Since its 1839 invention by chemists and physicists, photography has always been intertwined with scientific advancement. Over a century later, Edgerton, an electrical engineer at MIT, pioneered and improved stroboscopic lights for photographic use, as in this image of a milk drop captured in the fraction of a second that it splashes up to form a pearly crown. Edgerton’s compelling images of what happens too quickly for human eyes to perceive—the shattering of a dropped cup, the rip of a bullet through a playing card, the beat of a hummingbird’s wings—ensured his work’s popular appeal. And although he claimed to “only” be a scientist, he clearly had aesthetic sensibilities, too: He’d captured splashing milk coronets as early as 1936 but kept photographing them until he made this deeply saturated and beautiful image two decades later, which has become one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)