Kim Vandiver - Harold 'Doc’ Edgerton and the Edgerton Digital Collections Project

[MUSIC PLAYING]

VANDIVER: OK. We'll get started. Thank you all for coming. I'll talk a little bit about Doc Edgerton today, show you a lot of great photographs. I'll tell you at the end a little bit about the Edgerton Center, and a little bit about the Edgerton Archive Project.

A couple of special guests here today. Marty Klein up there, who worked with Doc over many, many years. Did Ellen Law make it? I don't see Ellen. Doc's granddaughter and maybe a couple of her kids may show up.

And Paul Penfield. Where'd you go to, Paul? Oh, OK, there he is. I'll tell a story or two about Paul. And I--

[CHUCKLES]

OK. And Sam Raymond, who also worked with Doc, I think should show up here pretty quick. So let's get rolling, because I've got lots of great pictures to show you. And a little bit of history to tell you about.

So Doc was born in 1903. And the family moved to Washington, DC, but by the time he was five or six years old, they'd moved back to Aurora, Nebraska. So he-- born in the year the Wright brothers first flew. And one of the things that he said, one of his earliest childhood memories was seeing the Wright brothers fly in 1909.

So again, to give you just a little bit of chronology. When he was living in Aurora, he got introduced to photography from an uncle who was a portrait photographer. As he grew up, got into high school, he started working for Nebraska Power and Light. And he worked summers there, and I think when he was also in college.

He attended the University of Nebraska, which is where he got his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. And then took a job for a year at General Electric in Schenectady.

Now, I don't have any photographs of Doc from these really early years. And the reason is, there's probably something like 12,000 photographs of Doc and students and people at the MIT Museum, uncatalogued, unindexed. I didn't have time to go dig through them to find some good photographs. I know they exist, so we'll come back to this theme in a little bit. Here is a picture of Doc, though, in his 20s.

And in those early years at MIT, he earned a master's degree in 1927. Became an instructor in '28. And Herb Grier and Ken Germeshausen were early students of his.

He married Esther, 1928, and had three children. And Bob is the only one still living today, the youngest. And he comes to our strobe lab short course frequently every June.

So Doc's early work was on synchronous electric motors. And this is where he started using synchronous strobes to study the motion of motors.

Got his Doctor of Science in electrical engineering, 1932. Became assistant professor in the same year. And at that time, started turning his camera and then the flash on everyday things.

I've heard him say that one of the first things he ever took a flash picture of other than an electric motor was turning the flash on a faucet, and just taking a picture of water. And he took pictures of water all through his life. He was really fascinated by droplets, and interesting things in water. This is a really early picture.

But then he rapidly moved on to lots of other interesting things. The Harvard football coach, 1934. I really like this picture, because you can see in it how it was triggered.

See this wire? Just a piece of wire. And as the ball moves into it, it closes a circuit and pops the flash. And I like the little puff of dust you can see it coming off the football when it gets kicked.

Tennis balls. Cock fights. This was new to me. I hadn't seen this one until I started searching through pictures.

Early bullet photograph. A little fuzzy. This is before what I call the micro flash, which is a air gap spark source of light that's less than a microsecond, which is perfected later on.

So in the early '30s, he begins his partnership with Ken Germeshausen. Germeshausen does a lot of experiments developing improved flash tubes. 1933, applies for his first patent. It's not granted until 1949. And evidently, there was some considerable patent discussion over what was and what wasn't original.

Doc was not the inventor of the strobe. One of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, took a strobe photograph in 1859 with an air gap spark. But Doc really improved the electrical control, and of course, the lighting xenon flash tubes and those kinds of things.

In 1935, he licensed to General Radio, the first strobe attack, and they began making those. People began to see his photographs. And first ones were in an exhibition in the Royal Photographic Society as early as 1933.

And he started doing quite a bit of consulting in these years. Turning the camera and strobe on a variety of machines and manufacturing processes. So this is just a setup looking at the cutting tool on a milling machine.

This photograph was taken in the Ocean Engineering Department water tunnel, which still exists and is in use today. So this is a marine propeller. And the streaks that you can see, those are cavitation bubbles coming off the tip. Thread coming off a real high speed bobbin.

And this is a hard picture to understand. You are looking up at the underside of a die, and droplets of lead are coming out through hundreds of little holes. This is the die in a shot tower. This is how you make lead BBs. And they fall and freeze before they hit the ground.

