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MIT Alumni News: 1865

Picture this

From the very beginning, Technology Review has used photography to help tell the story of MIT—and of science.

October 22, 2024
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1960: “A half microsecond glimpse of a .30-caliber bullet cutting a card was obtained by Professor Harold E. Edgerton, SM ’27, ScD ’31, and John Tredwell ’60, an M.I.T. graduate student, with a new electronic flash unit’s 50-millioncandle- power beam. This newly developed microflash gives researchers better close-ups of rapidly moving objects of all kinds.”Harold “Doc” Edgerton, SM ’27, ScD ’31

When alumni opened the first issue of The Technology Review in January 1899, they found not only a description of MIT’s new Pierce Building but crisp photographs of its interiors as well. The second issue featured photos of the varsity football team and an alumni banquet in Chicago that looped in 130 long-distance guests by phone. Photographs continued to appear regularly, offering alumni a window into the first Tech Reunions in 1904, stunning views of the Grand Canyon in 1905, and more. In 1922, the magazine also began publishing scientific articles with accompanying photos. 

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1930: “A corrugated sheet of water, pouring over the lip of a dam in New Hampshire.”
MIT

Although Life is often credited with pioneering cover photos when it relaunched in 1936 as a photo-driven magazine, Technology Review had been running full-page photo covers since 1931. Inside, its editors embraced photography to help chronicle the evolution of both MIT and science, showcasing the beauty and elegance of engineering and providing early glimpses of technologies like computers, nuclear power, television, radar, high-­powered microscopes, and accelerators—and the planet itself. 

These images appeared in the magazine between 1930 and the mid-1970s, an era bookended by innovations in photography and imaging led by Professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton, SM ’27, ScD ’31. 

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1946: “In Deep.” This image of a deep-sea diver appeared on the cover of the December 1946 issue.
H. ARMSTRONG ROBERTS
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1969: The solar eclipse of September 22, 1968, photographed in the former Soviet Union by an international group that included the article’s author, Wallace P. Boquist, president of Technology International. The photo was captured as “second contact (totality) is about to begin, [and] shows on a single image the surface of the sun, solar prominences (at about one o’clock in the picture) and intermediate corona, all without overexposure—a brightness range of approximately six orders of magnitude.”
UNKNOWN BUT PROBABLY BOQUIST
Gears
1941: “Time at 40x.” Many of TR’s “industrial” photos played with an unexpected sense of scale.
VERNON E. WHITMAN '22
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1967: Buzz Aldrin, ScD ’63, steps out of the Gemini 12 capsule and into space. This photo, taken by a camera he mounted to the spacecraft, was part of a cover story featuring his descriptions of the November 1966 mission.
NASA

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1976: The magazine was among the first to publish this iconic image, captured using equipment designed by Harold “Doc” Edgerton, of what appeared to be the Loch Ness Monster.
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1936: “We Look Inside.” A radiographic portrait of a 0.45-caliber automatic pistol.
GENERAL ELECTRIC X-RAY CORP.

cover of Oct 1931 issue
The magazine’s first photographic cover featured an image by Alfred G. Buckham, who began his career as an aerial reconnaissance photographer for the Royal Navy in the First World War.
ALFRED G. BUCKHAM/MIT
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1953: “Atomic Explosion in Action.” A fiery ball from a nuclear device disintegrates a steel tower shortly after detonation during tests made in the spring of 1953 at the Nevada Proving Grounds of the Atomic Energy Commission.
EDGERTON, GERMESHAUSEN, AND GRIER, INC.

1934: The famous photographs of a falling drop of milk by Harold “Doc” Edgerton, SM ’27, ScD ’31, and K.J. Germeshausen ’31 were featured on the cover of Technology Review in July 1934.
cover of 1969 issue
1969: “The moon’s back side, never before seen by human eyes, fills most of the cover photograph made from the Apollo 8 spacecraft during its return journey to planet earth.” The February 1969 issue also included “an account of how human skills and modern technology combined to make possible the epic journey of Astronauts Anders, Borman, and Lovell.” 

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1958: “‘Control Room of the M.I.T. Reactor.’ The first stationary nuclear reactor to be built in New England—a ‘tame’ unit producing no power—was put into operation during the Summer months at M.I.T. The new facility will be used for training nuclear science engineers, and for research in the physical and medical sciences.”
MIT
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1961: “‘A Day Beneath the Reactor.’ The assistant superintendent of operating rooms at Massachusetts General Hospital, Joan Koepcke, watches at the observation window of the M.I.T. Nuclear Reactor while a patient’s brain tumor is treated with a beam of neutrons. The recipient of therapy, alone in the operating room, is receiving anesthesia and the reactor is operating normally. Other research work proceeds as usual on the floor above.”
MIT

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1937: “This is a 1937 television image reproduced exactly as it appeared on the cathode-ray tube screen of an experimental receiver in the National Broadcasting Company’s studios … The subject is Miss Betty Goodwin … NBC’s first woman television announcer.”
UNKNOWN
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1960: “A Glowing Brain Helps Physicians.” “The coloring of parts of this ‘brain’ changes during a lecture on the effects of drugs. Encephalograms are in the foreground.”
MIT

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1930: “‘FOG’: New York’s Queensboro Bridge. Its spans of 1,182 feet are among the longest cantilevers in the United States.”
YOSEI AMEMYA
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1947: “Windward Oahu Shore Line.” For about a decade after the end of World War II, Technology Review showcased fewer industrial and more landscape photos.
CAPTAIN STEWART FERN

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1958: “Night of Reckoning.” A view through the “store front” windows of the Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories building, which housed “various units of the recently installed I.B.M. 704 digital computer.”
MIT PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICES
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1968: “Electron micrograph showing DNA rings from bacteriophage ØX174, magnification approximately 70,000.”
H. FERNANDEZ-MORAN

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