First Human Photographed

Before a photograph was a photograph, it was called a daguerreotype. Better than a Camera Obscura, the daguerreotype allowed a chemical capture of a stable image on a copper plate. While the quality was in no way comparable to the cameras in our phones today, the daguerreotype became the first success of humankind's efforts to visually capture our surroundings.

The picture above is an example of an image captured by the inventor of the process, Louis Daguerre. What was interesting about the picture above, in addition to it being an early daguerreotype, was the fact that it seems to have become the consensus for the first ever photograph of a human. Unlike the current freeze frame photography, early photographs had exposure times in excess of 10 minutes, and were better suited to landscape and cityscape photography. Which also meant that unless someone was absolutely still they would "ghost" out of the image altogether.

At the bottom-left of the picture is a man apparently getting his shoes shined, and was therefore still long enough to appear on this exposure. Thus, unwittingly, becoming one of the first two humans to ever by photographed.

Luckily, it seems that the art of long exposures to ghost out humans is very much alive and kicking.

Digital Camera Uno

What you have here, is the first ever digital camera.

In this blog post over at Kodak, Steve Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera, gives some detail into a phenomena that is so omni-present today.

Built off parts from a Super 8 movie camera, along with a nascent CCD imaging array, the camera used a digital cassette to store the images. It took 23 seconds to complete write the recorded image to the cassette. Thank God for solid state memory eh?

To play it back, a cassette reader contraption tied to a TV set. And the 8-pound camera recorded a - wait for it - 0.01 mega pixel picture. Bad enough to require an up-conversion to display it on a TV. And of course Kodak being Kodak, called it "Film-less Photography". That said, even they weren't that oblivious to the impact this would have on the future of photography. From the post...

"The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future."

There you go. 1975. First digital camera. And a paltry 0.01 megapixels.

2053? Really?

When it comes to nuclear technology, I guess I never stopped to think about all the testing that actually goes into one. I knew about all the insane nuclear weapon stockpile numbers from the cold war, but never realized that there were almost as many tested. 2053, over the period from 1945 to 1998. Including the two that were actually used in war.

Maybe it is time to be thankful for the fact that the others were merely tests. Or scared dry that there is a lot more where the first two came from.

The video below is a visualization, as part of an art project by Isao Hashimoto, and really brings the message home. And here is a link to Google Maps, showing the craters in one of the test ranges in Nevada. Another one from Wikimapia. Scary.

Via Discover Magazine. Including a spirited discussion in the comments over there.

Post # CL (Post number 150)

I built my first website back in early 2000s. It was a photo homage to an actress, who, at the time, I believed to be worth the effort. Remember this was the time when there weren't that many sites around, fewer still that were that niche. Yet I racked up 55,000 hits on the photo heavy, IP-suspect site. But look at the thing, it looks ugly. Starting with just a notepad, and I am guessing, a badly calibrated monitor, I churned out the three framed monstrosity in double quick time.

This site died, finally, when Geocities shut down. The wayback machine has the only sign of this site ever existing.

Things moved on when I got my own domain. This contained the first version of the site anarchius.org. Not as ugly as the other one, but still a template built from scratch and lacking in any form of sophistication. Using almost no images, the template relied on colors to spruce it up. And over time, it had started to look more and more clunky. And dull.

It was around this time, in May 2002, when I published by first blog post.

After dabbling around in a super simple template for a while, this became my template of choice for a number of years.

Eventually the site and the blog unified, using a template that looks a lot better (having been created by someone other than me). And I still continue to build all my pages by hand - both my blog template and my site pages. Gives me something to work on - and keeps the code clean as a whistle.

Given that this is going to officially be the post number 150, I figured this was as good a time as any to go look for some screen shots from history of the blog and the website, and reminisce.

The life and decline of WWW

The world wide web, has been one of the biggest success stories of the Internet. So much so that the two are often used synonymously. While the world wide web spawned and initially grew with the Internet, the predominant trend in recent times has been an implicit demotion of the web, in favor of the Internet. In hindsight, it seems obvious the success of the Internet would bring with it the seeds for the destruction of the world wide web.

The terms first. How is the Internet different from the world wide web or WWW? The Internet is the means to connect all of the world's computing devices together, while the WWW is that part of the Internet you access with your web-browser. The world wide web includes every website you visit, in all of its textual glory sprinkled with the innocuous yet wondrous invention - hyperlinks.

The evolution of text to hypertext is perhaps the single most powerful inventions in modern times. With the ability to embed links in text, suddenly it was possible to organize and access information in ways unheard of. A single link was all that separated any two pieces of knowledge. In fact, the two pieces of knowledge did not even have to reside on the same physical machine - as long as there was a means to connect two or more computers together, hypertext would allow anyone to access the information. With such power in the hyperlink, it was a shame not to pursue the goal of connecting all of the world's information stores together, allowing one to link to and access all the information from anywhere. Hence the Internet.

The success of the Internet beyond the initial goal of hyperlink oblivion, was its flexibility. Now that we had all these computers linked together, it was possible to exchange a lot more than just text through hyperlinks. And one did not have to limit the end points to computers. Instead you could connect PDAs, phones, music players or even refrigerators.

Initially the Internet was constrained - by lack of bandwidth. Exchanging anything more than text was painful. With the increase in bandwidth, communication was no longer limited to text. First it was images, then music. The increase in capacity contributed directly to increasing links between text and other multimedia. But this was still the days when downloading a picture meant waiting for it to arrive line-by-line across a phone line.

Even at this point, the principal means of getting to that picture or mp3 was via the world wide web, using your browser. As long as the multimedia was being linked to, the WWW was still the best way to get to it.

Thanks partly to the dot-com boom, there was a massive investment in opening up the capacity for communication across the Internet. This explosive growth in bandwidth, along with retail broadband communication, came the next era of accessing multimedia - streaming it instead of linking to it.

As the Internet grew into real-time capability, it was suddenly possible to cut out the middle man - WWW. Hypertext that began with the humble idea of linking information, had grown to assume the role of carrying multimedia to compensate for the lack of speed of the Internet, was suddenly irrelevant. It was now possible to go around the constraints and freedoms of hypertext. But there was still the need to have something to receive the streaming media - enter web applications or apps.

It is no accident that the era of the apps coincided with the growth in streaming capabilities of the Internet. Apps demand cheap bandwidth. Unlike the robustness of the WWW, apps are built around user experience. And unlike the WWW, apps allow end-to-end control. Doesn't matter if the app was built on the iPhone or popped off a browser, effectively it isolates user experience away from flexibility of the WWW to the immersive capability of the app.

The data is firmly pointing in the same direction. The above is a dated graph courtesy UC Berkeley, but showing the relative drop in bandwidth used by the web as compared to the other protocols. Updated data is available with the Wired article here. Notwithstanding very pertinent arguments to the contrary, the definitive move away from the broad set-up called WWW, into the narrower app-based is an eventuality. Something directly precipitated by the success of the Internet.