So moving on. In the later '30s, Doc develops the multi-flash. Starts taking pictures of lots of animals and other sporting events, and high-speed movies. So in 1937, what's called "The Coronet" photograph is part of the first-ever photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Before 1937, I guess photographs weren't considered art. They made a important change in some people's mind at that point. But became one of Doc's, probably, signature photograph. And if I forget to say, we have reprinted a bunch of the color ones of that, which you can pick up on the way out.

So this is 1936. Doc learned that Mrs. Lawrence Webster had hummingbirds that just eat out of her hand. And so he went up to New Hampshire to take pictures of hummingbirds.

So first stop action photographs that really froze hummingbirds in flight that had ever been taken. 50, 60 beats per minute. This one, you can even see its tongue sticking out.

And this is a page from Doc's lab books. There's 8,000 pages of Edgerton notebooks, and they're really an MIT treasure. They have incredible information in them.

This is July 8, 1936. "My mother and father were here from July 3 to today. My sister Mary Ellen and her two boys came also. Dad and I spent Monday, July 6 at the Acushnet Company taking golf pictures." And then the rest of the page is about Mrs. Webster and hummingbirds.

I would like to get all of those pages up where any one of you could log on to the web, and search by topic, and be able to associate time and date and place with Edgerton pictures. So here's one of those golf pictures from those days.

And here's a page out of the notebook. Just wonderful sketches. You can tell exactly what was done. This is photographs of golf club for American Fork and Hoe Company. They let anybody make golf clubs in those days.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

Frequency, 100 frames per second exposure, time set by hand, and shutter for a 5-by-7 camera. But just wonderful diagrams, exactly what he was doing. And in this period of time, the late '30s, developed the multi-flash unit. So this welcomes him. This is a single negative taken with a repeating flash flashing at 100 times a second so you can plot out velocity and acceleration, and you can see the ball coming off the club.

Doc started taking pictures over at Boston Garden. To do that, he had to make bigger, more powerful strobes. And they hung them from the catwalk and the beams over the garden. And this is a rodeo they actually had inside the Boston Garden.

In the late '30s, Doc went to Kodak and tried to convince them to produce strobes. And they did a little market analysis and decided they could make about 50 a year. And they said, it's just never going to be very important, Doc. And they declined to do it.

So he set out to create the demand that became the modern flash industry. And one of the ways he did that is by building portable strobe units that he loaned to sports photographers. And this photograph in 1940 is the first strobe photograph that went out on AP wirephoto. And that began to create demand that-- and we know what happened after that.

And there were lots of-- this is a photograph, 1940. Taken-- a prize-winning photo by Joe Costa, New York Daily News. This is right out of Doc's lab book. "Joe Louis-Arturto Godoy rematch, 1940."

And also, in 1940, MGM won an Academy Award for a short done with Edgerton using high-speed movies. This one's making scrambled eggs with your house fan.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

Then along comes World War II, and Doc becomes involved in using high-intensity strobe, developing high-intensity strobes for night reconnaissance photography. The fellow who came and recruited Doc to this business was Major Goddard of the Army Air Corps. And he'd been working for years on flash bomb night photography. And he wanted to know if Doc could make it work with electronic flash. It has huge advantages.

So these are some photographs taken in Britain in 1944. This is installing flash tubes in A-26s and A-20s for night reconnaissance photography. There's a whole series of them made, from the D1 to the D5. They varied from 5,000 watt seconds to almost 50,000 watt seconds. There's one of the planes in the evening getting ready to go off for a test run.

And he didn't send them to just any old place for test runs. He sent the pilots off on the first test runs when they were training there in Britain to take photographs of Stonehenge. So this is a night reconnaissance photograph of Stonehenge, 1944, 1,500 feet.

And this is one of my favorite Edgerton pictures. Doc knew when the photograph was going to be taken. He was on the ground, put a camera on a fence post, opened the shutter, and this is a nighttime photograph of Stonehenge with illumination from a night reconnaissance photo plane. So this is the matching photograph to that. Rather hard picture to reproduce.

So that photography had a crucial role in D-Day. There were pictures taken-- there were 1,000 feet cloud cover, a ceiling, the night of June 6. Flash bomb photography wouldn't have worked. Went in under the clouds. This was a really important rail and road junction in Normandy.

German activity was absolutely quiet that night. They had no idea that the invasion was about to begin. Look at the bottom here. 15 June, 1944. And this is another target photograph in France, showing fires burning and so forth.

So post-war. We'll move on. Formation of EG&G. Better bullet photography. National Geographic, and color.

So in 1947, Doc and Germeshausen and Grier formed EG&G. They had been working together off and on all through the war. Atomic Energy Commission came to them, wanted them to build triggering circuits for a nuclear weapons test, and they moved on as well to photography.

