Pixel inventor Russell Kirsch dies aged 91

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Pixel inventor Russell Kirsch dies aged 91
Friday 14 August 2020


Russell Kirsch Credit: AP/Press Association Images

Russell Kirsch, a computer scientist credited with inventing the pixel and scanning the world’s first digital photograph, has died aged 91.

Pixels, the digital dots used to display photos, video and more on phone and computer screens, were not an obvious innovation in 1957, when Kirsch created a small, 2-by-2-inch black-and-white digital image of his son, Walden, as an infant.

That was among the first images ever scanned into a computer, using a device created by his research team at the US National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institutes of Science and Technology).

This work “laid the foundations for satellite imagery, CT scans, virtual reality and Facebook,” said a 2010 Science News article about Kirsch.


Russell Kirsch holding the image of his son, Walden, that was scanned into the world’s first digital scanner in 1957 Credit: Jamie Francis/The Oregonian via AP, File

That first square image, that article said, measured a mere 176 pixels on a side - just shy of 31,000 pixels in total.

Today, the digital camera on the iPhone 11 can capture roughly 12 million pixels per image.

However, his pixels were not perfect. By making them square, image elements can look blocky, clunky or jagged – what we know as “pixelated”. Later Kirsch admitted it was "very foolish" to have opted for squares.

“Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch told the magazine in 2010.

“Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”

Kirsch later developed a method to smooth out images by using pixels with variable shapes instead of the squares.

Born in Manhattan in 1929, Kirsch was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary. He was educated at the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, Harvard and MIT and worked for five decades as a research scientist at the US National Bureau of Standards.

Russell Kirsch is survived by his wife of 65 years, Joan; by children Walden, Peter, Lindsey and Kara; and by four grandchildren.

Story from itv.com