About the project
This digital archive provided the first online access to Harold Edgerton’s research notebooks held by MIT, constituting the material record of an extraordinary man who shaped public perception about science and technology.
The collections include a social dimension, including you, and the committed community of MIT alumni, faculty, students, staff, and aficionados who share Doc Edgerton’s philosophy of:
Work hard. Tell everyone everything you know. Close a deal with a handshake. Have fun!
What you’ll find here
The site allows viewing and browsing of over 22,000 still images of Edgerton materials, 150 films and video that have been restored and are being digitized; access to approximately 8,000 pages from Doc Edgerton’s hand-written laboratory notebooks which have been digitized by the MIT Libraries Department of Distinctive Collections; and hundreds of high-speed photographic images.
The collection we present on this site represents a work in progress. Since this project began, we have inventoried, analyzed, cleaned, repaired, cataloged, photographed, titled, annotated, sorted, and organized tens of thousands of Edgerton artifacts, and enabled the public viewing of Doc’s research notebooks, still and moving images.
This site replaces an earlier Edgerton Digital Collections site which brought together materials from the MIT Museum, the MIT Libraries and Department of Distinctive Collections, and MIT Video Productions with the help of many other campus organizations including the MIT Edgerton Center.
This site uses content originally written for EXPLORING THE ART AND SCIENCE OF STOPPING TIME: A CD-ROM BASED ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF HAROLD E. EGDERTON, by Harold E. Edgerton, edited by James Sheldon, published by The MIT Press (1998).