Imaging / Photography Timeline

In 79 CE the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the Roman coastal city of Herculaneum. Among the vast ruins preserved in lava was the library of papyrus rolls in the so-called “Villa of the Papyri”— a magnificent home thought to have been built by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. This remains the only library preserved intact from Roman times.

Because the library was buried in lava, most of the papyrus rolls are too fragile to be opened. It has required sophisticated computer technology to read the few that have been read so far, and it is hoped that an X-ray CT scanning system may allow the reading of others.

Under house arrest in Cairo, Egypt, Iraqi Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Latinized as Alhacen or Alhazen) wrote The Book of Optics (Arabic: Kitab al-Manazir‎; Latin: De Aspectibus or Opticae Thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis,)  a seven-volume treatise on optics, physics, mathematics, anatomy and psychology.

"The book had an important influence on the development of optics, as it laid the foundations for modern physical optics after drastically transforming the way in which light and vision had been understood, and on science in general with its introduction of the experimental scientific method. Ibn al-Haytham has been called the "father of modern optics", the 'pioneer of the modern scientific method,' and the founder of experimental physics, and for these reasons he has been described as the 'first scientist.'

"The Book of Optics has been ranked alongside Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as one of the most influential books in the history of physics, as it is widely considered to have initiated a revolution in the fields of optics and visual perception. It established experimentation as the norm of proof in optics, and gave optics a physico-mathematical conception at a much earlier date than the other mathematical disciplines of astronomy and mechanics.

"The Book of Optics also contains the earliest discussions and descriptions of the psychology of visual perception and optical illusions, as well as experimental psychology, and the first accurate descriptions of the camera obscura, a precursor to the modern camera. In medicine and ophthalmology, the book also made important advances in eye surgery, as it correctly explained the process of sight for the first time" (Wikipedia article on Book of Optics, accessed 04-23-2009).

Translated into Latin by an unknown scholar at the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th, Alhazen's Book of Optics enjoyed great reputation and circulated by manuscript copying to the few who could understand it during the Middle Ages. It was first edited for print publication by the German mathematician Friedrich Risner and issued in Basel by Episcopus in 1572.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1027.

Ibn al-Haitham, known in the west as Alhazen, built the first camera obscura or pinhole camera—significant in the history of optics, photography, and the history of art.

In his Book of Optics Ibnal-Haitham used the term “Al-Bayt al-Muthlim", translated in English as dark room. "In the experiment he undertook, in order to establish that light travels in time and with speed, he says: 'If the hole was covered with a curtain and the curtain was taken off, the light traveling from the hole to the opposite wall will consume time.' He reiterated the same experience when he established that light travels in straight lines. A revealing experiment introduced the camera obscura in studies of the half-moon shape of the sun's image during eclipses which he observed on the wall opposite a small hole made in the window shutters. In his famous essay 'On the form of the Eclipse' (Maqalah-fi-Surat-al-Kosuf) he commented on his observation 'The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a plane opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle'.

"In his experiment of the sun light he extended his observation of the penetration of light through the pinhole to conclude that when the sun light reaches and penetrates the hole it makes a conic shape at the points meeting at the pinhole, forming later another conic shape reverse to the first one on the opposite wall in the dark room. This happens when sun light diverges from point “ﺍ” until it reaches an aperture and is projected through it onto a screen at the luminous spot. Since the distance between the aperture and the screen is insignificant in comparison to the distance between the aperture and the sun, the divergence of sunlight after going through the aperture should be insignificant. In other words, should be about equal to. However, it is observed to be much greater when the paths of the rays which form the extremities of are retraced in the reverse direction, it is found that they meet at a point outside the aperture and then diverge again toward the sun as illustrated in figure 1. This an early accurate description of the Camera Obscura phenomenon."

"In 13th-century England Roger Bacon described the use of a camera obscura for the safe observation of solar eclipses. Its potential as a drawing aid may have been familiar to artists by as early as the 15th century; Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519 AD) described camera obscura in Codex Atlanticus. . . .

"The Dutch Masters, such as Johannes Vermeer, who were hired as painters in the 17th century, were known for their magnificent attention to detail. It has been widely speculated that they made use of such a camera, but the extent of their use by artists at this period remains a matter of considerable controversy, recently revived by the Hockney-Falco thesis. The term "camera obscura" was first used by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1604.

"Early models were large; comprising either a whole darkened room or a tent (as employed by Johannes Kepler). By the 18th century, following developments by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, more easily portable models became available. These were extensively used by amateur artists while on their travels, but they were also employed by professionals, including Paul Sandby, Canaletto and Joshua Reynolds, whose camera (disguised as a book) is now in the Science Museum (London). Such cameras were later adapted by Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot for creating the first photographs" (Wikipedia article on Camera obscura, accessed 04-24-2009).

German-Dutch lensmaker of Middelberg, Netherlands, Hans Lippershey created and disseminated designs for the first practical telescope.

"Crude telescopes and spyglasses may have been created much earlier, but Lippershey is believed to be the first to apply for a patent for his design (beating Jacob Metius by a few weeks), and making it available for general use in 1608. He failed to receive a patent but was handsomely rewarded by the Dutch government for copies of his design. The 'Dutch perspective glass', the telescope that Lippershey invented, could only magnify thrice.

"The first known mention of Lippershey's application for a patent for his invention appeared at the end of a diplomatic report on an embassy to Holland from the Kingdom of Siam sent by the Siamese king Ekathotsarot: Ambassades du Roy de Siam envoyé à l'Excellence du Prince Maurice, arrive a La Haye, le 10. septembr. 1608 ('Embassy of the King of Siam sent to his Excellence Prince Maurice, September 10, 1608'). The diplomatic report was soon distributed across Europe, leading to the experiments by other scientists such as the Italian Paolo Sarpi, who received the report in November, or the English Thomas Harriot in 1609, and Galileo Galilei who soon improved the device.

"One story behind the creation of the telescope states that two children were playing with lenses in his shop. The children discovered that images were clearer when seen through two lenses, one in front of the other. Lippershey was inspired by this and created a device very similar to today's telescope" (Wikipedia article on Hans Lippershey, accessed 03-27-2009).

While Sarpi and Harriot experimented with Lippershey's telescope prior or contemporaneously with Galileo, neither wrote or published on the subject.

In March 1610 Galileo Galilei published Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, in Venice in an edition of 550 copies. The Sidereus Nuncius described and illustrated with copperplate engravings the first astronomical observations made through a telescope. Its images provided revolutionary new information about the universe.

After learning in 1609 that a Dutchman, Hans Lippershey, had invented an instrument that made faraway objects appear closer, Galileo applied himself to discovering the principle behind this instrument and by the end of 1609 had built a telescope of about thirty power. This he probably first turned to the heavens in October 1609, with astronishing and revolutionary results. In contradiction to the doctrines of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which taught that the celestrial sphere and its planets and stars were perfect and unchanging, Galileo's telescope showed the surface of the moon was rough and mountainous, and the Milky way was composed of thickly clustered stars. In addition the telescope revealed for the first time four of Jupiter's satellites, as well as stars not visible to the naked eye.

"He sent a copy of the book, along with the telescope he had been using, to the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo II de’ Medici. Dr. [Owen] Gingerich said the pamphlet amounted to 'a job application' to the Medici family for whom, in one of history’s first examples of branding, Galileo named the four satellites of Jupiter. 'Other planets were gods or goddesses,' said Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Florence institute. 'The only humans with position in sky were Medicis.' The ploy worked, Cosimo II hired Galileo as his astronomer, elevating him from a poorly paid professor at the University of Padua to a celebrity, making the equivalent of $300,000, a year, Dr. Galluzzi said. Galileo returned the favor by giving Cosimo another telescope, clad in red leather and stamped with decorations" (Dennis Overbye, "A Telescope to the Past as Galileo Visits the U.S.", The New York Times, March 27, 2009.)

Sidereus Nuncius contained only the bare facts of Galileo's observations without any overt reference to the controversial Copernican theory, yet it aroused sensation among the European learned community, for it provided the first hard evidence that the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the universe contained inaccuracies.

