Russell Kirsch is an American engineer, born in 1929. Known as the inventor of the pixel, Kirsch is also the developer of the first digital image scanner.
Russell Kirsch was born on June 20, 1929, in Manhattan, USA - New York. Kirsch, who fit many things in his life, passed away on August 11, 2020, at the age of 91.
He graduated from Bronx Science High School in 1946. He continued his education at New York University. In 1952, he continued his education life, first at Harvard University and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1951, he took part in the team that runs the SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) in the National Bureau of Standards. SEAC entered service in 1950. It is known as the first "stored-program computer" in the USA.
With his research group, they developed the digital image scanner in 1957 to “monitor changes in density on the surfaces of photographs.” Then they did the first digital scan. They used a photomultiplier and a rotating drum to get a reflection from a small image mounted on the drum.
One of the first photos scanned was a photograph of a small child. This boy was Russell Kirsch's three-month-old son. The photo was taken at only 30,976 pixels in a 176 x 176 array in a 5cm x 5cm area. The bit depth of the image is only one bit. Modern digital cameras in use today capture millions of pixels per image.
The resulting image was black and white. The images they scanned appeared only in black and white. Later, Kirsch and his team were able to obtain the gray color by doing studies.
Later, Kirsch served at the Sturvil Corporation as director of research and became a consulting editor for the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Kirsch was also a consulting editor at Languages of Design Magazine.
Kirsch is recognized as the inventor of the pixel as a result of his work. He also suggested the Kirsch operator for edge detection. In the following years, he also worked on artificial intelligence.
Pixel is the smallest controllable unit that enables the image to be obtained in digital displays.
In 2010, he spoke to Wired Magazine about making pixels square. He said in the conversation that squaring the pixels is the sensible thing to do, that the squares are not the only logical possibility, but they still use the squares. He also added that since the day they made the pixels square, square pixels were a very stupid thing that made everyone in the world suffer.
They soon changed their minds about making pixels square. Kirsch then used variable pixels instead of squares to smooth the images.
A scanned photo of Russell Kirsch's son was selected in 2003 by Life Magazine as one of the "100 Photos That Changed the World" for his important role in the development of digital photography. The original scanned image of his son is now in the Portland Museum of Art.