:30:59,180 --> 00:31:04,530 walk across to the photo lab, develop it right on the spot, 680 00:31:04,530 --> 00:31:07,170 and hold it up wet to see what you got. 681 00:31:07,170 --> 00:31:10,340 And if it looked right, then you went back across the hall, 682 00:31:10,340 --> 00:31:12,720 put the color film on the camera, 683 00:31:12,720 --> 00:31:15,660 took a whole roll of pictures, and then set it off 684 00:31:15,660 --> 00:31:19,000 and waited a week. 685 00:31:19,000 --> 00:31:21,590 In 1972, you had to wait a week. 686 00:31:21,590 --> 00:31:23,340 [FF] I remember those days. 687 00:31:23,340 --> 00:31:24,840 It's called film. 688 00:31:24,840 --> 00:31:25,340 [KV] Right. 689 00:31:25,340 --> 00:31:28,620 It's film, and not instant film, either. 690 00:31:28,620 --> 00:31:31,490 And it took a week to get them back. 691 00:31:31,490 --> 00:31:34,260 So that was all part of the process. 692 00:31:34,260 --> 00:31:39,440 So it wasn't until December or so-- I 693 00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:43,160 was getting pretty frustrated, and I found an article 694 00:31:43,160 --> 00:31:44,620 in Scientific American. 695 00:31:44,620 --> 00:31:47,100 And there was a fellow by the name 696 00:31:47,100 --> 00:31:53,390 of CL Stong, who for decades had a column in Scientific American 697 00:31:53,390 --> 00:31:55,310 called The Amateur Scientist. 698 00:31:55,310 --> 00:32:00,120 And it was basically the do-it-yourself science column 699 00:32:00,120 --> 00:32:01,260 inside Scientific American. 700 00:32:01,260 --> 00:32:04,680 And he would accept contributions from people 701 00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:06,780 and choose which ones he liked. 702 00:32:06,780 --> 00:32:09,530 And each month, there'd be another build your own radio 703 00:32:09,530 --> 00:32:11,210 or do this or do that. 704 00:32:11,210 --> 00:32:16,230 And there was an article on a new way to do color Schlieren. 705 00:32:16,230 --> 00:32:20,390 And it had been developed by a graduate student 706 00:32:20,390 --> 00:32:23,100 at the University of Tennessee, a guy 707 00:32:23,100 --> 00:32:25,010 by the name of Gary Settles. 708 00:32:25,010 --> 00:32:27,590 And he hadn't done the high speed photography part, 709 00:32:27,590 --> 00:32:31,410 but he had come up with a better way to do the color. 710 00:32:31,410 --> 00:32:35,690 So I built that, and I took the pictures, and I had three four 711 00:32:35,690 --> 00:32:36,340 of them. 712 00:32:36,340 --> 00:32:38,430 And I think one of the earliest pictures I took 713 00:32:38,430 --> 00:32:39,920 was very much like this one. 714 00:32:39,920 --> 00:32:43,300 And I walked into Doc's office one morning, 715 00:32:43,300 --> 00:32:46,250 and I handed him this 35-millimeter color slide. 716 00:32:46,250 --> 00:32:49,070 And he looks up, and he says, Van, I think you've got it. 717 00:32:49,070 --> 00:32:50,700 [FF] Oh my gosh. 718 00:32:50,700 --> 00:32:51,807 Hallelujah. 719 00:32:51,807 --> 00:32:52,640 You must have felt-- 720 00:32:52,640 --> 00:32:55,570 [KV] September, October, November, December, January. 721 00:32:55,570 --> 00:32:57,190 [FF] Whoa. 722 00:32:57,190 --> 00:32:59,700 [KV] But then once we had it-- once he saw a picture 723 00:32:59,700 --> 00:33:01,235 like this, we knew we had it. 724 00:33:01,235 --> 00:33:02,610 And so then he just encouraged me 725 00:33:02,610 --> 00:33:04,904 to take pictures of everything under the sun. 726 00:33:04,904 --> 00:33:06,570 And so we just tried all sorts of stuff. 727 00:33:06,570 --> 00:33:08,160 [FF] So we're seeing-- am I right? 728 00:33:08,160 --> 00:33:10,711 We're seeing changes of index of refraction. 729 00:33:10,711 --> 00:33:11,210 [KV] Yeah. 730 00:33:11,210 --> 00:33:15,810 So color Schlieren allows you to see changes in index 731 00:33:15,810 --> 00:33:20,170 in a transparent medium-- so water, air, anything 732 00:33:20,170 --> 00:33:21,770 that light will pass through, you 733 00:33:21,770 --> 00:33:23,360 can take a Schlieren picture of it. 734 00:33:23,360 --> 00:33:25,590 So this is a candle. 