It is thought that Galileo built dozens of telescopes, of which two survive, both in the Institute for the History of Science (Museo Galileo) in Florence, Italy. One covered in decorated leather, which Galileo sent to Grand Duke Cosimo II de' Medici, retains only one of its original lenses, but the other, covered only in varnished paper, contains its original functioning optics, and has its focal length labeled in Galileo's handwriting on the outside of its tube. This telescope was loaned to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for an exhibition from April to September 2009. (The online article in The New York Times includes a video showing the original telescope being unpacked in Philadelphia.)

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 855.

Robert Hooke published Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses in London. This was the first book devoted entirely to microscopical observations, and also the first book to pair its microscopic descriptions with profuse and detailed illustrations. This graphic portrayal of the hitherto unknown microcosm had an impact rivalling that of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610), which was the first book to include images of the macrocosm shown through the telescope. It was also the second book published under the auspices of the Royal Society of London.

Hooke began his observations with studies of non-living materials, such as woven cloth and frozen urine crystals, then proceeded to investigations of plant and animal life.  He published the first studies of insect anatomy, giving a lucid account of the compound eye of the fly, and illustrating the microscopic details of such structures as apian wings, flies' legs and feet, and the sting of the bee.  His famous and dramatic portraits of the flea and louse, a frightening eighteen inches long, are hardly less startling today than they must have been to Hooke's contemporaries.  His botanical observations include the first description of the plant-like form of molds, and of the honeycomb-like structure of cork, which last he described as being composed of "cellulae"— thereby coining the modern biological usage of the work "cell" to describe the basic microscopic units of tissue.

♦ You can page through a digital facsimile of the first edition of Hooke's Micrographia at the National Library of Medicine's website at this link.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1092.

German scientist, satirist and Anglophile Georg Christoph Lichtenberg discovered Lichtenberg figures, and described them in his memoir "Super nova methodo motum ac naturam fluidi electrici" investigandi," Göttinger Novi Commentarii, Göttingen, 1777.

"In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large electrophorus to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. After discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he recorded the resulting radial patterns in fixed dust. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these patterns, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern Xerography. This discovery was also the forerunner of modern day plasma physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied 2-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals" (Wikipedia article on Lichtenberg figures, accessed 06-11-2010).

On January 7, 1839 members of the Académie des Sciences first viewed examples of Daguerréotypes invented by the painter and printmaker, Louis-Jacques Daguerre.

On July 3, 1839 French  mathematician, physicist, astronomer and politician François Jean Dominique Arago made the first brief scientific announcement and explanation of Daguerre's process to the Chambre des Députés. This he repeated to the Académie des Sciences on August 19. Arago's report was published in the Comptes rendus IX (1839) 250-67.

Later in 1839 Daguerre published in Paris his first account of the process in a pamphlet called Historique et description des procédés du Daguerréotype et du diorama. Daguerre's method of fixing an image on a metal plate became the first commonly used photographic process. It produced a single positive image on a highly polished silver-plated sheet of copper.

Upon learning about the exhibition of Daguerréotypes at the Académie des Sciences on January 7, 1839, English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot hastily read a paper on January 31 to the Royal Society entitled Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves with the Aid of the Artist's Pencil.

This paper, which Talbot had printed and distributed to friends as a pamphlet in February, 1839, was the first separate publication on photography.  In it Talbot suggested that fixed negatives might be used to produce multiple positive images.

In 1835 Talbot had developed a method of fixing negative images on paper previously made light-sensitive by successive coats of sodium chloride and silver nitrate, thus becoming the first to produce permanent paper negatives. 

Gernsheim, The History of Photography (1969) Ch. 7, Gernsheim, Incunabula of British Photographic Literature (1984) no. 646. Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 2049.

English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor Sir John Herschel, invented the cyanotype, a photographic process that resulted in a cyan-blue print.

"The photosensitive compound, a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, is coated onto paper. Areas of the compound exposed to strong light are converted to insoluble blue ferric ferrocyanide, or Prussian blue. The soluble chemicals are washed off with water leaving a light-stable print."

The process was used through the 20th century by architects and engineers for the production of blueprints.

Austrian mathematician and physicist at Czech Technical University in Prague Christian Andreas Doppler published Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einige andere Gestirne des Himmels. (On the Colored Light of the Binary Stars and Some Other Stars of the Heavens). 

This was the first statement of the Doppler principle (Doppler shift, Doppler effect), which states that the observed frequency changes if either the observer or the source is moving. Doppler mentions the application of this principle to both acoustics and optics, particularly to the colored appearance of double stars and the fluctuations of variable stars and novae; however, his reasoning in the optical arguments was flawed by his erroneous belief that all stars were basically white and emitted light only or mostly in the visible spectrum. Five years later, the astronomer Hippolyte Fizeau will publish a paper announcing his independent discovery of the effect, noting the usefulness of observing spectral line shifts in its application to astronomy. This point was of such fundamental importance to Doppler's principle that it is sometimes called the Doppler-Fizeau principle. The acoustical Doppler effect was verified experimentally in 1845, and the optical effect in 1901. Modified by relativity theory, it became one of the major tools of astronomy. It also has numerous commerical applications beyond astronomy, such as in Doppler radar and in Doppler ultrasound imaging to evaluate blood flow.

William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, photographed books in his library during 1843-1844. This was undoubtedly one of the earliest photographs of books. Fox Talbot later published this photograph in The Pencil of Nature. 

"An exceptional student first at Harrow and later at Cambridge, Talbot was a man of great learning and broad interests. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany, chemistry, Egyptology, philology, and the classics were all within the scope of his investigative appetite. The Philosophical Magazine, Miscellanies of Science, Botanische Schriften, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Philological Essays, Poetae Minores Graeci, and Lanzi's Storia pittorica dell'Italia are among the volumes represented in this photograph—truly an intellectual self-portrait. The image appeared as plate 8 in The Pencil of Nature. Paradoxically, A Scene in a Library was taken out of doors, where the light was stronger" (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2005.100.172, accessed 10-25-2011).

Anna Atkins, an English amateur botanist and the first woman phtographer, published the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.  Atkins published this work privately with a handwritten text from her home in Sevenoaks, Kent, England. She issued a very small number of copies from cyanotypes contact printed by placing specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a sillhouette effect. Photographs of British Algae was the first book illustrated with photographs, and the first serious application of photography to a scientific subject. Atkins extended the work into three volumes, with the last part appearing in 1853. 

In May 2011 only seventeen copies of Atkins's book were recorded, in various states of completeness. Only the copy in the Royal Society seems to be complete as Atkins intended, with 389 plates.  Robert Hunt's copy, with 382 plates was sold at Christie's, London for £229,250 ($406,460) in May 2004.

♦ Further background information and digital facsimiles are available at the NYPL Digital Gallery.

In 1844 and 1845 French physician Alfred François Donné published Cours de microscopie compémentaire des études médicales in Paris. The folio atlas of plates, which appeared one year after the text, included twenty plates showing engraved images of 86 microdaguerreotypes taken by medical student, later physicist Léon Foucault. Because daguerreotypes were unique images they could not be duplicated by a photographic process like prints from photographic negatives, and had to be engraved for reproduction by printing.

Donné, a French public health physician, began teaching his pioneering course on medical microscopy in 1837, a time when the medical establishment remained largely unconvinced of the microscope’s usefulness as a diagnostic and investigative tool. In July 1839 Louis Daguerre, one of the inventors of photography, announced to the Académie des Sciences his “daguerreotype” process for creating finely detailed photographic images on specially prepared glass plates. Donné immediately embraced this new art, and within a few months had created not only the first documented photographic portrait in Europe, but also the earliest method of preparing etched plates from daguerreotypes. Donné resolved to incorporate photography into his microscopy course, and in February 1840 he presented to the Académie his first photographic pictures of natural objects as seen through the microscope. “It was Alfred Donné who foresaw the helpful role that projections of microscopic pictures could play during lectures on micrography” (Dreyfus, p. 38).

