Shutter Speeds

How fast can a camera take photos? Vaclav Slim talks about just that topic in Numbers Don’t Lie. In the early 1870’s, Leland Stanford challenged his employee, Easweard Muybridge, to develop a camera that could settle an old debate: Are all four legs of a horse in the air when it runs? To answer the question, Muybridge came up with a camera with a shutter speed of 1/1,000 of a second in 1878. The question could finally be answered, with (photographic) proof: Yes, all four hooves of a horse are indeed airborne at the same time.

 

Soon, the shutter speed increased to 1/10,000 of a second. By 1940, it hit the millionth of a second mark.

 

In 1999, Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a rapid laser technique that could capture the transition states of chemical reactions on a scale of femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second). Today, we can detect events separated by attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second). It allows us to “see” the motion of an electron on the atomic scale.

 

As Smil says, we have come a very long way:

“From settling the dispute about airborne horse hooves to observing flitting electrons.”

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