Pixel creator – Gry w INTERIA.PL has died

Russell Kirsch, the scientist credited with inventing the term “pixels”, without which it is difficult to imagine video games – or any electronic device with a display at all, died on August 11. The man was 91 years old, born in 1929. No reasons were given.

Kirsch studied at Harvard and the famous MIT before joining the National Institute of Standards and Technology (then known as the National Office Standardization), where he joined the SEAC team, which dealt with the first program operating in computer memory.

In 1957, he created a digital painting that was to go down in history. The square with a side length of 2 inches was perhaps small, but it consisted of pixels, with an impressive resolution of 176 × 176. At that time, however, no one had any idea that the screen sizes measured in pixels would be the “resolution”.

The man reasonably assumed that the computer would need some device that could turn the image into data that could be stored in memory. This is how the scanner was created – in the form of a rotating drum with a photomultiplier tube examining the reflections from the image.

In this way, the copy appeared on the mask placed between the photo attached to the drum and the photomultiplier tube, but already divided into small pieces – pixels. For the historic first scanned photo, Kirsch chose the image of his infant son.

Interestingly, the man never really liked his invention – and all modern technology. He reportedly said about pixels that “I started with a bad idea and this bad idea survived”. However, we are certainly grateful for the most popular method of displaying an image.

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