Over the next few years Donné continued to refine his photomicrography methods with the help of his assistant, Léon Foucault (who would go on to have a distinguished career as a physicist).  Donne's and Foucault's work was the first biomedical textbook to be illustrated with images made from photomicrographs. Among its noteworthy images are the first microphotographs of human blood cells and platelets, and the first photographic illustration of Trichomonas vaginalis, the protozoon responsible for vaginal infections, which Donné had discovered in 1836. The text volume of the Cours contains the first description of the microscopic appearance of leukemia, which Donné had observed in blood taken from both an autopsy and a living patient. His observations mark the first time that leukemia was linked with abnormal blood pathology:

"There are conditions in which white cells seem to be in excess in the blood. I found this fact so many times, it is so evident in certain patients, that I cannot conceive the slightest doubt in this regard. One can find in some patients such a great number of these cells that even the least experienced observer is greatly impressed. I had an opportunity of seeing these in a patient under Dr. Rayer at the Hôpital de la Charité. . . . The blood of this patient showed such a number of white cells that I thought his blood was mixed with pus, but in the end, I was able to observe a clear-cut difference between these cells, and the white cells . . . "(p. 135; translation from Thorburn, pp. 379-80).

The following year this abnormal blood condition was recognized as a new disease by both John Hughes Bennett (a former student of Donné’s) and Rudolf Virchow.

Norman, Morton's Medical Bibliography (1991) nos.  267.1, 3060.1. Dreyfus, Some Milestones in the History of Hematology, pp. 38-40, 54-56, 76-78. Frizot, A New History of Photography, p. 275. Gernsheim & Gernsheim, The History of Photography 1685-1914, pp. 116, 539. Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, Vol. 1, p. 1120. Wintrobe, Hematology: The Blossoming of a Science, p. 12. Bernard, Histoire illustrée de l’hématologie, passim. Thorburn, “Alfred François Donné, 1801-1878, discoverer of Trichomonas vaginalis and of leukaemia,” British Journal of Venereal Disease 50 (1974) 377-380.

British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot published The Pencil of Nature in six fascicules in London through the firm of Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans. This work was illustrated with 24 calotypes or talbotypes, a photographic process invented by Fox Talbot in 1841, in which salted paper prints were made from paper negatives. It was the "first photographically illustrated book to be commercially published," or "the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs."  

Because the work was a complete novelty to the book-buying public Fox Tablot published a brief "Notice to the Reader" explaining the nature of the images:

"The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation."

Fox Talbot originally intended to publish additional fascicules but discontinued publication after six because the work was a commercial failure.

Approximately 40 copies of original edition of The Pencil of Nature have survived.

Two facsimiles were published in print in the 20th century, one in the 21st. The text and images are also available online. 

Impressed by the exhibition of photography at the Great Exhibition, English meterologist and aeronaut James Glaisher proposed that microphotography be used as a method for document preservation. 

According to the Wikipedia article on Microform, astronomer and photography pioneer Sir John Herschel supported this view in 1853.

Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851. Reports by the Juries (1852).

Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. 331.

In London Paul Pretsch patented a process called "photo-galvanography" for the printed reproduction of photographs.

The first print that Pretsch issued was called "Scene in Gaeta after the Explosion." It was "the first relief half-tone and the first commercial use of half-tone" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions Held at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London [1963] no. 629).

In 1856 photographer Paul Pretsch, inventor (1854) of the half-tone process, which he called photo-galvanography, issued a book entitled Photographic Art Treasures. This was the first book of printed reproductions of photographs as distinct from a book illustrated with pasted-in original photographs.

"Photographic Art Treasures was planned as a series of monthly editions, each part containing four photogalvanographed prints. The Company naturally hoped to become a profitable business, but it had a higher purpose. The ‘New Era in Art’, as it was proclaimed, wanted to enable ordinary people for the first time to see and have in their own homes reproductions of great works. Part I had emerged in November of ’56, Part II in January 1857, but thereon slowed to a more realistic rate of every alternate month.

"Fenton provided the bulk of the prints, but he did engage other notable photographers – Lake Price, Reilander, Cundall and Howlett, Henry White, Lebbin Colls, R.F. Barnes. Besides printing their photographs, there were copies of engravings and famous paintings. Reactions to photogalvanography varied, from ecstatic praise to grumbling complaints. Partly these new prints added to the debate over whether photographs were Art or Science. Could they be compared to painted masterpieces, or were they mere chemical manipulation? In the case of Pretsch’s process, there were added concerns over the use of re-touching. Perfect photographs could produce perfect plates, but there was hot debate over how much some of the prints had to be assisted by further work. Any extra engraving added to the lengthy process (of about six weeks), and, of course the cost. Photographic Art Treasures were never cheap (retailing for mid-range Proof Editions at 7/6 ). Extra prints and stereographs on offer were also slow to reach fruition, and altogether sales were disappointing. They did achieve for the first time half tones in print, and they were indeed permanent, as opposed to often deteriorating photographs. However, accumulating problems added to the initial difficulties, and by Part V that summer, production ceased.

"Pretsch’s woes had been added to in 1857 with another legal wrangle, this one initiated by the ever-litigious Fox Talbot. It was claimed part of Pretsch’s method infringed Talbot’s own Patent of 1852. Eventually, Pretsch was unable to further contest the action as the Company went bust with debts of about £4,000. At some point during that year he seemed to have travelled back to Vienna, working on a series of large format views of the townscape, which together made up a 360 degree panorama. He did however continue to reside in London, and to improve his processes. Pretsch tried without success (as did Swan and Woodbury) to adapt photogravure to cylindrical presses, but mainly concentrated on the lithographic stone application of his processes. In this guise he collaborated with De la Rue on some cartographic and scenic prints. . . ." (Paul William Morgan, "Paul Pretsch, Photogalvanography and Photographic Art Treasures," http://www.photogravure.com/resources/texts_pdfs/PhotographicArtTreasures.pdf

In collaboration with balloon navigator Samuel A. King on King's hot-air balloon, the "Queen of the Air," American photographer James Wallace Black photographed Boston from a tethered balloon at 1,200 feet, producing 8 plates of glass negatives, 10 1/16 x 7 15/16 in.

One good print resulted, which Black titled "Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It." This was the first clear aerial image of a city.  

The original photograph is preserved in the Boston Public Library. This photograph is especially significant because much of the area photographed was destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

On January 11, 1863 the USS Hatteras, an iron-hulled steamship converted into a gunboat by the U.S. Navy, was taken by surprise and sunk in an engagement  with the disguised Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, approximately 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas.

The hull of Hatteras rests in approximately 60 ft (18 m) of water  and is buried under about 3 ft (0.91 m) of sand. Her steam engine and two iron paddle wheels remain on the ocean bottom. The wreck is monitored to ensure that it is not damaged by oil and gas development in the area.

On January 11, 2013, 150 years after the battle, a 3-D sonar map was released by NOAA's (the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, together with ExploreOcean, Teledyne Blueview, and Northwest Hydro showed never-before seen details of the USS Hatteras, the only Union warship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War.

During the four and a half months Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War normal channels of communication were interrupted and the only way for the provincial government in Tours to communicate with Paris was by pigeon post.

French photographer and inventor René Dagron "proposed to the authorities to use his microfilming process to carry the messages by carrier pigeons. Rampont, the man in charge of the carrier pigeon program, agreed and a contract was signed on 11 November. According to the contract Dagron was to be paid 15 francs per 1000 characters photographed. A clause in the contract, signed by an official named Picard, gave Dagron the title of "chief of the photomicroscopic correspondence postal service" mentioning in French: 'M. Dagron a le titre de chef de service des correspondences postales photomicroscopiques. Il relève directement du Directeur Général des Postes,' which translates as 'Mr. Dagron has the title of the chief of the photomicroscopic correspondence postal service. He reports directly to the Director General of the Post Office.'

"After a period of difficulties and through hardships brought on by the war and the lack of equipment, Dagron finally achieved a photographic reduction of more than 40 diameters. The microfilms so produced weighed approximately 0.05 grams each and a pigeon was able to carry up to 20 at a time. Up to that point a page of a message could be copied in a microfilm approximately measuring 37 mm by 23 mm but Dagron was able to reduce this to a size of approximately 11 mm by 6 mm which was a significant reduction in the area of the microphotograph.

