MIT 150 | Warren Seamans Interview - Photography & Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton 1995 [MUSIC PLAYING] INTERVIEWER: I'm Jim Sheldon. It's February 15, 1995. And I'm with Warren Seamans, director of the MIT Museum. And we're going to talk today about Harold Edgerton, one of MIT'S most famous folks. So I just thought it was important that we get some of the history down, so that it doesn't go by the boards. And you're someone who knew Doc very well, was connected with him over what? The last 40 years of his life? SEAMANS: No. 30 years. INTERVIEWER: 30 years of his life. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that. SEA MANS: I guess I first met Doc very shortly after I came to MIT because I was in personnel. And personnel offices at MIT, at those days, were in the basement right where his lab was. And he just moved to Building 4, what we think of Strobe Alley, he'd moved there just shortly before. And I always had an interest in sort of exploring and electrical engineering was one of the departments that I worked closely with. So I got through Strobe Alley and I met him like almost every everybody else did in those days, by simply walking down Strobe Alley and there he was. He'd come out and say hello, or you'd see him and that not only ultra friendship, but sincere friendship that he managed to exude with anybody he came in touch with, whether if he would ever see you again, or whether he'd never seen you before, you were his friend. We actually worked in trying to, while I was in personnel, trying to find some sort of technician for some short-term program that he was in. I don't recall much about that. But shortly thereafter, I moved to the Department of Humanities. And one of my first things I remember was Doc trying to save the birds that were dying because they were flying into this glass breezeway between the library building, where humanities was, and Building 2. So he put these big cutouts of birds, of hawks, to scare the birds that were flying into this glass thing. So Doc's presence was always, always around you. You knew he was here. And even in those days, he was obviously, he was a mythical character. He wasn't just another professor. You knew that he was somebody that was very important in MIT's history. After we started what is now known as the Museum in the summer of '71, and we moved into where we are now, in this Building, in 52, in February of '72, one my very first visitors in this very fledgling program was Doc. Doc came along because he'd heard that there was something trying to save MIT's history. And Doc, by this time, obviously was relatively certain where his place in history around MIT was going to be. But he was concerned that we were only going to save paintings, and portraits, and vases, and that sort of thing. He thought MIT stood for a lot more than that. We didn't even know what we were saving at that point. We were saving anything we could get. And one of the things we'd found early on, in this scouring of the MIT campus to find MIT memorabilia, was an exhibit that Doc had worked with with [? John ?] [? Mealy, ?] a photographic exhibit that had been taken in the late '50s to try and document the student body at that time. And this eventually came out in a little booklet. But it was actually a photographic exhibit that had been done and [? Mealy ?] gave that to MIT. And we found it. And it was in terrible condition. But we put it up around our very makeshift offices. And Doc heard about that. And so it was probably the second time he ever came around, just poking around, and he brought [? John ?] [? Mealy ?] in with him. So we all hit it off very readily from that point of view. And it's at that point he said, we've got to save the history of the Institute. And the history's in the instruments. It's not in this other stuff. So really, he was a big supporter of our operation from the very beginning. And I would say over the next-- as we developed, and as I was able to spend more and more time in this, and as I got to know the Institute better, I would get a call probably oh, at least twice a week if Doc was around asking about something or other. Do you want this? Or should I throw these photographs out? You don't really want this sort of stuff do you? It developed into a relationship that was-- I was always able to say yes to. And that's an unusual relationship because he was helping us to build our collections and he spread word far and wide about what we were trying to do. So he had the ear to the president, to the upper administration. And they were always there to listen to what Doc said. INTERVIEWER: What do you think-- right now, it hasn't been that many years since Doc passed away-- but what do you think the long-term legacy of Edgerton is going to be to the Institute? SEAMANS: Well, I think Doc personifies what was traditionally the MIT's way of teaching people, of the way that MIT thought people learned best. I think Doc personified that when he came here in 1926, I guess it was, the learn by doing, the hands-on method, all of these things. I think Doc not only personified that, but then went on to develop it by his own personality pulling people in. I think, if anything over Doc's period of time, and that probably there were some things that weren't particularly happy in Doc's career here, was that MIT moved very far away from that with influx of computers in one sense and so forth, And with various people who wanted much more of a theoretical Institute, MIT moved away from the hands-on thing. And Doc ended up, toward the end of his life, as one of the really last outposts of where a person, a student, could go and actually do something with his hands, his or her hands, at the end. I think Doc's legacy is to really show the importance of that. And what Kim Vandiver and the whole Edgerton Center now is doing is pulling that back in. Now it's an ongoing thing. And there's a lot of other people like Steinberg and, well, I can't think of the names right at this point, but that really see this importance and are pulling people back in, teaching people, students, MIT students, that there is something beyond theory. That there's something you need to-- as for example, and Doc used this example himself, that in his age, and certainly in my age, the average kid that came to MIT would have known how to take his Model A or his '49 Ford apart and repair it. Well, in the last few years, you just don't take most cars apart today and get them back to run. So the average student coming in today doesn't have that hands-on experience. So not only was the Institute moving away, but society itself was moving away. You can't take your digital alarm clock apart and put it back together and hope to have it run. So Doc, I think, was very disappointed toward this and did everything he could to keep his course alive, bringing in Charlie Miller and other people to help keep that thread alive. And of course, his own magnetic attraction throughout-- Doc in his darkest days of health could pull himself back together to give the most phenomenal lecture that would fill any auditorium at MIT or wherever else he gave. So he, by his own personal magnetism, he held this spirit of learning by doing, hands-on thing together. And now again, now people see the importance of this thanks to again, as I said, the-- INTERVIEWER: Not just here at the Institute, but really across all of education to some extent. SEAMANS: I think that's true to some degree. I don't think most of the probably other technical institutes got as far away from-- well, Caltech's probably an exception to that-- but most of the others did not get as far away from hands- on education as MIT did for a long period of time. And a lot of Doc's contemporaries, I think particularly Jay Stratton, Julius Stratton, who was president and exact contemporary of Doc's felt very strongly that MIT was moving much too far away from the method you actually need to teach to understand technology basically. And I think a lot of those people, I think their opinion is being upheld very strongly today by a lot of things, not only Edgerton Center, but other things are showing a movement back toward hands-on approach. INTERVIEWER: What do you think about the sort of-- what kind of influence did Doc, when we try to describe him oftentimes, some people will say engineer. Then they'll say artist. Then they'll say entrepreneur.