Schardin

Hubert Schardin Hermann Reinhold (June 17, 1902 Plassow – 27 September 1965 in Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German ballistics expert, engineer and academic who studied in the field of high-speed photography and cinematography.

He also was the director of the German-French Research Institute (ISL) in Saint-Louis (France) and founder and director of the Fraunhofer Society for High-Speed Dynamics - Ernst-Mach-Institut (EMI) - in Freiburg im Breisgau.

The main importance of Schardin's scientific activities is in high-speed physics. He extended the research of Ernst Mach and Fritz Ahlborn, resulting in more than 1,000 publications. He influenced the development of electro- and high-speed exposures, electro-optical photography and high-speed cinematography with illumination by electric spark and flash x-rays.

He developed high-speed measurement techniques, at first for the specific problems of ballistics, to a general scientific level of instrumentation. He also developed new application areas for these techniques. An important innovation by Schardin was the development of a High speed camera in 1929 with his PhD advisor Carl Cranz, the (Cranz-Schardin camera). This high-speed camera was important in scientific research for almost a century, and was only recently rendered obsolete by modern advances in high-speed electronic digital cameras.

Schardin also had significant impact on the development of shaped-charge explosives, which are now used by the military for armor-piercing weapons.

Since 1969, the International Congress for High-Speed Photography and Photonics ICHSPP (with the assistance of the Association for High-Speed Physics) has awarded the Hubert Schardin Medal in his honor.

Schardin attended high school in Slupsk, where he passed his final secondary-school examinations in 1922. He then studied physics at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg where he took the diploma exam in Technical Physics in 1926.

From 1927 to 1929 Schardin worked as private assistant, and then from 1930 to 1935 as a permanent assistant to the famous German ballistics Professor Carl Cranz. In 1934 he earned his PhD with honors, delivering a dissertation on the Toepler Schlieren photography method under the guidance of Cranz. This and later publications on this topic made Schardin the 20th-century patriarch of Schlieren photography and Shadowgraph imaging.

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