Harold "Doc" Edgerton

MIT electrical engineer who created the stroboscope - the electric flash - as well as super-fast cameras. By making flash durations super-short (down to 1/100,000 of a second) and shutter speeds fast (down to 1/400,000 a second) he could freeze time and capture instants invisible to the eye, which opened doors for ground-breaking studies of how things worked as well as modern photographic lighting techniques. He aided in night aerial photography during WWII, worked on undersea photography with Jacques Cousteau (who called him "Papa Flash"), and developed side-scanning sonar to help find shipwrecks. All this and he had a good eye for composing pictures, too.