Russell Kirsch, the half-Hungarian inventor of pixel and scanning, dies at 91

Thanks to the concept behind the first scanned image of his newborn son, Russell A. Kirsch laid the foundations for a wide range of scientific developments since the 1950s.

Russell A. Kirsch was born in Manhattan on 20 June 1929 to Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary. After his studies at the New York University, Harvard, and MIT, he started working at the National Bureau of Standards where, as the head of a research group, he created the first digital image in 1957. As TechCrunch writes,

“His research was being undertaken from the perspective that computers […] could eventually simulate the human mind and perception.”

His first scanned image was a photograph of his then 3-month-old son, Walden. It was a grey-scale image of 179 by 179 pixels – a word which, created from the words picture and element, would not be used for years to come.