So EG&G was formed. And they started taking pictures of, for example, like this. Atmospheric-- this is on a top of a tower-- atomic bomb, in this case.

They had to develop the magneto-optic shutter, the rapatronic camera. And those all came out of this era. Some of the equipment is in the-- you can see at the MIT Museum. Charlie Wyckoff worked on that camera. Some of you remember him.

The Microflash came along in those years. The Microflash is this air gap spark, 1/3 microsecond exposure, and you can really take nice stop action photographs of things like bullets. This is one of my favorite bullet pictures. The bullet is right here.

But this shows you Doc had this fantastic sense of composition. It's a single flash, it's a single instant in time. But you get the whole feeling for how a balloon breaks, because he was clever and put three in a row, and you get the whole sequence.

So that's a .30 caliber bullet. Twice the speed of sound. Black and white. And later, when we had color film, same picture taken with color. That bullet moves just a few thousandths of an inch in the duration of the photograph.

So the way-- if any of you don't know how bullet pictures are taken, you turn all the lights off in the room. You open the shutter on the camera. You shoot the gun. And the shockwave from the bullet hits a microphone, and the microphone trips the flash.

And if you're standing in the room, and you're looking right at the playing card, got your eyes wide open, and it's completely black. The gun goes. The flash goes off. And you can see the bullet with your eye.

You see it there, just sitting there. Because your eye just retains the image. And it's interesting how the eye works. But that microsecond of light last several milliseconds in your eye, and your brain says, hey, that's pretty cool.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

AUDIENCE: I'd like a video of that.

VANDIVER: Yeah. So Doc's first article in National Geographic was 1947, and it was about hummingbirds. There was another one, I think, in 1951, and a whole series of Geographic articles, many of them about underwater exploration.

Crawford Greenwalt was the president of DuPont, and hummingbirds were his hobby. And he came to Doc to have him learn how to use flash, and he built the Greenwalt's first unit. Greenwalt went on to publish his own book of hummingbird photographs with individually glued-in color photographs of birds from all over the world. Absolutely spectacular. Rare book.

Bats. Great photographs. Including fishing bats. I don't have that picture. I have to find that one. And then, of course, the modern signature photograph, "The Milk Drop."

So the '50s to the '70s, this is when marine archeology and underwater work really became important. And I was just looking at some of the listing of publications. So he first met Cousteau in about '53.

And as the story goes, the Geographic hooked him up and told him about Cousteau. And, well, send him up. And so there is a photograph I have seen of Cousteau swimming in the MIT alumni pool with Doc's underwater flash and camera. And from then on, he went on several expeditions with Cousteau, of which you can-- many of them, if you go back and watch those old Cousteau specials on TV. There were several of them that Doc was involved in.

Then he also did ma-- he did something like-- Claire, how many-- where's Claire? How many different archaeological expeditions that either Doc contributed to, went, or-- it's something like 80, right?

And Doc had a profound effect on marine archeology. He introduced, essentially, the marine archeology community to the use of sonar for a variety of purposes. And it really revolutionized the way underwater archeology was done. I'll show you a little bit of that. And Claire Calcagno here has researched a lot of the materials at the MIT Museum and written papers on Doc's marine archeology.

So the early-- I think Doc's first use of underwater sound was to figure out how far off the bottom camera it was. Because you put a pinger on the camera, and you lowered it down. Each time the pinger would beep, the sound would go directly to the surface. And the sound would go down to the bottom, bounce off directly to the surface.

And the difference in arrival time told you how far off the bottom the camera was. So remotely paying out the cable from the boat, you could position the camera exactly the height off the bottom that you wanted it to be. Now, 5 feet off the bottom is how much difference in delay time.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

VANDIVER: Two. One each way. Down and back. 2 milliseconds. Difference is-- in a millisecond, sound travels about 5 feet in water.

So this is-- one of the next uses was-- Doc learned that, hey, some of the sound is penetrating the bottom. And you can see things beneath the bottom. So the boomer was born. And this was one of the things which he really used widely in marine archeology, because you get to find things underneath some kinds of bottoms. Others didn't, or it didn't do so well.

And this is one of Doc's favorite practice targets. It's the Sumner and Callahan tunnels. So he'd take the boomer out in the Boston Harbor and go back and forth searching for the tunnels.

And that's these two dome shapes that you can see in here are the two tunnels underneath the bottom. So this is water. The boat's up there. This is the bottom. And then underneath the bottom, that's where the tunnels are sitting.

