In the early 1930s, Harold Edgerton, a professor at MIT, and his graduate student Kenneth Germeshausen were developing a stroboscopic flash capable of freezing motion at speeds no mechanical shutter could approach. Urged by his wife and colleagues to turn the technique on everyday life rather than laboratory motors, Edgerton pointed his camera at running water. The very first photograph he made this way, in 1932, was of water falling from a faucet.

The photograph displayed here was one of three by Edgerton exhibited at the London Royal Photographic Society in 1933 in the first public showing of his photography. The image bears many similarities to his first study of the tap, but possesses a hidden technical upgrade, a 50% increase in exposure time to 1/75,000th of a second. The result is dramatic—the water looks less like a liquid than a structure, as though cast in glass. Edgerton was always curious about liquid and these early faucet images established the subject that would run through his career, from the MIT laboratories to his later series of "milk drop coronets."

In 1934 Edgerton and Germeshausen were joined by Herbert Grier, and together they formed EG&G—a company that would go on to develop the high-speed cameras and electronic timing systems used to photograph and document US nuclear bomb tests, most notably Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946 and the Nevada Hydrogen tests in the 1950s. The instrument that began with tap water became, in time, one of the defining tools of modern warfare.