Coronet

An engineer and inventor, Edgerton conducted pioneering research in stroboscopic photography. This permitted him to freeze exceedingly fast movement and make exposures between 1/10,000 and 1/1,000,000 of a second. His astonishing photographs of everyday events earned him praise from around the world. Edgerton's work paved the way for the modern electronic flash, and also gave physicists a new means of analyzing the dynamics of fluids, air currents, and engines. Over the years he captured extraordinary images of hummingbirds hovering, athletes performing, bullets bursting objects, and blood coursing through capillaries.

Coronet depicts the splash caused by a drop of milk falling from a dropper onto a thin layer of milk on a red plate. Mea-suring one-half inch in diameter, the splash is the culmina-tion of twenty-five years of work that Edgerton dedicated to achieving the nearly perfect symmetry apparent in the image. The uniform tips on the periphery of the splash provide valuable scientific information about the properties of liquids, while the shape is also reminiscent of a crown.