This stop-action photograph of Benjamin Sewall Blake jumping was taken by his father, Francis Blake. Francis Blake was born in Needham, Mass., in 1850. In his early years, he was a scientist who worked on the US Coast Survey and Darien Exploring Expedition. Later in life he became an accomplished inventor—he was known as “Transmitter Blake” because of his work on the development of the telephone—and a skilled photographer. In the mid-1880s, Blake designed a distinctive shutter that allowed him to take photographs with very short exposure times.