"Dagron photographed pages of newspapers in their entirety which he then converted into miniature photographs. He subsequently removed the collodion film from the glass base and rolled it tightly into a cylindrical shape which he then inserted into miniature tubes that were transported fastened on the wings of pigeons. Upon receipt the microphotograph was reattached to a glass frame and was then projected by magic lantern on the wall. The message contained in the microfilm could then be transcribed or copied. By 28 January 1871, when Paris and the Government of National Defense surrendered, Dagron had delivered 115,000 messages to Paris by carrier pigeon" (Wikipedia article on René Dagron, accessed 04-26-2009).

J. D. Hayhurst, The Pigeon Post into Paris 1870-1871 (1970) provides a comprehensive account, and reproduces a number of original documents including photomicrographs.

In 1872 Charles Darwin issued The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals through his publisher, John Murray. This book, which contained numerous wood-engraved text illustrations, was also illustrated with seven heliotype plates of photographs by pioneering art photogapher Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and was the only book by Darwin illustrated with photographs.

“With this book Darwin founded the study of ethology (animal behavior) and conveyance of information (communication theory) and made a major contribution to psychology” (DSB). Written as a rebuttal to the idea that the facial muscles of expression in humans were a special endowment, the work contained studies of facial and other types of expression (sounds, erection of hair, etc.) in man and mammals, and their correlation with various emotions such as grief, love, anger, fear and shame. The results of Darwin’s investigations showed that in many cases expression is not learned but innate, and enabled Darwin to formulate three principles governing the expression of emotions—relief of sensation or desire, antithesis, and reflex action.

American antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer Henry Stevens published an auction catalogue of books, manuscripts, maps, and charts verbosely titled as follows:

Bibliotheca geographica & historica or a catalogue of a nine days sale of rare & valuable ancient and modern books maps charts manuscripts autograph letters et cetera illustrative of historical geography & geographical history general and local. . . collected used and described. With an introduction on the progress of geography and notes annotatiunculae [sic] on sundry subjects together with an essay upon the Stevens system of photobibliography. Part I. To be dispersed by auction . . . [in] London the 19th to 29th November 1872.

In his essay introductory to the catalogue entitled Photobibliography. A Word on Catalogues and How to Make Them Stevens calls for "A Central Bibliographical Bureau" which would produce standard bibliographical descriptions of items that could be used by other cataloguers and bibliographers.  Analogous to what later became national union catalogues of books, Stevens imagined that this could "be made self-supporting or even remunerative, like the Post Office."  He also called for a standardized system of recording reduced size images called "photograms" of books according to "one uniform scale." This would reduce "all the titles, maps, woodcuts, or whatever is desired to copy" to fit the images onto standardized filing cards on which bibliographical details could be written by hand, to spare the bibliographer the time and effort of transcribing title pages.  Negatives would be stored compactly, and prints made for reproduction in printed catalogues, etc. As examples Stevens had an albumen print of a title page pasted in as the frontispiece of the auction catalogue, plus a small circular photograph of "Ptolemy's World by Mercator" pasted onto the title page.   Stevens noted the he also made available a few copies of the auction catalogue on thicker paper with about 400 pasted-on "photograms."

Stevens later expanded on this idea in a paper entitled "Photobibliography, or a Central Bibliographical Clearing-House" presented to the 1877 Conference of Librarians held in London (see "Transactions and Proceedings of the Conference", pp. 70-81).

In 1878 Stevens published privately a 16mo pamphlet of 49pp. entitled, Photo-Bibliography; or, a Word on Printed Card Catalogues of old, rare, beautiful, and costly books, and how to make them on a Co-operative System; and Two Words on the Establishment of a Central Bibliographical Bureau, or Clearing-house, for Librarians.  Bigmore & Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing (1880) III, 401.

In 1877 Austrian physicists Ernst Mach and P. Salcher in Prague published "Photographische Fixirung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge," Sitzungsber. k. Akad. Wiss., math.-naturwiss. Classe, 95 (1887) 764-80. The paper reproduced the first photograph of a shock wave in front of an object (in this case a bullet) moving at supersonic speed, and the first mathematical formula describing the physics of this wave.

“The angle α, which the shock wave surrounding the envelope of an advancing gas cone makes with the direction of its motion, was shown to be related to the velocity of sound ν and the velocity of the projectile ω as sinα = ν/ω when ω > ν. After 1907, following the work of Ludwig Prandtl at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Strömungsforschung in Göttingen, the angle α was called the Mach angle. Recognizing that the value of ω/ν (the ratio of the speed of an object to the speed of sound in the undisturbed medium in which the object is traveling) was becoming increasingly significant in aerodynamics for high-speed projectile studies, J. Ackeret in his inaugural lecture in 1929 as Privatdozent at the Eidgenössischen Technische Hochschule, Zürich, suggested the term ‘Mach number’ for this ratio" (DSB).

Anderson, History of Aerodynamics, 376. 

In 1877 Czech painter, photographer and illustrator Karel Václav Klíč (Karl Klietsch) became one of the inventors of photogravure.

"The earliest forms of photogravure were developed in the 1830s by the original pioneers of photography itself, Henry Fox Talbot in England and Nicéphore Niépce in France. They were seeking a means to make prints that would not fade, by creating photographic images on plates that could then be etched. The etched plates could then be printed using a traditional printing press. These early images were among the first photographs, pre-dating daguerreotypes and the later wet-collodion photographic processes. Fox Talbot worked on extending the process in the 1850s and patented it in 1852 ('photographic engraving') and 1858 ('photoglyphic engraving'). Photogravure in its mature form was developed in 1878 by Czech painter Karel Klíč, who built on Talbot's research. This process, the one still in use today, is called the Talbot-Klič process" (Wikipedia article on photogravure, accessed 02-05-2012).

Lawyer, Swedenborgian, poet, agent for Canadian emmigration, economist, and amateur petrologist in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany Otto Hahn published Die Meteorite (Chondrite) und ihre Organismen with 32 plates containing 144 images of photomicrographs of cross-sections of meteorites.

Hahn claimed that the mysterious structures shown in his photographs were  evidence of fossilized plants and simple animals, carried within meteorites from extra-terrestrial origins.

Though other scientists realized that Hahn had confused mineral structures with organic structures, it was claimed, without concrete substantiation, that Darwin enthusiastically endorsed Hahn's interpretation, even making an uncharacteristic reference to God in the context. See The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online at this link (accessed 05-28-2009). Darwin did own copies of Hahn's works and may also have visited with Hahn at Down House.

My thanks to Jörn Koblitz of MetBase for this reference.

French chemist, meteorologist, aviator and editor Gaston Tissandier published La photographie en ballon.  This pamphlet included a frontispiece consisting of an original photographic print by Jacques Ducom mounted on stiff card with a tissue overlay key. The key was thought necessary to explain the photograph because people were completely unaccustomed to looking at images from an aerial point of view.

The history of aerial photography began in 1858, when the photographer Nadar took the first photographs from a balloon. His results were only partially successful, as were those of other experimenters who followed him, and it was not until 1878, when factory-made gelatin dry plates were introduced, that aerial photography came into its own. Using gelatin plates, which were twenty times faster than the old wet-collodion plates, the photographer Paul Desmarets obtained two birds-eye views of Rouen in 1880 from a balloon at 4,200 feet. However, Desmarets' results were surpassed five years later by Jacques Ducom, who, in a balloon navigated by Gaston Tissandier, was able to take superb aerial photographs of Paris from a height of 1,800 feet.

"Ducom's view of the Ile Saint-Louis, Paris from 1,800 ft leaves absolutely nothing to be desired. Through a magnifying glass people can be counted on the bridge. The exposure of this and the other photographs taken on this flight was 1/50 second, using a specially constructed guillotine shutter which was opened pneumatically and closed automatically with a rubber spring" (Gernsheim & Gernsheim, The History of Photography 1685-1914 p. 508). Tissandier's La photographie en ballon records his and Ducom's achievements in aerial photography, and also surveys the work of Nadar, Desmarets, Shadbolt, Triboulet, Pinard, Weddel and other aerial photographers. The preface mentions the pioneering aerial photograph of Boston taken in 1860 by J. W. Black from a tethered balloon at 1,200 feet. Tissandier, who saw a print of Black's photograph, described it as "assurément fort curieuse, mais comme les précédentes elle manque de netteté et semble en outre avoir été prise  très faible hauteur" (p. vi). Gernsheim & Gernsheim, pp. 507-8. Frizot, A New History of Photography, p. 391.

