"Doc" Edgerton was mostly retired when I was a Teaching Assistant. They had a lecturer who talk the courses, but if he wasn't traveling, Doc hung out in his office most days. He was helping chase the Loch Ness Monster back then, and occasionally working with Cousteau. He was a really nice guy, and extremely practical & down to earth. I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and he gave a lecture at the Laboratory there a few years after I had gone on to tach other courses. Doc and his wife made a point of tracking down my Mom and taking her out to dinner. My mother remembered attending one of his touring lectures at her college in the late 1930's. She was absolutely tickled pink & a bit star-struck almost 50 years later.
We did most of our high speed photography with 35 mm black & white. Doc's approach to drying negatives was to fold a paper towel over the film, and then pull the negatives through the towel. He said he'd never observed any scratches from the process over 40 years of doing it. I could always spot the students that had taken Minor White's photography class by the way they winced when we did that.
We spent a lot of time teaching basics of flash photography, but also used repeating strobes to view repetitive motion by eye. One of the popular labs was taking photos of .22 bullets in flight, cutting playing cards in half & such. The fun part was that the students had to do a final project of some sort, usually in groups of 2 or three. Lots of them came up with interesting objects to shoot with the .22. There were safety rules about nothing that could shatter or deflect the bullets, and if you shot fruit, you had to make a "fruit trap" to contain the shrapnel.
There is a famous photo Edgeton took of shooting an apple with a .30 caliber military rifle:
![Image](https://artgalleryofnovascotia.ca/sites/default/files/Bullet_Apple_WEB.jpg)
What they don't mention is that a few milliseconds after the photo was taken, the entire lab was filled with flying apple sauce. 30 years later, I could still smell a hint of apple in the lab on a hot humid day. Hence the requirement for a fruit trap...