Computer scientist Russell A. Kirsch, the inventor of the pixel and an undisputed pioneer of digital imaging, died Tuesday at his home in Portland from complications caused by a form of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91 years old.
Russell Kirsch may not be a name you recognize immediately, but his contributions to computer science have made digital imagery possible.
Berch was born June 20, 1929, in New York City to immigrant parents from Russia and Hungary, and Kirsch attended Bronx High School, then NYU, Harvard, and eventually MIT. In 1951 he joined the National Bureau of Standards, where he worked for 50 years, helping to invent the pixel and create the first digital photo.
This 172 x 172 pixel image of his son Walden – made in 1957 – is now iconic, and was named as one of Life Magazine ‘100 Photographs That Changed the World ‘in 2003.
As DPReview points out, Kirsch has never stopped improving his most famous invention, even after retiring in 2001.. In a 2010 interview with WIRED, he wrote his efforts to create a system that uses “variable shaped pixels” instead of the fields that have dominated digital imaging since he invented them.
In that interview, he called Fields ‘the logical thing to do’, but lamented that the decision, “was something very foolish that everyone in the world has suffered since.”
So at the ripe old age of 81 he started working on a masking system that makes up 6 x 6 pixels area and then intelligently divides these areas into the two sections that have the most contrast before the pixels on opposite sides of the screen merge seam. The idea was never caught, but he explains the technology and its benefits in detail in the video below:
But while the incredible confessions described above certainly give you a sense of Russell Kirsch, the engineer, Kirsch’s best personal image probably comes from a 2012 blog post by a man named Joel Runyon, who met Kirsch over coffee in Portland.
After revealing that Runyon’s computer and the images on it would probably not exist – if they did not exist – without Kirsch’s contributions to engineering and computer science, the 83-year-old Kirsch shared the following words:
I think, I have always believed that none of us are held back from what we set out to do. Most people think the opposite – that all things hold back from them that they are meant to do and that they end up doing nothing.
Mr. Kirsch may be gone, but his legacy will live on in one of the nearly 3.8 billion photos currently taken each day. May he rest in peace.
(via Oregon Live)
Image credits: Header image taken with photo by Joel Runyon, CC-BY-3.0.