On September 5, 1886 Le Journal Illustré in Paris published on pp. 284-88 "L'Art de vivre cent ans. Trois entretiens avec Monsieur Chevreul." This appeared in Vol. 23, No. 36 of the periodical.  Besides the portrait of Chevreul on the cover, the article included  half-tone reproductions of a series of twelve unposed photographs taken on August 18, 1886 by photographer Paul Nadar of his father, the photographer and aeronaut Félix Nadar, interviewing the chemist and sceptic Michel Eugène Chevreul on Chevreul's 100th birthday. This was the first photographic interview, sometimes called the first media interview. 

In front of the camera, Nadar and Chevreul discussed photography, color theory, Molière and Pasteur, the scientific method, the crazy ideas of balloonists, and – of course – how to live for 100 years. It was a lively and interesting conversation between two legends of the 19th century: one born before the French revolution; the other destined to see the marvels of the airplane and motion pictures.  

In 2012 ABC Australia made a documentary film re-creating the interview in the style of an early motion picture.  In November 2012 this 27 minute film was downloadable at this link: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/artists/michel-chevreul-felix-nadar-the-first-interview/default.htm.

Auer, Paul Nadar. Le premier interview photographique. Chevreul. Félix Nadar. Paul Nadar (1999), included a reduced-size fold-out reproduction of the issue of Le Journal Illustré in which the photo-interview was published so that the images could be viewed side-by-side in sequence.

Inventor Elisha Gray of Highland Park, Illinois received the first of six patents for the Telautograph, an early precursor of the fax machine.  

The telautograph transmitted electrical impulses recorded by potentiometers at the sending station to servomechanisms attached to a pen at the receiving station, reproducing a drawing or signature made by the sender at the receiving station.  It was the first device to transmit drawings to a stationary sheet of paper; previous inventions in Europe had used rotating drums to record these transmissions.

In an interview in The Manufacturer & Builder (Vol. 24: No. 4 (1888) 5–86) Gray made this statement:

"By my invention you can sit down in your office in Chicago, take a pencil in your hand, write a message to me, and as your pencil moves, a pencil here in my laboratory moves simultaneously, and forms the same letters and words in the same way. What you write in Chicago is instantly reproduced here in fac-simile. You may write in any language, use a code or cipher, no matter, a fac-simile is produced here. If you want to draw a picture it is the same, the picture is reproduced here. The artist of your newspaper can, by this device, telegraph his pictures of a railway wreck or other occurrences just as a reporter telegraphs his description in words. The telautograph became very popular for the transmission of signatures over a distance, and in banks and large hospitals to ensure that doctors' orders and patient information were transmitted quickly and accurately" (quoted in Wikipedia article on Telautograph, accessed 03-02-2011).

Gray's patents on the telautograph are:

Gray, Elisha. "Art of Telegraphy", United States Patent 386,814, July 31, 1888.

Gray, Elisha. "Telautograph", United States Patent 386,815, July 31, 1888.

Gray, Elisha. "Telautograph", United States Patent 461,470, October 20, 1891.

Gray, Elisha. "Art of and Apparatus for Telautographic Communication", United States Patent 461,472, October 20, 1891.

Gray, Elisha. "Telautograph", United States Patent 491,347, February 7, 1893.

Gray, Elisha. "Telautograph", United States Patent 494,562, April 4, 1893.

Jean Renard Ward, History of Pen and Gesture Computing http://rwservices.no-ip.info:81/pens/biblio70.html#Gray1888b, accessed 03-02-2011

Inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman of Rochester, New York used Cellulose Nitrate as a base for photographic roll film. Cellulose nitrate was used for photographic and professional 35mm motion picture film until the 1950s, eventually creating one of the most dramatic problems in the preservation of media.

"It is highly inflammable and also decomposes to a dangerous condition with age. When new, nitrate film could be ignited with the heat of a cigarette; partially decomposed, it can ignite spontaneously at temperatures as low as 120 F (49C). Nitrate film burns rapidly, fuelled by its own oxygen, and releases toxic fumes.

"Decomposition: There are five stages in the decomposition of nitrate film:

"(i) Amber discolouration with fading of picture.
"(ii) The emulsion becomes adhesive and films stick together; film becomes brittle.
"(iii) The film contains gas bubbles and gives off a noxious odour
"(iv) The film is soft, welded to adjacent film and frequently covered with a viscous froth
"(v) The film mass degenerates into a brownish acrid powder.

"Film in the first and second stages can be copied, as may parts of films at the third stage of decomposition. Film at the fourth or fifth stages is useless and should be immediately destroyed by your local fire brigade because of the dangers of spontaneous combustion and chemical attack on other films. Contact your local environmental health officer about this.

"It has been estimated that the majority of nitrate film will have decomposed to an uncopiable state by the year 2000, though archives are now deep-freezing film."

Because physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had his lab notes burned after his death there are conflicting accounts of the discovery, but this is a likely reconstruction: while investigating cathode rays with a fluorescent screen painted with barium platinocyanide and a Crookes tube, which he had wrapped in black cardboard so the visible light from the tube wouldn't interfere, Röntgen, then teaching at the University of Würzburg, noticed a faint green glow from the screen, about one meter away. The invisible rays coming from the tube to make the screen glow were passing through the cardboard. He found they could also pass through books and papers on his desk.

Upon investigation Röntgen found that the fluorescence was caused by unknown rays, originating from the spot where cathode rays hit the glass wall of the vacuum tube. These unknown rays he temporarily designated X-rays.

Röntgen discovered the medical use of X-rays when he saw a picture of his wife's hand on a photographic plate formed due to X-rays on December 22, 1895. This inadvertent photograph of his wife's hand was the first X-ray photograph of a part of the human body.

In his initial report on the discovery Röntgen described the rays' photographic properties and their amazing ability to penetrate all substances, even living flesh. Although he was unable to determine the true physical nature of the rays, Röntgen was certain that he had discovered something entirely new.  He published his initial report, "Eine neue Art von Strahlen," in the relatively obscure Sitzungs-Bericht der physiikalisch-medicinischen Gesellschaft zu Würburg at the end of December 1895. The advantage of publishing in this obscure journal was that Röntgen obtained extremely rapid publication. The publishers of the journal issued offprints of the paper for commercial sale. These offprints went through several printings, reflecting unusually wide interest in the discovery from the international scientific and medical community. X-rays were among the most rapidly adopted and exploited scientific discoveries. Within a year roughly 1000 publications appeared on the subject.

For this discovery Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. 1841.

Electrical engineer Arthur Korn of Munich invented an effective system of telephotography, or fax, called the Bildtelegraph.

Bildtelegraph became "widespread in continental Europe especially since a widely noticed transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908, used until the wider distribution of the radiofax. Its main competitors were the Bélinograf by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s the Hellschreiber, invented in 1929 by Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission" (Wikipedia article on Fax, accessed 04-22-2009).

In 1907 engineer Robert Goldschmidt and Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist Paul Otlet published "Sur une forme nouvelle du livre-- le livre microphotographique" in l'Institut international de bibliographie bulletin. In this paper they "proposed the livre microphotographique as a way to alleviate the cost and space limitations imposed by the codex format. Otlet’s overarching goal was to create a World Center Library of Juridical, Social and Cultural Documentation, and he saw microfiche as way to offer a stable and durable format that was inexpensive, easy to use, easy to reproduce, and extremely compact" (Wikipedia article on Microform, accessed 04-26-2009). 

Using funds supplied by J. Pierpont Morgan, entrepreneur and photographer Edward S. Curtis began publication and sale by subscription in Seattle, Washington, of The North American Indian, Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska.

The massive work was written and illustrated by Curtis, and edited by anthropologist Frederick Webb Hodge. Volume one contained an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. The original publication project was intended to occur over five years.  Twenty-three years later the work was finally complete,  in 20 volumes of text and illustrations, and 20 large portfolios, including 723 leaves of photogravure reproductions of photographs.

"This publication follows the nineteenth-century Euro-American tradition of capturing the 'otherness' of indigenous American Indian life in photography and narrative chronicles. It is set apart by its ambitious scale, and by the striking effect of its images, which are essentially contrived reconstructions rather than true documentation.

