Both Edward Muybridge (1830-1904), born in England, and Harold Edgerton (1903-1990), born in Fremont, Nebraska made important contributions to the art and science of photography.

Muybridge’s corresponding use of the following technological innovations in the 19th century including the invention of shutters, anastigmatic lenses, light meters and the standardization of the manufacture of this equipment and material made it possible for him to invent a 12-camera setup that made sequential photographs of animals and people moving in rapid secession.

Sequential photography was the precursor to Thomas Edison’s invention of the Kinetograph camera in 1890 and the Kinetoscope, which projected moving images, in 1892.

Harold Edgerton’s principal contribution to this new broadening capability of photography to record the invisible was the adaptation of the stroboscope to study the movement of electric motors while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

By 1931 he had figured out how to synchronize strobe flashes with the motion being examined by taking a series of photos through an open shutter at the rate of many flashes per second. By harnessing the speed of light to make ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography, he was able to photograph the speed of a bullet at mid-flight. 

Edgerton and Muybridge made possible the ability to capture the unseen at the spur of a moment, which became the ethos of photography for much of the 20th century.