There's Marty Klein, who's with us today. And Marty and Doc developed the first commercial towed fish, narrow beam side scan sonar at EG&G in 1966. Is that about right, Marty?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

VANDIVER: OK. And then when did you go on to form Klein Side Scan?

AUDIENCE: January of 1968.

VANDIVER: OK. And then you sold the company 20 years later?

AUDIENCE: Something like that.

VANDIVER: Something like that. So Marty got--

AUDIENCE: 40 years ago.

VANDIVER: Yep. So Marty got his start doing sonar with Doc, and made a life's work out of it.

This is an image that I saw Doc in this very image many, many times. He was fond of going right out here in the Charles River, throwing on a side scan sonar fish over the side and going out and testing things before heading off on a project to who knows where. Neat book on sonar images.

Ah. So if Paul Gray were here, he had some funny stories about these. But these are 16-inch naval shells. And they were sitting out on a pallet for a long, long time over by Building 20. And one day, Paul likes to tell the story that a student complained to him about having this war material laying around. And so he decided, well, I'll just send him to see Doc.

Because the reason these shells were here, the explosives had taken out of them. You can unscrew a piece in the back. And these naval shells, Doc used them to make pressure-testing vessels out of them. So if you wanted a camera that could go down 20,000 feet in the ocean, he'd put it inside the shell, closed it up, pressurized it hydraulically, and tested it to 20,000 feet.

I think I disposed of the last one of these at MIT. When I was a young professor in the Ocean Engineering Department, the pressure testing vessel that had been made out of one of these was still there in a cart standing upright with all the apparatus. And I gave it to some folks at Woods Hole. So that's the last we saw of one of these here at MIT.

Doc, as I said, went many times with Cousteau on board the Calypso. One of the photographs of those trips.

In 1975, they went looking for the Britannic. And so this map-- this is Greece. There's Athens. And right down here is where the Britannic was found. This is where it was sunk on World War I. If you notice, this is a tracing of a map done on MIT letterhead.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

And this is the-- out of Doc's-- again, out of a notebook. This is a side scan sonar trace going right dead over the center of the Britannic. Calypso, November 15, 1975. Latitude, longitude, depth.

1973, Doc went out with a group looking for this Civil War ironclad the Monitor off of Cape Hatteras, where it sunk shortly after-- it wasn't long after the famous battle that it was in with the Merrimack. But then they were towing it north, and it got in a storm and sank. And it wasn't rediscovered until 1973. And these are side scan traces showing the Monitor on the bottom.

So I'm going to tell you just a little bit of story about my own involvement with Doc. How are we doing on time? OK.

I came in summer in 1968 as a grad student. Probably saw Doc give a talk. Got fascinated.

By 1969, I was going in the army. And while I was in the army, I bought cameras, I built my first photo lab, I learned how to take pictures. And when I came back in 1972, I went to Doc in the spring of '72 and said, I really want to take the strobe project lab course.

And of course, I was a graduate student at the time. I'd had lots of laboratory training. But he said, well, we'll let anybody in. And so he let me in, and I took the strobe project lab course, and just had a ball.

And that summer, I learned that he needed a teaching assistant for the next year. And I hadn't yet found a PhD thesis in ocean engineering that I was happy with. And so Doc hired me as his teaching assistant for the year, which gave me time to develop a really terrific ocean engineering doctoral subject. And it gave me a chance to do what I'm going to tell you about.

So I came in September. Doc said, why don't you do a project? In addition to being the TA, I want you to do a project. And he says, I've never done color schlieren photography. And so why don't you give it a try?

And so I went to the library and found out that color schlieren is used a lot in supersonic wind tunnels to take pictures of shockwaves. And there were three or four different techniques described there. And so I read up on them, built the apparatus, took the first picture.

About a month later, walked into Doc's office, and he had that little 10-power loup. I don't know how many of you remember him looking at negatives with his loup. And he got his loop out, and he says, Van-- he used to call me Van. He says, I think it's out of focus.

All right, well. So then I went back. Because I built it the best I could, and that's what we got. So I went back and found another technique and built it, and a month later, bring him the first picture, and he says, Van, I don't like the color. OK.

So this went on until January. I was getting a little desperate. And I was reading the amateur scientist column in Scientific American, and a graduate student in Tennessee had come up with a new way of doing schlieren. He didn't have the high-speed equipment that I had, but he had a new technique.

And so I built that. And during IAP in '73, came in with the photograph-- one very much like this-- showed it to Doc. And he says, Van, I think you've got it.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

So with that, we took lots of pictures of cool things. And I'll tell you a little bit about schlieren here. This is the hot air above a candle. And you can see it's kind of blue on one side and yellow on the other, that column of hot air.