"Originally planned for five years, the complicated project was slowed by prohibitive expenses. Public reception was mixed. Less than half of 500 projected sets were printed. Scholars, while interested in staff notes on vocabulary and lore, were dubious of Curtis’s methods of observation. In the 1970s the photographs began to enjoy a nostalgic revival in reprints, and have had a lasting, if controversial, influence on views of the American Indian" (http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/aboutwork.html).

"The lavishly illustrated volumes were printed on the finest paper (Dutch etching stock or Japanese tissue paper) and bound in expensive leather, making the price prohibitive for all but the most avid collectors and libraries.

"Subscriptions started at $3000 on the Van Gelder paper in 1907; by 1924 the base price had risen to $4200.

"Although the plan was to sell 500 sets, it appears that Curtis secured just over 220 subscriptions over the course of the project, and printed less than 300 sets.

"In 1935 the assets of the project were liquidated, and the remaining materials were sold to the Charles Lauriat Company, a rare book dealer in Boston. Lauriat acquired nineteen unsold sets of The North American Indian, thousands of individual prints, sheets of unbound paper, and the handmade copper photogravure plates. The book dealer printed a sales brochure and sold nearly seventy more sets at the reduced price of $1245 each. The sets sold apparently included the nineteen remaining original sets plus additional ones made up from loose sheets and newly printed plates" (http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/description.html).

Austrian mathematician Johann Radon, professor at Technische Universität Wien, introduced the Radon transform. He also demonstrated that the image of a three-dimensional object can be constructed from an infinite number of two-dimensional images of the object.

About sixty-five years later Radon's work was applied in the invention of computed tomography.

Among the experimental results predicted by Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity was the bending of light by massive bodies due to the curvature of spacetime (space-time) in their vicinity. To test this prediction, Frank Watson Dyson, the Astronomer Royal, and astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington  organized two expeditions—one to Principe Island off West Africa, and the other to Sobral in Brazil—for the purpose of observing the solar eclipse on May 29, 1919; the sun served as the “massive body,” and an eclipse was necessary in order to observe the light coming from other stars.

“The results were in agreement with Einstein’s prediction, the Sobral result being 1.98 ± 0.12 arcsec and the Principe result 1.61 ± 0.3 arcsec [about twice the amounts predicted by Newtonian theory]. Because of the technical difficulty of these observations, the precise value of the deflection remained a controversial issue, which was not laid to rest until the development of radio interferometric techniques in the 1970s” (Twentieth Century Physics III, 1722-23).

On November 6, 1919  Dyson reported to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society concerning A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919. The paper, reproducing photographs of the eclipse made by Eddington, was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1920.

In response to the paper, the president of the Royal Society, Sir J.J.Thomson, said, “This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day, and it is fitting that it should be announced at a meeting of the society so closely connected with him. . . . The result [is] one of the highest achievements of human thought” (quoted by Pais, Subtle is the Lord, 305). 

On November 7 confirmation of Einstein’s discovery was headlined in The Times of London, and on November 9 in The New York Times.  This article was copied or adapted by newspapers all over the world, and it had the effect of turning Einstein, whose fame had previously been limited to the theoretical physics community, into a world-famous celebrity.  For the rest of his life Einstein remained the world’s most famous scientist, and relativity remained the puzzling, but fascinating subject that most people did not believe they could understand.

Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, working at Westinghouse Laboratories in Pittsburgh, patented the iconoscope, the first electronic television camera. His design, however, was incomplete:

"Vladimir Zworykin is also sometimes cited as the father of electronic television because of his invention of the iconoscope in 1923 and his invention of the kinescope in 1929. His design was one of the first to demonstrate a television system with all the features of modern picture tubes. His previous work with Rosing on electromechanical television gave him key insights into how to produce such a system, but his (and RCA's) claim to being its original inventor was largely invalidated by three facts: a) Zworykin's 1923 patent presented an incomplete design, incapable of working in its given form (it was not until 1933 that Zworykin achieved a working implementation), b) the 1923 patent application was not granted until 1938, and not until it had been seriously revised, and c) courts eventually found that RCA was in violation of the television design patented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, whose lab Zworykin had visited while working on his designs for RCA. 

"The controversy over whether it was first Farnsworth or Zworykin who invented modern television is still hotly debated today. Some of this debate stems from the fact that while Farnsworth appears to have gotten there first, it was RCA that first marketed working television sets, and it was RCA employees who first wrote the history of television. Even though Farnsworth eventually won the legal battle over this issue, he was never able to fully capitalize financially on his invention" (http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Colour-television, accessed 12-22-2009).

In 1925 Robert B. Goldschmidt and Paul Otlet published "La Conservation et la diffusion internationale de la pensée" as publication no. 144 of the Institut international de bibliographie (Brussels). This work described their plans for a massive library where each volume existed as master negatives and positives on microform, and where items were printed on demand for interested patrons.

Musicians Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes developed Kodachrome, the first color transparency film. Kodachrome 16mm movie film was released for sale in 1935, and in 1936 Kodachrome 35mm still and 8mm movie film were released. To some it was the best slide and movie film ever produced.

Kodak produced the film and the chemical required to develop it from 1935 to 2009, by which time digital photography had, for all intents and purposes, replaced film photography.

According to the The New York Times, the last remaining roll of Kodachrome was developed on at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas on December 30, 2010.

American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney Chester F. Carlson invented xerography, originally called electrophotography in Astoria, Queens, New York. Xerography did not become a commercial success until the wide adoption of the xerographic copier first introduced in 1949.

The Bettmann Archive, founded in New York in 1936 by Otto Bettmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, contained 15,000 images by 1938.  Bettmann later characterized this period of time as "the beginning of the visual age."

By 1980, the year before Bettmann sold the archive to the Kraus-Thomson Organization, the archive contained 2,000,000 images, carefully selected for their historical value, mainly under the five categories of world events, personalities, lifestyles, advertising art, and art and illustrations.

In 1984 the Kraus-Thomson Organization acquired the extensive United Press International (UPI) collection, containing millions of worldwide news and lifestyle photographs taken by photographers working for United Press International, International News Photos, Acme Newspictures, and Pacific and Atlantic.

In 1995 Corbis, a company controlled by Bill Gates, bought the Bettmann Archive.

"Beginning in 1997, Corbis spent five years selecting images of maximum historical value and saleability for digitization. More than 1.3 million images (26% of the collection) have been edited and 225,000 have been digitized. Because of this effort, more images from the Bettmann Archive are available now than ever before.

"In 2002, the Archive was moved to a state-of-the-art, sub-zero film preservation facility in western Pennsylvania. The 10,000-square-foot underground storage facility is environmentally-controlled, with specific conditions (minus -20°C, relative humidity of 35%) calculated to preserve prints, color transparencies, negatives, photographs, enclosures, and indexing systems" (http://www.corbis.com/BettMann100/Archive/Preservation.asp, accessed 01-17-2010).

On May 25, 1940 Presbyterian minister and president of Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, Thornwell Jacobs sealed the Oglethorpe Atlanta Crypt of Civilization in a cermony broadcast on Atlanta's WSB radio.  It was intended to be opened on May 28, 8113 CE.

Modelled after a chamber in an Egyptian pyramid, the Crypt of Civilization was a subterranean chamber, twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and ten feet high. Among the many elements of the time capsule were  microfilm media (film and thin metal) used to store written information, recorded sound, and moving pictures in the capsule. Apparently little or no print on paper material was included even though by the time of the creation of the capsule there was already sufficient evidence that print on paper, or writing on parchment, had survived for several thousand years, while microfilm or microform media was new and untested for durability.

"In this room had been a swimming pool, the foundation of which was impervious to water. The floor was raised with concrete with a heavy layer of damp proofing applied. The gallery's extended granite walls were lined with vitreous porcelain enamel embedded in pitch. The crypt had a two-foot thick stone floor and a stone roof seven feet thick. Jacobs consulted the Bureau of Standards in Washington for technical advice for storing the contents of the crypt. Inside would be sealed stainless steel receptacles with glass linings, filled with the inert gas of nitrogen to prevent oxidation or the aging process. A stainless steel door would seal the crypt."

