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History of the Selfie


What is a selfie?  A selfie is a photograph that one has taken of oneself using a camera.  Although the term is fairly new, the concept is fairly old.  At this point in history, the camera has been around for thousands of years.  In order to discover the first selfie, we need to look at the camera and when it was invented. 

THE FIRST CAMERA

A Chinese philosopher, Mo-Ti, who lived between 470 B.C.E. to 390 B.C.E., is credited with the invention of the first camera; what we know as the pinhole camera.  A pinhole camera was a dark room or dark box with a hole on one side which would allow light into the dark box.  The light would project an image on the opposite side of the box where the image was captured.  The smaller the hole, the sharper the image.  If light was too little, the image would be too dark and little detail.  If the light was too much, the image was too light and blurry.  Fifty years after its creation, Mo-Ti’s invention got the attention of another well-known philosopher, Aristotle.  Aristotle is said to have used a camera to observe sun eclipses without looking directly at the sun.  After another 1,300 years (around 1,000 A.D.), an Egyptian named Abu Ali Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, documented in his “Book of Optics” the design and properties of Mo-Ti’s camera.  During the early 1600s A.D., Johannes Kepler added a lens to the design.  Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke downsized the camera to a portable device in the 1650s.  Now that we know a little more about the camera, let’s look at where the Selfie came from and who was the first to take one.

THE FIRST SELFIE

The first selfie was taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839.  According to the Library of Congress, Cornelius may have been posing for 3 to 15 minutes due to the long exposure times for the camera he was using.  The Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna was one of the first teenagers to take a selfie and share it.  In 1914 and at age 13, Anastasia took a selfie to send to a friend.  She included a letter that said “I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror.  It was very hard as my hands were trembling”.  The process was referred to as a self-portrait, as opposed to today’s term, selfie.  The term selfie came from an Australian man named Nathan Hope.  Hope got drunk for his 21st birthday in 2002.  His lip was torn sometime during the night.  He took a photo of his lip and began sending the picture around, seeking advice on what to do.  The picture included the caption “sorry about the focus, it was a selfie”.

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