SCI-TECH & ENGINEERINGOLDEST KNOWN SURVIVING PHOTOGRAPH
The earliest documented photograph still in existence was
taken by Nicéphore (born Joseph) Niépce (FRA) in 1827, using
a camera obscura. It shows the view from the window of
his home, the estate Le Gras in France’s Burgundy region.
Rediscovered in 1 952, the image is now in The Gernsheim
Collection at the University of Texas in Austin, USA.FIRST PHOTOGRAPH TO FEATURE A HUMAN
This image was taken by Louis Daguerre (FRA), c. 1838. The
long exposure necessary for early photographs meant that
the Paris street scene on the Boulevard du Temple appears
almost empty, apart from a man standing still because his
boots are being cleaned. He and the shoe-shiner are the first
humans to be captured for posterity.FIRST IMAGE POSTED
TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB
On 18 Jul 1992, computer
scientist Silvano de Gennaro
(ITA) photographed his
girlfriend Michele Muller with
her comedy doo-wop band
Les Horribles Cernettes.
A few weeks later, his
colleague Tim Berners-Lee
(UK) asked for an image to
test some new features of his
pet project, the World Wide
Web, so Silvano sent over the
picture as a 120 x 50-pixel GIF.FIRST UNDERWATER
PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT
French zoologist Louis Marie-
Auguste Boutan first used
his self-invented submarine
camera in 1893. But it was
not until 1899 that he created
a special flash, enabling
him to make an underwater
image of a recognizable
subject. Produced that year,
his portrait of Romanian
oceanographer and biologist
Emil Racovitza was taken on
a dive in Banyuls-sur-Mer in
the south of France.FIRST JPEG
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is one of the best-
known digital-image formats. It was developed to standardize
techniques for digital-image compression and is utilized in
imagery on the internet and digital cameras. The earliest images
that use the JPEG compression method are a set of four test
images used by the JPEG Group called Boats, Barbara, Toys
and Zelda, created on 18 Jun 1987 in Copenhagen, Denmark.OLDEST SURVIVING AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH
On 13 Oct 1860, James Wallace Black (USA) took this shot of
Boston in Massachusetts, USA, from the tethered Queen of
the Air hot-air balloon at an altitude of c. 2,000 ft (609 m).
The first-ever aerial photograph was taken by Nadar, aka
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (FRA), in 1858. He photographed the
French village of Petit-Bicêtre (now Petit-Clamart) from 80 m
(262 ft) in a tethered air balloon. None of his aerial shots survive.
FIRST HOLOGRAM
Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor developed the theory
of holography in 1947. However, it was the invention in 1960 of
the laser – whose coherent light could capture a holographic
image – that enabled Emmett Leith (USA) and Juris Upatnieks
(USA, b. LVA) of the University of Michigan to produce the first
hologram. Created in 1962, its main subject was a toy train.
FIRST DIGITAL IMAGE
Russell Kirsch (USA) created
this image of his son, Walden,
in 1957 at the National Bureau
of Standards in Washington,
DC, USA. At the time, Kirsch
was working on the first
internally programmable
computer in the USA, the
Standards Eastern Automatic
Computer (SEAC). He
developed equipment that
translated his picture into
binary code. The image
measured 176 by 176 pixels.
FIRST IMAGE
ON INSTAGRAM
On 16 Jul 2010, Instagram’s
co-founder and CEO Kevin
Systrom (USA) uploaded a
picture of a golden retriever
to the app, which was then
known as “Codename”. The
names of the dog and its
owner are not known, but the
foot in the picture belongs
to Systrom’s girlfriend. The
image was taken at a taco
stand named Tacos Chilakos
in Todos Santos, Mexico.