"Articles on the crypt in the New York Times caught the attention of Thomas Kimmwood Peters (1884-1973), an inventor and photographer of versatile experience. Peters had been the only newsreel photographer to film the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. He had worked at Karnak and Luxor, Peters was also the inventor of the first microfilm camera using 35 millimeter film to photograph documents. In 1937 Jacobs appointed Peters as archivist of the crypt." 

"From 1937 to 1940, Peters and a staff of student assistants conducted an ambitious microfilming project. The cellulose acetate base film would be placed in hermetically sealed receptacles. Peters believed, based on the Bureau of Standards testing, that the scientifically stored film would last for six centuries; he took however, as a method of precaution, a duplicate metal film, thin as paper. Inside the crypt are microfilms of the greatest classics, including the Bible, the Koran, the Iliad, and Dante's Inferno. Producer David O. Selznick donated an original copy of the script of 'Gone With the Wind.' There are more than 640,000 pages of microfilm from over eight hundred works on the arts and sciences. Peters also used similar methods for capturing and for storing still and motion pictures. Voice recordings of political leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt were included, as were voice recordings of Popeye the Sailor and a champion hog caller. To view and to hear these picture and sound records, Peters placed in the vault electric machines, microreaders, and projectors. In the event that electricity would not be in use in 8113 A.D., there is in the crypt a generator operated by a windmill to drive the apparatus as well as a seven power magnifier to read the microbook records by hand. The first item one would see upon entering the chamber is a thoughtful precaution-a machine to teach the English language so that the works would be more readily decipherable if found by people of a strange tongue.

"Thornwell Jacobs envisioned the crypt as a synoptic compilation and thus aimed for a whole 'museum' of not only accumulated formal knowledge of over six thousand years, but also 1930s popular culture. The list of items in the crypt is seemingly endless. All of the items were donated, with contributors as diverse as King Gustav V of Sweden and the Eastman Kodak Company. Some of the more curious items Peters included in the crypt were plastic toys - a Donald Duck, the Lone Ranger, and a Negro doll, as well as a set of Lincoln Logs. Peters also arranged with Anheuser Busch for a specially sealed ampule of Budweiser beer. The chamber of the crypt when finally finished in the spring of 1940, resembled a cell of an Egyptian pyramid, cluttered with artifacts on shelves and on the floor" (http://www.oglethorpe.edu/about_us/crypt_of_civilization/history_of_the_crypt.asp, accessed 04-22-2011). 

In 1944 American writer, poet, editor, inventor, genealogist, librarian and director of Wesleyan's Olin Memorial Library Fremont Rider published The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library.

In this unusually well designed and produced book for its time Rider detailed the increasing shortage of space in research libraries, and described how his invention of the microcard, an opaque microform, would help to solve this problem. He also claimed that American research libraries were doubling in size every sixteen years—an assertion later proved incorrect.

The Fotosetter, the first phototypesetter, was invented.

The first phototypesetters were mechanical devices that replaced the metal type matrices with matrices carrying the image of the letters. They replaced the caster of hot metal typesetting machines with a photographic unit.

Hungarian electrical engineer and physicist Dennis Gabor, working at British Thomson-Houston, Rugby, England invented holography.

"Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object was still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimensional. Holograms can also be made using other types of waves. The technique of holography can also be used to optically store, retrieve, and process information. While holography is commonly used to display static 3-D pictures, it is not yet possible to generate arbitrary scenes by a holographic volumetric display" (Wikipedia article on holography, accessed 04-26-2009).

In 1949 the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York introduced the Model A xerographic copier, the first commercial electrophotographic copier. 

"Manually operated, it was also known as the Ox Box. An improved version, Camera #1, was introduced in 1950" (Wikipedia article on Xerox 914, accessed 04-21-2009).

The company renamed itself Haloid Xerox in 1958, and shortened its name to Xerox Corporation in 1961.

William H. Sweet and Gordon L. Brownell at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, described the first positron imaging device, and and the first attempt to record three dimensional data in positron detection in their paper entitled "Localization of brain tumors with positron emitters',' Nucleonics XI (1953) 40-45. This was the beginning of positron emission tomography (PET).

"Despite the relatively crude nature of this imaging instrument, the brain images were markedly better than those obtained by other imaging devices. It also contained several features that were incorporated into future positron imaging devices. Data were obtained by translation of two opposed detectors using coincidence detection with mechanical motion in two dimensions and a printing mechanism to form a two-dimensional image of the positron source. This was our first attempt to record three-dimensional data in positron detection" (Brownell, A History of Positron Imaging [1999], accessed 12-25-2008)

Inge Edler and Carl Hellmuth Hertz at Lund University in Sweden obtained the first recording of the ultrasound echo from the heart. This was the beginning of echocardiography from which diagnostic sonography, or medical ultrasonography, evolved.

"The principle for echocardiography is as follows. The vibrations in a piezoelectric crystal create a beam of high frequency sound waves that are transmitted into the chest. When the waves pass an interface, such as between the heart wall and the surrounding area or the surface of a cardiac valve, some of the sound is reflected, creating an echo. The crystal is reset, enabling it to receive the echo. The longer it took for the echo to return to the crystal, the longer the distance between the crystal and the surface that was the source of the echo. The principle was the same as for sonar, used to measure the depth of water under a vessel, only in this case you measure the distance from the structure that is the source of the echo to the chest wall."

Edler, Inge & Hertz, Carl Hellmuth. The Use of the Ultrasonic Reflectoscope for Continuous Recording of the Movements of Heart Walls. K. Fysiogr. Sellsk. Lund. Foresch., 24 (1954) 1-19.

Shigeo Satomura  of the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, demonstrated the application of the Doppler shift in the frequency of ultrasound backscattered by moving cardiac structures.

This was the beginning of doppler ultrasound for evaluating blood flow and pressure by bouncing high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) off red blood cells.

S. Satomura, Ultrasonic Doppler Method for the Inspection of Cardiac Functions. J. Accoust. Soc. Amer. 29 (1957) 1181-85.

Russell A. Kirsch and a team at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, using the SEAC computer, built the first image scanner— a drum scanner, and took the first digital photograph: 

"The first image ever scanned on this machine was a 5 cm square photograph of Kirsch's then-three-month-old son, Walden. The black and white image had a resolution of 176 pixels on a side" (Wikipedia article on Image Scanner, accessed 04-01-2009).

Ian Donald, Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow, and his colleagues John MacVicar, an obstetrician, and Tom Brown, an engineer, published a paper in The Lancet entitled "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound." This article described their experience using an ultrasound scanner on 100 patients, and included 12 illustrations of various gynecologic disorders (eg, ovarian cysts, fibroids) as well as demonstration of obstetric findings such as the fetal skull at 34 weeks' gestation, "hydramnios" (polyhydramnios), and twins in breech presentation. The somewhat grainy and indistinct "Compound B-mode contact scanner" images were the first published obstetrical or gynecological sonograms.

J. M. Norman (ed),  Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed.(1991) no. 2682.

The first of the Corona series of American strategic imaging reconnaissance satellites was launched. Produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science and Technology with assistance from the U.S. Air Force, the Corona satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and other areas.

"The Corona satellites used 31,500 feet (9,600 meters) of special 70 millimeter film with 24 inch (60 centimeter) focal length cameras. Initially orbiting at altitudes from 165 to 460 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the cameras could resolve images on the ground down to 7.5 meters in diameter. The two KH-4 systems improved this resolution to 2.75 meters and 1.8 meters respectively, because they operated at lower orbital altitudes. . . .

"The first dozen or more Corona satellites and their launches were cloaked with disinformation as being part of a space technology development program called the Discoverer program. The first test launches for the Corona/Discoverer were carried out early in 1959. The first Corona launch containing a camera was carried out in June 1959 with the cover name Discoverer 4. This was a 750 kilogram satellite launched by a Thor-Agena rocket.

"The plan for the Corona program was for its satellites to return canisters of exposed film to the Earth in re-entry capsules, called by the slang term "film buckets", which were to be recovered in mid-air by a specially-equipped U.S. Air Force planes during their parachute descent. (The buckets were designed to float on the water for a short period of time for possible recovery by U.S. Navy ships, and then to sink if the recovery failed, via a water-dissolvable plug made of salt at the base of the capsule. This was for secrecy purposes.)" (Wikipedia article on Corona (satellite) accessed 11-29-2010).

