PORTLAND, Oregon – Russell Kirsch, a computer scientist credited with inventing the pixel and scanning the world’s first digital photo, died at 11 a.m. at his home in Portland, Oregon, The Oregonian reported. He was 91.
Pixels, the digital dots used to display photos, video and more on phone and computer screens, were not an obvious innovation in 1957, when Kirsch created a small 2-by-2-inch black-and-white digital image made by his son, Walden, as a child. That was one of the first images ever scanned into a computer, using a device made by his research team at the US National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institutes of Science and Technology).
This work “laid the groundwork for satellite imagery, CT scans, virtual reality and Facebook,” said a 2010 Science News article on Kirsch, later republished by Wired. That first square image, that article said, measured at least 176 pixels on a page – just a shame of 31,000 pixels in total. Today, the digital camera on the iPhone 11 can record about 12 million pixels per image.
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Although computers have become exponentially more powerful and can now fit in our pockets, science has since come up with the fact that Kirsch made his pixels square. The square shape of the pixels means that pixels can look blocky, clunky or jagged – just generally not as smooth as real life. There is even a word for this effect: “pixelated.”
In this 2007 snapshot, Russell Kirsch holds the image of his son, Walden, which was scanned in the world’s first digital scanner in 1957 (Jamie Francis / The Oregonian via AP, File)
“Square was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch told the magazine in 2010. “Of course the logical thing was not the only possibility… but we used fields. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has suffered since. ”
Kirsch later developed a method of smoothing out images with pixels with variable shapes instead of the fields.
Berch, born in Manhattan in 1929, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary. He was educated at the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, Harvard and MIT and worked for five decades as a research scientist at the US National Bureau of Standards.
Russell Kirsch is survived by his wife of 65 years, Joan; by children Walden, Peter, Lindsey and Kara; and by four grandchildren.
