Russell Kirsch, the inventor of the pixel and the first person to take a digital photo, died Tuesday at his home in Portland, Oregon, according to a report by the Washington Post. Kirsch was 91 years old.
Kirsch was a computer scientist who worked for the National Bureau of Standards in the 1950s (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and worked with the first programmable computer in the US, called the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer ( SEAC), which was created in 1950. But it was not until 1957 that Kirsch and his team began experimenting with digital images, a uniquely challenging pursuit when computers were large enough to fill entire rooms.
Kirsch married a new father in 1957, and brought in a photo of his three-month-old baby to test a new drum scanner he was working on. Through his experiments, Kirsch created the first digital photo, which according to 176 was exactly 176 pixels by 176 pixels NIST. (In contrast, cheap modern cameras can store about 20 million per photo.) With this, Kirsch and his team, including Leonard Cahn, Chuck Ray, and Genevieve Urban, had invented what would become known as the pixel.
The team published in 1957 a paper with the Institute of Radio Engineers entitled ‘Experiments in Processing Pictorial Information with a Digital Computer’ which is available to read online thanks to the Computer History Museum. The paper includes other early examples of scanned photos that became some of the earliest digital images. The biggest problem in the fifties, of course, was storage. In 1957, you could not actually hold so much information at a given time, which for years led to very limited practical use.
Notably, the term “pixel” was not yet used in that paper and there was actually some discussion about what to call that small square bit of visual information. The alternative term “pel” was often used in the early days, but pixel eventually won out.
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Computers were serious business in the fifties, even in popular culture films like the classic Desk Set from 1957, and that seriousness really comes out in the interviews that Kirsch would give years later about his time at the National Bureau of Standards. Every minute of operation of the SEAC had to be accounted for, and running the computer cost about $ 120 per hour, if more than $ 1,100 adjusted for inflation. Kirsch acknowledged ‘precious’ time for computers to ‘steal’, leading to experiments that could change the world for the better.
“Sometimes I can confess that I have machine age of seemingly useful products such as the calculations of thermonuclear weapons and things like that,” Kirsch said in an oral history. from 1970 onwards. ‘I did not know at the time where I stole the time. I’m not quite sure I would have done otherwise if I had known, but it was possible to get a certain amount of computer available at very attractive rates, namely free. “
It’s hard to explain just how revolutionary their photo experiment was, especially when other computer performances were still decades away. The ARPANET, the forerunner of our modern Internet, made its first connection until October of 1969 and digital photography would not become a general consumer-oriented pursuit until the late 1990s.
Ask your grandparents about what it was like to film to develop, children. It was an experience.
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