735 00:33:25,590 --> 00:33:27,500 This is just the ordinary hot air 736 00:33:27,500 --> 00:33:29,380 above a candle, which you normally can't see, 737 00:33:29,380 --> 00:33:32,900 except it's a mirage effect, like when you're looking down 738 00:33:32,900 --> 00:33:34,170 a highway in the desert. 739 00:33:34,170 --> 00:33:38,290 And this is a 22-caliber bullet, and this is the shock wave 740 00:33:38,290 --> 00:33:39,960 that accompanies it. 741 00:33:39,960 --> 00:33:46,372 And the amazing thing about shock waves is they make a V. 742 00:33:46,372 --> 00:33:52,810 And the angle of the V-- one over the sine of this angle 743 00:33:52,810 --> 00:33:54,920 is the mach number. 744 00:33:54,920 --> 00:33:58,632 So if that angle is 30 degrees, sine of 30 is 1/2. 745 00:33:58,632 --> 00:34:00,500 1 over 1/2 is 2. 746 00:34:00,500 --> 00:34:05,725 That bullet is traveling mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. 747 00:34:05,725 --> 00:34:06,600 [FF] That's fabulous. 748 00:34:06,600 --> 00:34:08,199 [KV] So in pictures like this, there's 749 00:34:08,199 --> 00:34:11,630 a lot of really interesting physics and things 750 00:34:11,630 --> 00:34:12,620 to talk about. 751 00:34:12,620 --> 00:34:18,290 The color in this particular Schlieren technique-- the color 752 00:34:18,290 --> 00:34:21,139 you see tells you the direction in which 753 00:34:21,139 --> 00:34:23,090 the light was refracted. 754 00:34:23,090 --> 00:34:28,580 So this is a little bubble, just a ball of hot air. 755 00:34:28,580 --> 00:34:32,300 It's hottest in the center, it's cooling radially. 756 00:34:32,300 --> 00:34:35,170 In all directions, the temperatures are dropping. 757 00:34:35,170 --> 00:34:39,699 So the index of refraction is increasing radially 758 00:34:39,699 --> 00:34:41,230 in all directions. 759 00:34:41,230 --> 00:34:44,469 So if the light radios into the upper part here, 760 00:34:44,469 --> 00:34:48,190 the light bends toward increasing index. 761 00:34:48,190 --> 00:34:50,449 Up here, the light was bent up. 762 00:34:50,449 --> 00:34:52,150 Here, it was bent to the right. 763 00:34:52,150 --> 00:34:55,659 Here, it was bent to the left, and in there, it was bent down. 764 00:34:55,659 --> 00:34:59,810 So up is yellow, down is blue, left is green, right is red. 765 00:34:59,810 --> 00:35:01,929 [FF] So this is highly informational. 766 00:35:01,929 --> 00:35:04,080 [KV] Lots really cool information. 767 00:35:04,080 --> 00:35:05,820 [FF] Besides being stunning to look at. 768 00:35:05,820 --> 00:35:07,469 [KV] So then you look at a picture 769 00:35:07,469 --> 00:35:10,010 like this-- you can see the candle flame nicely. 770 00:35:10,010 --> 00:35:12,449 Now, that's itself illumination. 771 00:35:12,449 --> 00:35:16,500 That light is coming from the flame. 772 00:35:16,500 --> 00:35:18,620 The light that took the rest of the picture 773 00:35:18,620 --> 00:35:22,150 is coming from your high speed source, which 774 00:35:22,150 --> 00:35:26,240 is 1/3 of a microsecond in duration, which allows you 775 00:35:26,240 --> 00:35:29,560 to stop a bullet in its tracks. 776 00:35:29,560 --> 00:35:32,630 But the light to get the candle flame 777 00:35:32,630 --> 00:35:34,910 comes from the candle flame itself. 778 00:35:34,910 --> 00:35:38,587 But if you only had the shutter open 1/3 of a microsecond, 779 00:35:38,587 --> 00:35:40,420 that's not enough light from a candle flame. 780 00:35:40,420 --> 00:35:43,400 So in fact, the way you take the picture is you turn off 781 00:35:43,400 --> 00:35:46,510 all the lights in the room, you open the shutter 782 00:35:46,510 --> 00:35:48,980 on the camera for 1/4, maybe 1/2 a second. 