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Matinee: 'The Rapatronic Camera'
16 August 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 617th in our series of Saturday matinees today: The Rapatronic Camera.
Developed by Harold "Doc" Edgerton in the 1940s to photograph the process of a nuclear explosion within milliseconds of detonation, the rapatronic camera could capture an image in as little as 10 nanoseconds. After the 80th anniversary of the 1845 bombings of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9), we look back at the extraordinary camera that captured what was coming.
The word "rapatronic" digests three words that describe its nature: rapid action and electronic. Edgerton, who had become famous for his strobe shots capturing hummingbirds in flight and other stop motion strobe photography, partnered with Kenneth J. Germeshausen and Herbert Grier to develop the camera to photograph nuclear tests for the U.S. government through the 1950s and 1960s.
In this 3:42 clip, Charles Wyckoff, a specialist in high speed photography who worked with Edgerton, shows off one of the cameras they used. The camera had two shutters: a conventional Compur shutter and and an electro-magnetic shutter behind it. Behind that was a metal extension dtube at the end of which is the film holder.
The second half of the presentation shows digital and chemical image restoration of atomic footage done by Atomic Central, which provided the clip.
Black-and-white images and video of atomic explosions from the 1940s can also be seen at the Internet Archvie.
In the 80 years since those first detonations in Japan, no other nation has used an atomic bomb in war. The images captured by the rapatronic camera suggest why.