This type of color schlieren, the color you see tells you the direction in which light has been refracted. So if you take a cut through that hot air and draw yourself a picture-- so imagine this is light traveling through that column of hot air. Light bends in the direction of increasing index of refraction.

So that column of hot air acts like a diverging lens, because the index is-- its temperature is highest in the center, the density is lowest. Index is lowest. And so index increases as the temperature decreases. So it acts like a diverging lens.

And now, the way you get a picture out of it is you set yourself up with two telescope mirrors. Ours were about 10 inches in diameter and 8-foot focal length. And you put a light source at the focal point of one of them. And the light then lands on the mirror, and it creates a collimated beam of parallel light.

That light lands on the second mirror, and it's focused back down to an image of that original point source. And you block that light with a knife edge. And you put a camera right behind the knife edge.

So now, that red ray of light comes along, passes through the hot air above that candle, and is refracted slightly from its path, hits the mirror, but now no longer lands on the knife edge where the original image was, but gets over the knife edge and into the camera. Camera is focused through the mirror onto the plane where the candle is sitting. And the camera essentially assembles the photograph out of light that gets over the knife edge. And it's light that appears to be coming from the location of the candle.

So that's how a schlieren system-- the simplest explanation of a schlieren system. And if you do it, then, with multiple sources of different colors, you can make it so that if light is refracted down, it looks yellow. Up, it's blue. Left and right are red and green, and everything in between at different angles.

So this is a .30 caliber bullet. The light is refracted down in the shock waves at the top and come out yellow. Up, blue.

But you can see there's a lot of amazing things in a picture like this. These are little mock stems. That's reflected sound because of the density difference between hot air and cold air. This is wake turbulence. And this is taken with that Microflash unit, but put into the system.

So Doc early on had taken pictures of-- remember the [INAUDIBLE] pictures and the marine propellers? Well, you can see the tip vortex in a ordinary house fan by putting in smoke. And so what Doc did with smoke, I did with mirrors. We've got--

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

This black, this is one blade of the house fan. And this is an alcohol lamp. This is just hot air. You can see it in the schlieren. It's rolled into the tip vortex and then shed downstream as a helix. And when you're standing in front of an ordinary fan, the buffeting you feel are these little rotating tornadoes coming by you that have been spun off the tips of the fan.

So this is a .30 caliber bullet-- a shadow graph of Doc's-- passing through a piece of cardboard. The same thing in schlieren. This picture, you can see a lot of amazing things going on. Let me get my pointer back.

There's sound diffraction over that sharp edge. Looks like a new point source. There's reflection, obviously, here. There's little bits of supersonic cardboard, each with their own little shockwave going on.

This is a Doc shadow graph of a soap bubble with a .22 caliber bullet going through it. You can see all sorts of amazing detail in that soap bubble and shockwaves. And there's a similar photograph in schlieren, where you see a bullet. You can see-- I don't know if it shows up. Yeah, I can see it. These are reflected sound waves, shockwaves from the skin of the bubble.

So a little-- one of the things that I most love about Doc was what he did for lots of people, including me. Help folks start companies. He gave generously of his time, and his money, and his resources.

And in my case, I had been taking these schlieren photographs, and he liked them, and he says, Kim, I want you to write it up. You're going to show these photographs at the 11th International Congress in High Speed Photography, which was held in the summer of 1973 at Imperial College in London.

And so that was a great opportunity. And I wrote the paper, and we sent it off, and I took slides along. But Doc also took about a dozen of these photographs, sent them out to the photo lab at EG&G.

EG&G made 16-by-20 enlargements of them. Mounted them. Doc sent them ahead to the congress. They were put up in a gallery outside of the main hall where the talks were given.

And so I had this private show at this conference where, of course, he's the father of modern high-speed photography, so he just had me tucked under his wing. I just got to go to everything that Edgerton went to. It was really cool. Well, one of the people who came to that gallery was the editor at Nature magazine. And basically saw the pictures, says, I got to have that. And so my first published article was in Nature magazine with a color photograph as a grad student. So this is pretty heady experience.

And I wouldn't be here today if it were not for Doc Edgerton. And he helped me in ways I know, and I'm sure he helped me in ways I'll never know. But he helped other people too.

And that was one of the real motivations in 1990, when Doc died, to-- we want to do something that would be a really appropriate legacy to Harold Edgerton. And so in 1990, there was a discussion with the family, and the trustees of the family foundation, and Paul Penfield, and with Paul Gray, and people here at MIT, as to what would be appropriate.

