The Daily Book of Photography

DAY 332

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Digital Photography

OLDER THAN YOU THINK

While we tend to think of digital photography as a distinctly late-20^th century innovation, its roots actually go back to the 1950s.

In 1957, Russell Kirsch, working for the U.S. government, created what today we would call a scanner and produced the first digital image by scanning a 5cm × 5cm photograph onto a computer. In the 1960s, NASA used digital signals to map the surface of the moon, and, in processing them later, essentially created digital-photography editing. Then came the “charged-coupled device” in 1969 (or CCD as it is commonly known), which gauges the ...