783 00:35:48,980 --> 00:35:52,940 And when the person on the gun hears the shutter click, 784 00:35:52,940 --> 00:35:55,340 they pull the trigger. 785 00:35:55,340 --> 00:35:59,155 The bullet travels across the system. 786 00:36:01,969 --> 00:36:04,010 The microphone is sitting right here, by the way. 787 00:36:04,010 --> 00:36:06,100 You can see the shock wave right down here out 788 00:36:06,100 --> 00:36:07,237 of sight as the microphone. 789 00:36:07,237 --> 00:36:08,695 The shock wave hits the microphone, 790 00:36:08,695 --> 00:36:11,870 the microphones sets off the flash, takes the picture. 791 00:36:11,870 --> 00:36:16,545 So the flash is a third of a microsecond in duration. 792 00:36:16,545 --> 00:36:20,300 And that's the exposure time for everything you see here. 793 00:36:20,300 --> 00:36:22,780 But the shutter has been open a half a second. 794 00:36:22,780 --> 00:36:24,720 And so you have a half a second exposure 795 00:36:24,720 --> 00:36:26,440 time of the candle flame. 796 00:36:26,440 --> 00:36:28,500 So they're always blurry, because they flicker 797 00:36:28,500 --> 00:36:30,790 when the shock wave goes by. 798 00:36:30,790 --> 00:36:32,890 [FF] But he got past that, right? 799 00:36:32,890 --> 00:36:34,160 [KV] Oh yeah. 800 00:36:34,160 --> 00:36:35,360 And that's a sparkler. 801 00:36:35,360 --> 00:36:38,340 So if you knew what you shutter time was, 802 00:36:38,340 --> 00:36:42,350 your exposure time-- let's say it was 1/8 of a second 803 00:36:42,350 --> 00:36:45,150 or something, or maybe less-- these little 804 00:36:45,150 --> 00:36:48,050 trails are the sparks. 805 00:36:48,050 --> 00:36:50,012 You could figure out how fast they're going. 806 00:36:50,012 --> 00:36:50,844 [FF] Oh gosh. 807 00:36:50,844 --> 00:36:51,499 Of course. 808 00:36:51,499 --> 00:36:53,290 [KV] So if you know how long-- this is then 809 00:36:53,290 --> 00:36:57,430 a time exposure of the trail of a spark 810 00:36:57,430 --> 00:36:58,930 as it travels through the air. 811 00:36:58,930 --> 00:37:01,170 [FF] Like subatomic particles. 812 00:37:01,170 --> 00:37:02,530 [KV] Yeah, in a way. 813 00:37:02,530 --> 00:37:07,340 It's kind of like a smoke chamber. 814 00:37:07,340 --> 00:37:09,810 So actually, here's one of my favorite pictures 815 00:37:09,810 --> 00:37:11,420 of my own stuff. 816 00:37:11,420 --> 00:37:14,350 And I'll talk about both of these. 817 00:37:14,350 --> 00:37:17,360 This is a picture just of a soap bubble, 818 00:37:17,360 --> 00:37:19,800 and it's just about life size. 819 00:37:19,800 --> 00:37:22,310 And soap bubbles in Schlieren systems 820 00:37:22,310 --> 00:37:24,520 turn out to be really interesting. 821 00:37:24,520 --> 00:37:27,480 You see things you don't normally see. 822 00:37:27,480 --> 00:37:29,460 So this is a rubber hose. 823 00:37:29,460 --> 00:37:31,330 It was dunked in the soap solution, 824 00:37:31,330 --> 00:37:34,070 and then you blow on the end of the hose to make the bubble. 825 00:37:34,070 --> 00:37:36,550 These are little streamers of soapy solution 826 00:37:36,550 --> 00:37:39,690 that are actually flowing on the surface of the bubble. 827 00:37:39,690 --> 00:37:41,360 And they do most interesting things. 828 00:37:41,360 --> 00:37:43,460 They go along, and then they divide, and then 829 00:37:43,460 --> 00:37:44,400 they divide again. 830 00:37:44,400 --> 00:37:46,095 And a movie of this is just fascinating. 831 00:37:48,740 --> 00:37:51,050 In a picture like this, if you look carefully, 832 00:37:51,050 --> 00:37:53,740 you can actually see-- this is a shock wave, 833 00:37:53,740 --> 00:37:55,960 but that's reflected shock wave that 834 00:37:55,960 --> 00:37:58,895 has actually hit the rubber hose and bounced off. 835 00:37:58,895 --> 00:38:01,300 And down here, there's an arc. 836 00:38:01,300 --> 00:38:05,410 That's sound that's being reflected off the bubble. 