And we came up with the idea that we should-- the photographs were great, and they would be preserved. But the really important contribution, and the reason students loved Doc, was that he made his lab and his time available to help them with things they wanted to accomplish. So we created the Edgerton Center-- proposed the Edgerton Center as a place where MIT students could come and have a place to work.

And Doc was fond of saying-- a student would walk in, I've always wanted to try something. And he'd say, there's a bench, there's a soldering iron. It only takes a couple microseconds. Get on with it. And we wanted to have that be a way of remembering Doc, by creating the Edgerton Center.

So in 1992, we founded the Edgerton Center. And Paul Penfield and I did a lot of the heavy lifting to make that happen. Paul was the department head of engineering and computer science at the time. And Doc's lab was EECS space. And you know how valuable space is at MIT.

And he wanted this to happen, and so did I. And a lot of other people, including Paul Gray and the family. So an endowment that Doc had set up as a life trust, which would support Esther-- his wife-- until she died, became the permanent endowment of the Edgerton Center in 2001.

So today-- and our mission when we opened the doors, we wanted to continue to do high-speed photography. We wanted it to be a hands-on resource center for MIT students the way it had been when Doc was there. And we wanted it to continue something else that Doc did, and that was to have it be a window on MIT.

He was fond of taking things out and giving talks at school kids. But also, people came. And even in those days, there were photographs all up and down the hallway. We wanted to do that. And today, that still exists in our K-12 programs.

So just a little bit about what goes on today at the Edgerton Center. We still do high-speed photography. So here's one of Doc's making applesauce photographs. And this is a picture from strobe project lab, which is a subject that I took in that spring of 1972. We still teach it today. This is a student photograph of colored chalk.

We support 20-some student clubs and teams. One of them is a group called the Vehicle Design Summit. Two summers ago-- it's almost now-- so it'd be the spring-- so over two years ago, two women students, the two on the left and right here, in blue, Robyn Allen and Anna Jaffe, came to me in about the 1st of May and said, we have invited 90 students from solar car teams from around the world to come to MIT this summer to build energy-efficient vehicles, and we need little help.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

And I said, yeah. You mean the summer of '07, right? They says, no, no. They're arriving June 12.

So we set about making this happen. It took-- basically, the Edgerton Center served as the bank. And they had an $80,000 housing bill that summer.

They eventually brought 46 students actually came. They spent eight weeks here. They built four different vehicles that were running by the last day. By that fall, they had raised $250,000 in cash to make this thing happen. And they're still going today. They're now doing a next design of a vehicle that they hope can be mass produced.

So one of the vehicles they built was this one. This is a diesel-powered vehicle built from scratch from the ground up. So they bought the engine and converted it to burn vegetable oil. So it smells a little bit like a McDonald's.

But I got to drive this one. This was a lot of fun. And a full-length Discovery Channel film was done on this summer on the kids' project.

AUDIENCE: Great.

VANDIVER: Thanks. A little bit-- we do K-12 work. For 10 years, we've been bringing teachers and their classrooms from Cambridge and around who come to do half-day field projects at MIT in topics that are coordinated with their curriculum. So these are kids with a ring of DNA made out of LEGO. And Doc was fond of saying, the trick to education is to not let them know they're learning something till it's too late.

Some of our teams go abroad and work in developing countries. And this is built around a woman named Amy Smith, who's now been with the Edgerton Center for six or seven years. In the fall of '04, she won a MacArthur grant for this work in developing countries with our students.

A year ago, we had teams of students, about 30 total students, in seven different developing countries doing charcoal and water projects. Irrigation. Peanut shellers. And they're out in the field right now. Amy is in Peru this IAP with one of the teams of students. But there are six or seven other teams scattered around the world doing their work.

Just to show you pictures of the fellow, Matt, on my left. That guy up there. He was doing solar power using solar collectors in-- that's in Lesotho, in southern Africa. Jessica, I'm going to tell you about. Amos Winter went to Tanzania and got involved with making wheelchairs in an NGO that makes wheelchairs there. And Elizabeth Basha is working on a project doing an early flood warning system in Honduras.

And these projects are continuing. They've gotten World Development Bank money to help carry them on. These are some of the really more successful projects.

But what about Jessica? Just tell you her story, then I'm about done. Jessica, as part of D-Lab, which is this January trip, went to Zambia in southern Africa and worked in January of 2005 in this wheelchair operation, and learned about making wheelchairs.

She got an idea when she was there, and she came back that spring and thought about it, that she could make a bicycle-drawn ambulance, because they had no ambulance service in that part of the world. So she went back in the summer with a design, built the first prototype. And then the next IAP, she went back.

