Milk Drop Coronet, Harold Edgerton, 1957
In the 1950s at his lab at MIT, Edgerton started tinkering with a process that would change the future of photography. There, the electrical-engineering professor combined high-tech strobe lights with camera shutter motors to capture moments imperceptible to the naked eye. Milk Drop Coronet, his revolutionary stop-motion photograph, freezes the impact of a drop of milk on a table, a crown of liquid discernible to the camera for only a millisecond. The picture proved that photography could advance human understanding of the physical world.