Computer scientist who scanned first digital image
Russell Kirsch was a 27year-old computer scientist and a new father when he did one day in early 1957 what many parents do, and brought a photograph of his baby to the office.
His office was the National Bureau of Standards — now the National Institute of Standards and Technology — where Mr. Kirsch was one of the few people authorized to work on the Standards Electronic Automatic Computer, or SEAC, the first programmable computer in the United States.
Although rudimentary compared with modern computers, SEAC was revolutionary for its time. Large enough to fill a room, it was used for purposes including Social Security accounting, Air Force logistics and computations related to the hydrogen bomb.
Mr. Kirsch envisioned another use for SEAC and future machines of its kind.
“What would happen,” he recalled thinking, “if computers could see the world the way we do?”
To test his question, he chose a recent photograph of himself smiling proudly at his firstborn child. The boy, just a few months old, rests in the crook of his elbow, gazing wide-eyed into the camera that captured the moment in black-andwhite.
The full image contained more information than the computer could absorb, so Mr. Kirsch snipped out a small piece containing just the baby’s face. He ran the image through a scanner and program that he and colleagues had fashioned.
The photograph was converted into an image 176 pixels by 176 pixels — a grainy shadow of the dazzling high-resolution photographs snapped today on smartphones, but nonetheless the first digital image.
Later ranked by Life magazine among the “100 photographs that changed the world,” it became the foundation for technologies including satellite imaging,
CT scans, bar codes and digital photography, according to NIST.
Mr. Kirsch died Tuesday at his home in Portland, Ore. He was 91. The cause was frontotemporal dementia, said his son Walden Kirsch, the subject of his father’s historic photograph, now age 63.
Russell Andrew Kirsch was born in Manhattan on June 20, 1929, the son of Jewish immigrants.
In addition to his work on digital imaging, Mr. Kirsch pursued research on artificial intelligence. “He was basically trying to understand how machines could acquire the knowledge that a human mind can,” Hans Oser, a mathematician who worked with Mr. Kirsch, said in an interview, drawing a distinction between artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Mr. Kirsch was married for 65 years to the former Joan Levin, an art historian with whom he used computer analysis to study the works of artists including Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Miro as well as cave art and petroglyphs around the world.
In addition to his wife and son, both of Portland, survivors include three other children: Peter Kirsch of Denver, Lindsey Kirsch of Seattle and Kara Kirsch of St. Paul, Minn.; a sister; and four grandchildren.