ABSTRACT
The first high-speed movie was taken by William Henry Fox Talbot (1852) [1]. He showed that after photographing a rapidly rotating page of The Times newspaper illuminated by a short spark, the text was clear in the resulting negative. It was not obvious, when the laser was invented more than a century later [2], that this new technology might offer some new capabilities to the high-speed photographer. However, the fundamental properties of the laser which make it a useful tool for high-speed imaging were known then, and are discussed in this article.
