Father Of The “Pixel,” Russell Kirsch Passes Away At 91

When we look at our favorite pictures, it was millions of tiny illuminated areas that we are staring at. We called these minute illuminated areas “pixels.” And Russell Kirsch, the father of this revolutionary technology just passed away at the age of 91.

Back in 1967, Kirsch was an engineer working at the National Bureau of Standards. He and his team developed the first-ever digital photograph. From that experiment, they set the foundation of any visual information, inventing the “pixel.”

In 1957, Kirsch was looking at a drum scanner. To test his creation, he brought to the office a physical photo of him carrying his newborn son, Walden Kirsch.

Using his scanner, with the help of the States’ first programmable computer, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, Kirsch replicated his son’s image on a computer screen.

This was the first digital image in the world, leading to the pixel’s invention. This picture, of course, was nothing, when compared to what we can capture with our current devices. But then, it was in 1957 and nobody had ever seen a picture appearing on a computer screen.

In the same year, Kirsch and his team published a paper called “Experiments in Processing Pictorial Information with a Digital Computer.” The paper is kept on the Computer History Museum’s official website.

However, at the time, the biggest problem was storage. Back in those days, it was impossible for computers to hold much information. So rather than the entire picture, Kirsch could only replicate his baby’s face.

Recent reports suggest that the computer scientist and revolutionary engineer passed away in his house in Portland at 91. The cause of his death, according to his son, was frontotemporal dementia.

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