Education
Russell Kirsch, the 'Pixel' founder, passes away at 91.
As we search our childhood images on a digital wall, we gaze at millions of tiny lit regions on the computer screen. These tiny illuminated areas on the display are what we call "pixels." And the founder of this groundbreaking invention has just passed away.
Back in 1957, Russell Kirsch, an American engineer at the National Bureau of Standards and his colleagues, created the first optical image. As a result of this discovery, the team created the building block of all visual knowledge on a computer screen, i.e. the "pixel."
The First Digital Image in the Earth and the "Pixel"
And, in 1957, to address his own question, "What would happen if machines could see the universe the way we see it? "He worked on a drum scanner at the NBS (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology). He brought a tangible image (below) of him and his newly born wife, Walden Kirsch, to the office to test his development.
With the help of his scanner and the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), the first programmable computer in the States, Kirsch was able to replicate his son's image on a computer screen.
This was the first optical image in the world that contributed to the invention of the "pixel." Compared to what we've been capturing with our current "Pixel" devices, this picture was nothing. Yet it was 1957, and no one saw a photo on a computer screen, not even a 176 x 176 image like this one.
As a result of the experiment, Kirsch and his team published a paper about it in 1957 called "Experiments in Processing Picture Information with a Digital Computer."
You can check out the study paper on the official website of the Museum of Computer History.
Nonetheless, storage was the biggest problem at the moment. Computers, back in those days, couldn't carry a ton of details, so Kirsch could just reproduce his baby's face instead of the whole image.
Now, according to new reports, the visionary engineer and computer scientist died at the age of 91 in his home in Portland. According to his wife, the cause of Kirsch 's death was front-temporal dementia.
So, three cheers on the guy who made it possible for us to see content on our computer screens. You exist in millions of "pixels" as well as in our hearts.