By the time she had gone back, they'd made six more. There they are, your bike and this ambulance. Had built six more, had them in service, and were benefiting people. A year later, she went back to design the tooling so they could fulfill an order from the World Health Organization for like 50 or 100 of these things.

So these are life-changing experiences that are happening at the Edgerton Center and at MIT. So I'd like to think that Doc would be proud of what we've done with his space, and his laboratory, and his name, and the resources that he made possible for us to do what we're doing.

So I'm going to end by telling you a little bit about the Edgerton Archive Project. I went to the family foundation a few months ago and said, I'd like to do the following project. 99% or more-- it's got to be way more-- of the Doc material is where you and I can't get at it. There are many, many hours of film that are in cans at the MIT Museum. There's his 40-plus laboratory notebooks at the MIT archives.

All the photographs he took of things like milk drops, there are negatives of them. And they have actually already been positives have been made in a standard shape. But there's 7,000 of them, and they're not catalogued in a way that you and I could go look them up and get to them. Then there's these 12,000 35-millimeter color slides of Doc and students, and you and me, and everybody doing things, and they're not cataloged or indexed.

And I'd like to put all of that into a web-based archive where any one of us can get to it. And in fact, so if Claire goes in there and sees a picture she hasn't seen before and says, oh, I know where that is. That's Greece, and that's 1975. And that's Charlie Mazel, or whoever it is. And be able to put that information in, so that over time, we build up a the metadata that supports all of the Doc materials.

So if you were early when you came in today, at the beginning, we played about a 10-minute loop of videos that are taken from Doc's movies. So there are something like 60 or 80 film clips on Tech TV today that you can go see. And so that's just the beginning of this project.

So when I began, here's a fellow from early days, from 1926 or '7. I have no idea who he is, but I'd love to find out. Hope somebody can write in and tell us someday.

So a parting word from Doc. This is Doc standing in front of his notebooks. I don't know if I can make this happen. If I can't, we'll just stop and go to questions. I'm going to turn this down. And if I can get a little video clip to run here, this is where we'll end.

[POP]

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

All right, I don't want your updates. Do your thing,

There's a lot of great footage of Doc in different things. The short that was made in 1940, we have that. This is not going to cooperate. Here we go. Hey, we're getting closer.

Twice. Yeah, OK. Thank you. Let's kill one of these. Enlarge this. And play.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- If you don't wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and want to do something, why, you're wasting your time. Time is very precious. We're wasting it right now.

[CHUCKLES]

I got through to you, didn't I?

[END PLAYBACK]

VANDIVER: All right. So that's the end.

[CLAPPING]

So we got a little time. Thanks for coming. People who've got memories that they have, what they did with Doc, or questions you want to ask. Time's yours.

AUDIENCE: He worked at General Electric [INAUDIBLE].

VANDIVER: I think, actually, my recall is that he was in fact working on large motors. And that's then, when he came to MIT, he continued that work, is the closest connection that I know.

AUDIENCE: He and I were interested in ball lightning.

VANDIVER: What's your name?

AUDIENCE: Robert Golka. And--

VANDIVER: When was this?

AUDIENCE: This was probably about five years before he died. He invited me to give a lecture. But I'd built the largest Tesla coil at Wendover Air Force Base in Utah. And I worked out there for nine years trying to make ball lightning, and I never succeeded.

I made things that looked like ball lightning, but it wasn't the real thing. It's 40 years I've been in this field, and I haven't succeeded. But he said, press on! [INAUDIBLE].

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

VANDIVER: Anybody else have a favorite story from [INAUDIBLE] time?

AUDIENCE: I've got a question for you.

VANDIVER: Sam Raymond.

AUDIENCE: Yes, hi. Yes, it was Doc said he had this [INAUDIBLE] learning, and he'd go out at night to test the equipment. He was trying to get some of these [INAUDIBLE] and help him. So we finally told him, well, there's a [INAUDIBLE]. Go check them out.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

[INAUDIBLE]

VANDIVER: I think that's right. I've heard that story too. So he not only shot Stonehenge. They also--

[CHUCKLES]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

VANDIVER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Related to that story that Sam said. With the same piece of equipment, I was assisting the freshman seminar in 1970. And Doc said, get it all set up. There was a capacitor, 1/2 farad capacitor the size of a coffin.

And he said, get it all hooked up, but don't fire it off till I come in. So we have it all set up. We had some guy with a baton over to measure the output of this 3 and 1/2-foot diameter reflector.

