The generation of a flat electron beam directly from a photoinjector is an attractive alternative to the electron damping ring as envisioned for linear colliders. It also has potential applications to light sources such as the generation of ultrashort x-ray pulses or Smith-Purcell free electron lasers. In this paper, we report on the experimental generation of a flat beam with a measured transverse emittance ratio of 100 ± 20 for a bunch charge of ∼ 0.5     nC ; the smaller measured normalized root-mean-square emittance is ∼ 0.4         μ m and is limited by the resolution of our experimental setup. The experimental data, obtained at the Fermilab/NICADD Photoinjector Laboratory, are compared with numerical simulations and the expected scaling laws.