Russell Kirsch, a computer scientist who received credit for inventing the pixel and scanning the world’s first digital photo, died Aug. 11 at his home in Portland at the age of 91.
Berch, born in Manhattan in 1929, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary. Educated at the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, Harvard and MIT, Kirsch worked for five decades as a research scientist at the US National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institutes of Science and Technology).
“My dad, he was a super curious guy who always asked questions,” said his son, Walden Kirsch, who works at Intel in Oregon. “He was an iconoclast. When people said you could not go there or you could not do that, he did. ‘
In 1957, Kirsch created a small, 2-by-2-inch black-and-white digital image of Walden as a child – one of the first images ever scanned into a computer, using a device created by his research team. Life magazine featured the image in a 2003 book, “100 Photographs That Changed the World,” and it is now in the collection of the Portland Art Museum.
“Everyone involved with computers will tell you how powerful it is for creativity,” Kirsch told The Oregonian in 2007.
Russell Kirsch with the image of his son, Walden, scanned in 1957 the world’s first digital scanner.Oregonian Stock Photo / 2007
Kirsch moved from Maryland to Oregon in 2001. He suffered from dementia, but remained a regular at Ken’s Artisan Bakery in Northwest Portland for many years. In the 1960s, Kirsch’s research team pioneered artificial intelligence, and Walden Kirsch said he was sorry his father could not appreciate how prevalent that technology had become.
“At the time, that was just a bizarre affair,” Walden Kirsch said. “He was at the forefront, many, many years before it was a thing.”
Russell Kirsch is survived by his wife of 65 years, Joan, by children Walden, Peter, Lindsey and Kara, and by four grandchildren.
– Mike Rogoway | [email protected] | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699
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