837 00:38:05,410 --> 00:38:07,000 So bubbles are a lot of fun. 838 00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:10,500 And then this picture is fun in a sense 839 00:38:10,500 --> 00:38:13,220 in that Doc took this picture in another form 840 00:38:13,220 --> 00:38:14,780 many, many years before. 841 00:38:14,780 --> 00:38:16,810 So that's 1930s. 842 00:38:16,810 --> 00:38:20,730 It's an old house fan, and it's spinning. 843 00:38:20,730 --> 00:38:24,160 And just above it is artificial smoke. 844 00:38:24,160 --> 00:38:26,830 It's basically chemical smoke. 845 00:38:26,830 --> 00:38:29,510 And as the propeller blade passes 846 00:38:29,510 --> 00:38:35,030 by off the tip of any surface, it's generating lift. 847 00:38:35,030 --> 00:38:36,270 There's a vortex. 848 00:38:36,270 --> 00:38:39,200 And he put the smoke there so it gets sucked into the vortex 849 00:38:39,200 --> 00:38:42,230 and shed downstream as a helix. 850 00:38:42,230 --> 00:38:44,190 So in this picture, you can see that vortex 851 00:38:44,190 --> 00:38:45,770 forming in the smoke. 852 00:38:45,770 --> 00:38:50,500 And this is the same photograph with the same fan-- 853 00:38:50,500 --> 00:38:54,710 because he still had it around the lab -- in Schlieren. 854 00:38:54,710 --> 00:38:55,960 [FF] This picture has the fan. 855 00:38:55,960 --> 00:38:56,380 The fan is-- 856 00:38:56,380 --> 00:38:57,838 [KV] This picture is the whole fan. 857 00:38:57,838 --> 00:39:02,330 This one-- this is an alcohol lamp. 858 00:39:02,330 --> 00:39:03,795 Usually, a little, tiny blue flame. 859 00:39:03,795 --> 00:39:05,620 This is just hot air. 860 00:39:05,620 --> 00:39:08,340 The hot air is being sucked into the vortex, 861 00:39:08,340 --> 00:39:09,820 and then it is shed down. 862 00:39:09,820 --> 00:39:11,390 Here's the helix. 863 00:39:11,390 --> 00:39:15,317 It's this core vorticity that goes off this way. 864 00:39:15,317 --> 00:39:16,900 So there's another one of the subjects 865 00:39:16,900 --> 00:39:18,200 that we took pictures of. 866 00:39:18,200 --> 00:39:22,210 So Schlieren photographs were a lot of fun. 867 00:39:22,210 --> 00:39:26,530 And then there's one other bit of story 868 00:39:26,530 --> 00:39:30,470 that is appropriate to, of course, where you're 869 00:39:30,470 --> 00:39:32,730 teaching grad students and that sort of thing 870 00:39:32,730 --> 00:39:35,360 about taking photographs. 871 00:39:35,360 --> 00:39:37,461 This picture, Doc really liked. 872 00:39:37,461 --> 00:39:38,335 And he said, OK, Kim. 873 00:39:38,335 --> 00:39:40,295 He says, you need to write a paper, 874 00:39:40,295 --> 00:39:42,170 and then we're going to go to this conference 875 00:39:42,170 --> 00:39:43,740 and show your stuff. 876 00:39:43,740 --> 00:39:46,570 Give this paper at the 11th International Congress 877 00:39:46,570 --> 00:39:50,020 on High Speed Photography in London in, I think, 878 00:39:50,020 --> 00:39:52,280 the summer of 1973. 879 00:39:52,280 --> 00:39:55,320 So I had this venue were Doc was the grand old man. 880 00:39:55,320 --> 00:39:57,750 He was the father of modern high speed photography. 881 00:39:57,750 --> 00:40:00,010 It was at University College London. 882 00:40:00,010 --> 00:40:01,880 They filled the auditorium. 883 00:40:01,880 --> 00:40:04,942 And all these old cronies that were friends of Doc 884 00:40:04,942 --> 00:40:07,150 that he'd worked with through the war and afterwards, 885 00:40:07,150 --> 00:40:09,370 he was famous with these people. 886 00:40:09,370 --> 00:40:14,310 So here I was under his wing, getting to go everywhere he 887 00:40:14,310 --> 00:40:17,410 went and treated like royalty. 888 00:40:17,410 --> 00:40:19,245 So I gave them my paper, showed 30 or 40 889 00:40:19,245 --> 00:40:24,605 of these beautiful color images that people hadn't seen before. 890 00:40:24,605 --> 00:40:27,270 But he had also taken about a dozen pictures, had 891 00:40:27,270 --> 00:40:30,640 them enlarged to 16 by 20, sent them ahead, 892 00:40:30,640 --> 00:40:33,060 and they'd all been set up in a gallery. 