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Russell Kirsch, Inventor of the Pixel, Dies at Age 91
Computer scientist Russell Kirsch died Aug. 11 at his home in Portland at age 91. Kirsch was credited with inventing the pixel and scanning the world's first digital photo.
Credit: Walden Kirsch
Russell Kirsch, a computer scientist credited with inventing the pixel and scanning the world's first digital photograph, died Aug. 11 at his home in Portland at age 91.
Born in Manhattan in 1929, Kirsch was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Hungary. Educated at the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Kirsch worked for five decades as a research scientist at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institutes of Science and Technology).
"My dad, he was a super curious guy, always asking questions," said his son, Walden Kirsch, who works at Intel in Oregon. "He was an iconoclast. When people said you can't go there or you can't do that, he did."
In 1957, Kirsch created a small, 2-by-2-inch black-and-white digital image of Walden as an infant – among the first images ever scanned into a computer, using a device created by his research team. Life magazine featured the image in a 2003 book, "100 Photographs That Changed the World," and it's now in the Portland Art Museum's collection.
"Anyone involved with computers will tell you how powerful it is for creativity," Kirsch told The Oregonian in 2007.
From OregonLive
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