And Doc came in, and I had the kids stand 10 feet away, because we could calculate the-- Doc's, oh, no. You don't want them to stand there. And I said, why? And he said, I'll show you. He had them stand back, put newspaper on a yardstick. We did a countdown, and the thing burst into flames.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

And then Doc said that, after he got them all doing that photographing news stamps and stuff, because he said all the pilots wanted to drop bombs. They didn't want to take pictures. He would go there, and they'd have a [INAUDIBLE] shirt with their girlfriend's initials cut into it. And they'd cover their face up, and they'd fire the flash off--

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

--their girlfriends' initials into their chest.

VANDIVER: Gus Kayafas has worked and published many of Doc's photographs. There are four books of Doc photographs, the first of which was published in 1939. And the first three were all edited by Jim Killian, who was the president of MIT in the late '40s and early '50s.

And the fourth book was published in '86, right? Stopping Time.

AUDIENCE: '87.

VANDIVER: '87. And Gus had a lot to do with putting the photographs together for those. And that's a beautiful book, the Stopping-- they're all really neat books.

The earliest one, I finally bought a-- I wanted a copy and didn't have the very earliest. And found a signed copy on bookfinder.com for $100, and so I now have a complete collection. Any others? Yeah, Marty.

AUDIENCE: Can we show the pressure vessels, the old battleship gun shells? One of my favorite memories is, in Building 20, Doc would squeeze things. He'd put them in pressure vessel.

But the pressure vessel had a big fixed cover. And to put it on, you had to get a big piece of steel pipe and wrench the thing. And then you had to take a sledgehammer. And Doc just loved to do that. That great grin on his face--

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

--he battled with [INAUDIBLE] huge sledgehammer.

VANDIVER: Right. Because you stood the shell up point down. And it was standing up this way. And the back end of it unscrewed. And so that's what you were screwing that in tight so it would-- the whole pressure is what I gather was going on. I never saw that one happen. That's funny.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

VANDIVER: Is that right?

AUDIENCE: That's so when they shot the bullet, [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: That's how you get started with those shells and everything, right?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, we built 100 [INAUDIBLE]. He arranged to get 100 shells for those and sold them off. A lot more than we paid.

[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]

VANDIVER: Hey, that's worth the price of admission today. I didn't know that story. You built 100 of them. [INAUDIBLE] built them?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

VANDIVER: Pardon?

AUDIENCE: More than 100. But strangely, what happened [INAUDIBLE]. So what happens, we used them all up. So I needed to get some more.

And I heard that the government had made a whole lot of shells to be used in [INAUDIBLE] Vietnam, North Vietnam. And that the contract ended/ they decided not to do it. Found out that they had made 100 shells, and they had been scrapped.

So I got on the phone, found out they were going to scrap [INAUDIBLE]. So raced down there, and we got flat-bed trucks and bought 100 more shells, brand new. So another 100 shells. [INAUDIBLE].

VANDIVER: Did you--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] prices.

VANDIVER: I guess. Did you--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] apiece.

VANDIVER: Did you make-- so how many more did you actually sell? Another 100? You'd sell another 100 of them? This is too loud. OK.

AUDIENCE: Want to tell them of the archive project, [INAUDIBLE] people could contribute their memories and information, or?

VANDIVER: Well, I hope a year from now, we'll be really far into it. We're making-- the early progress is with the film right now. So we're going to-- quite a bit of the film is already on video. And that's what you saw some of at the beginning today.

But we're going to take another 20 hours or so of it, and have it digitized and turned into video so that those can be up. So that's underway. And--

AUDIENCE: Some of it's online. That's where I looked yesterday.

VANDIVER: Well, yeah. What I showed at the beginning today were-- there are about 80 different short clips that we've gotten up online already that you can see. And so eventually, we'll have a lot more, including--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] data, those 7,000 images of so many dozen people [INAUDIBLE]. I'm happy to give it to you.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].

VANDIVER: Let's get that one on the mic.

AUDIENCE: The last 15 years, I've annotated and dated all 7,000 of those images.

VANDIVER: That's incredible.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. And most of it digitized too.

AUDIENCE: Whoa.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

VANDIVER: Fantastic. All right. Oh, well. So the annotation is really incre-- that's really valuable.

OK, Gus, we need to be talking. OK, thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you came. Ed?

AUDIENCE: One thing I'm hoping for the archive project that we're doing is, not just to get the footage and the pictures adopted, but the story saying, like what you did-- you stopped by a couple years ago, and remember I videotaped you giving me a story sitting at Doc's desk? I still have that little video footage.