893 00:40:33,060 --> 00:40:34,760 So anybody coming through the place 894 00:40:34,760 --> 00:40:38,650 could walk through this gallery and see all these photographs. 895 00:40:38,650 --> 00:40:40,640 So while I was there, this fella comes up to me 896 00:40:40,640 --> 00:40:43,870 and he said, I really like your photographs. 897 00:40:43,870 --> 00:40:47,080 And he said, I'd like to use them. 898 00:40:47,080 --> 00:40:49,280 I said OK. 899 00:40:49,280 --> 00:40:54,413 And so this picture was a cover photograph on Nature Magazine. 900 00:40:54,413 --> 00:40:55,425 [FF] Oh gosh. 901 00:40:55,425 --> 00:40:58,160 [KV] So this was my first professional publication 902 00:40:58,160 --> 00:40:59,110 as a grad student. 903 00:40:59,110 --> 00:41:02,020 It was a little short article in Nature 904 00:41:02,020 --> 00:41:03,510 with this photograph on the cover. 905 00:41:03,510 --> 00:41:04,760 [FF] What year? 906 00:41:04,760 --> 00:41:06,250 [KV] '74. 907 00:41:06,250 --> 00:41:09,689 There might be a copy of it around here somewhere. 908 00:41:09,689 --> 00:41:10,480 Talk about having-- 909 00:41:10,480 --> 00:41:12,230 [FF] I get it. 910 00:41:12,230 --> 00:41:15,150 [KV] To have your first publication when you're 911 00:41:15,150 --> 00:41:16,894 applying as a professor or something 912 00:41:16,894 --> 00:41:18,810 somewhere, to be a cover photograph in Nature, 913 00:41:18,810 --> 00:41:20,310 that's a pretty good place to start. 914 00:41:20,310 --> 00:41:22,900 [FF] It's a pretty good place to start. [laughing] 915 00:41:22,900 --> 00:41:23,940 This is great. 916 00:41:23,940 --> 00:41:25,260 Oh, Kim, thank you. 917 00:41:25,260 --> 00:41:28,463 This is a wonderful, wonderful story. 918 00:41:28,463 --> 00:41:30,235 Not bad. 919 00:41:30,235 --> 00:41:33,410 [KV] So that was my first professional publication 920 00:41:33,410 --> 00:41:34,910 as a graduate student. 921 00:41:34,910 --> 00:41:40,270 And it was a nice thing to have on my resume going forward. 922 00:41:40,270 --> 00:41:42,960 I've said many times, I wouldn't be here today 923 00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:46,860 if I hadn't had that experience with Doc Edgerton. 924 00:41:46,860 --> 00:41:49,310 Even though I was an ocean engineer 925 00:41:49,310 --> 00:41:52,510 and I didn't continue professionally 926 00:41:52,510 --> 00:41:58,070 in high speed photography as his mentee, what 927 00:41:58,070 --> 00:42:02,570 it did for me is the year I worked for him as a teaching 928 00:42:02,570 --> 00:42:05,170 assistant was a year I was not doing 929 00:42:05,170 --> 00:42:07,380 something in ocean engineering. 930 00:42:07,380 --> 00:42:10,090 And that was because I hadn't found a thesis 931 00:42:10,090 --> 00:42:12,380 topic that I really liked. 932 00:42:12,380 --> 00:42:15,200 And it gave me a year of extra time 933 00:42:15,200 --> 00:42:18,580 that I could go do something fantastically fun 934 00:42:18,580 --> 00:42:20,920 and find a good thesis topic. 935 00:42:20,920 --> 00:42:22,530 So by the end of that year, I not only 936 00:42:22,530 --> 00:42:27,280 got to give this paper, but I had come up with a super thesis 937 00:42:27,280 --> 00:42:31,090 topic, which then that opened the doorways for me to becoming 938 00:42:31,090 --> 00:42:34,220 a professor of ocean engineering. 939 00:42:34,220 --> 00:42:35,880 [FF] Timing. 940 00:42:35,880 --> 00:42:37,930 [KV] Timing, a little luck. 941 00:42:37,930 --> 00:42:40,600 And not being afraid to knock on the door. 942 00:42:40,600 --> 00:42:41,870 [FF] There you go. 943 00:42:41,870 --> 00:42:42,690 Thank you. 944 00:42:42,690 --> 00:42:45,180 Exactly. 945 00:42:45,180 --> 00:42:46,700 Good job, Kim. 946 00:42:46,700 --> 00:42:47,300 [KV] Yeah. 947 00:42:47,300 --> 00:42:49,150 Thank you.