Meeting Harold

In my recent geek post, I mentioned a brush with fame that I had earlier in my life. In the summer of 1978, I was preparing to enter my senior year in college and working a summer job at EG&G. EG&G stands for Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, and Edgerton was Harold Edgerton, the famous pioneer of ultra high-speed photography. I was working as a machine operator at the time, stamping glass bits to become parts of flash tubes of the sort found in copying machines. It was a pretty good job. The work was very repetetive, but otherwise not unpleasant and I was making reasonable money.

One afternoon in August a whole bunch of the company was off on vacation. I had been asked to spend the day manually injecting resin into the ends of the flash tubes so that the company could complete an order on time. The head of the department walked through with three guys in suits. He paused at my work station and said "This man is adding a stiffening agent to xenon tubes." It was a bit of a thrill for me. I was a lad of 20 at the time and looked about 14 (I'm not exaggerating). It was one of the first times that someone had referred to me as a man rather than a boy. One of the guys in suits handed me a postcard. It was a copy of the photograph Making Applesauce at MIT (shown above). I thanked him and they walked on. Someone later told me that it was Edgerton. I was both elated and crushed. Harold Edgerton! And I hadn't even realized it. I still deeply regret that I did not know at the time. I absolutely would have asked him to sign the postcard. I still have it.