"The return capsule of the Discoverer 13 mission, which launched August 10, 1960, was successfully recovered the next day. This was the first time that any object had been recovered successfully from orbit. After the mission of Discoverer 14, launch on August 18, 1960, its film bucket was successfully retrieved two days later by a C-119 Flying Boxcar transport plane. This was the first successful return of photographic film from orbit.

Haloid Xerox, Rochester, New York, introduced the Xerox 914, the first successful commercial plain paper xerographic copier, roughly the size of a desk.

". . .  commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with 'key operator' training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, 'It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine' " (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-mother-of-all-invention/8123/, accessed 06-11-2010).

In work initiated at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital in early 1956, and continued briefly in mid-1957, South African-born American physicist Allen M. Cormack showed that changes in tissue density could be computed from x-ray data. His results were subsequently published in two papers:

"Representation of a Function by its Line Integrals, with Some Radiological Applications," Journal of Applied Physics 34 (1963) 2722-27; "Representation of a Function by its Line Integrals, with Some Radiological Applications. II,"  Journal of Applied Physics 35 (1964) 2908-13.  

No machine was constructed at this time because of limitations in computing power, and these papers generated little interest until Godfrey Hounsfield and colleagues invented computed tomography, and built the first CT scanner in 1971, taking Cormack's theoretical calculations into a real application.

Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and Robert Willson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invented the first plasma video display for the PLATO Computer System.

The display was monochrome neon orange and incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics. Built by Owens-Illinois glass, the flat panels were marketed under the name "Digivue."

Woodbrow W. "Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson of Panoramic Research, Palo Alto, California, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database. Bledsoe (1966a) described the following difficulties:

" 'This recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head rotation and tilt, lighting intensity and angle, facial expression, aging, etc. Some other attempts at facial recognition by machine have allowed for little or no variability in these quantities. Yet the method of correlation (or pattern matching) of unprocessed optical data, which is often used by some researchers, is certain to fail in cases where the variability is great. In particular, the correlation is very low between two pictures of the same person with two different head rotations.'

"This project was labeled man-machine because the human extracted the coordinates of a set of features from the photographs, which were then used by the computer for recognition. Using a GRAFACON, or RAND TABLET, the operator would extract the coordinates of features such as the center of pupils, the inside corner of eyes, the outside corner of eyes, point of widows peak, and so on. From these coordinates, a list of 20 distances, such as width of mouth and width of eyes, pupil to pupil, were computed. These operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. When building the database, the name of the person in the photograph was associated with the list of computed distances and stored in the computer. In the recognition phase, the set of distances was compared with the corresponding distance for each photograph, yielding a distance between the photograph and the database record. The closest records are returned.

"This brief description is an oversimplification that fails in general because it is unlikely that any two pictures would match in head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale (distance from the camera). Thus, each set of distances is normalized to represent the face in a frontal orientation. To accomplish this normalization, the program first tries to determine the tilt, the lean, and the rotation. Then, using these angles, the computer undoes the effect of these transformations on the computed distances. To compute these angles, the computer must know the three-dimensional geometry of the head. Because the actual heads were unavailable, Bledsoe (1964) used a standard head derived from measurements on seven heads.

"After Bledsoe left PRI [Panoramic Research, Inc.] in 1966, this work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily by Peter Hart. In experiments performed on a database of over 2000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks (Bledsoe 1968). Peter Hart (1996) enthusiastically recalled the project with the exclamation, 'It really worked!' " (Faculty Council, University of Texas at Austin, In Memoriam Woodrow W. Bledsoe, accessed 05-15-2009).

Bledsoe, W. W. 1964. The Model Method in Facial Recognition, Technical Report PRI 15, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W., and Chan, H. 1965. A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System-Some Preliminary Results, Technical Report PRI 19A, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966a. Man-Machine Facial Recognition: Report on a Large-Scale Experiment, Technical Report PRI 22, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966b. Some Results on Multicategory Patten Recognition. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13(2):304-316.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1968. Semiautomatic Facial Recognition, Technical Report SRI Project 6693, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California.

English molecular biologist Aaron Klug at the University of Cambridge formulated a method for digital image processing of two-dimensional images.

A. Klug and D. J. de Rosier, “Optical filtering of electron micrographs: Reconstruction of one-sided images,” Nature 212 (1966): 2932.

Using the Project MAC, an early time-sharing system at MIT, Cyrus Levinthal built the first system for the interactive display of molecular structures. 

"This program allowed the study of short-range interaction between atoms and the "online manipulation" of molecular structures. The display terminal (nicknamed Kluge) was a monochrome oscilloscope (figures 1 and 2), showing the structures in wireframe fashion (figures 3 and 4). Three-dimensional effect was achieved by having the structure rotate constantly on the screen. To compensate for any ambiguity as to the actual sense of the rotation, the rate of rotation could be controlled by globe-shaped device on which the user rested his/her hand (an ancestor of today's trackball). Technical details of this system were published in 1968 (Levinthal et al.). What could be the full potential of such a set-up was not completely settled at the time, but there was no doubt that it was paving the way for the future. Thus, this is the conclusion of Cyrus Levinthal's description of the system in Scientific American (p. 52):

It is too early to evaluate the usefulness of the man-computer combination in solving real problems of molecular biology. It does seems likely, however, that only with this combination can the investigator use his "chemical insight" in an effective way. We already know that we can use the computer to build and display models of large molecules and that this procedure can be very useful in helping us to understand how such molecules function. But it may still be a few years before we have learned just how useful it is for the investigator to be able to interact with the computer while the molecular model is being constructed.

"Shortly before his death in 1990, Cyrus Levinthal penned a short biographical account of his early work in molecular graphics. The text of this account can be found here."

You can watch a six minute film produced with the interactive molecular graphics and modeling system devised by Cyrus Levinthal and his collaborators in the mid-1960s at this link.

In 1966 the Research and Development department of National Cash Register (NCR) of Dayton, Ohio produced an edition of all 1245 pages of  the World Publishing Company's No. 715 Bible on a single 2" x 1-3/4" photochromatic microform (PCMI) The microform contained both the Old Testament on 773 pages and the New Testament on 746 pages, and was issued in a paper sleeve with title on the cover and information about the process inside and on the back.

On the microform each page of double column Bible text was about 0.5 mm wide and 1 mm high. Each text character was 8 um high (ie 8/1000ths of a millimeter). NCR noted on the paper wallet provided with the microform that this represented a linear reduction of about 250:1 or an area reduction of 62,500:1. This would correspond to the original text being circa 2 mm high. To put this into perspective, NCR also noted that if this reduction was used on the millions of books on the 270+ miles of shelving in the Library of Congress, the entire Library of Congress as it existed in 1966 could be stored in six standard filing cabinets.

♦ In 1971 Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell carried 100 of the microform bibles aboard the lunar module Antares, as confirmed by NASA's official manifest. Launched January 31, 1971, Mitchell and the bibles reached the Fra Mauro formation of the Moon on February 5 aboard the Antares before returning to the command module for the voyage back to Earth. This was the first edition of the Bible to reach the Moon, and probably the first book of any kind of reach the moon and return. A second parcel containing 200 microform Bibles flew in Edgar Mitchell's command module "PPK" bag in lunar orbit, and did not land. These 200 copies represented extra Bibles to be used if something happened to the lunar module copies.

In 1968 Stephen A. Benton, then of Polaroid Corporation, and later at MIT's Media Lab, invented the Benton hologram or rainbow hologram, a hologram designed to be viewed under white light illumation rather than laser light, which was required to view holograms before this invention.  

"The rainbow holography recording process uses a horizontal slit to eliminate vertical parallax in the output image, greatly reducing spectral blur while preserving three-dimensionality for most observers. A viewer moving up or down in front of a rainbow hologram sees changing spectral colors rather than different vertical perspectives. Stereopsis and horizontal motion parallax, two relatively powerful cues to depth, are preserved. The holograms found on credit cards are examples of rainbow holograms" (Wikipedia article on rainbow hologram, accessed 11-23-2012).

English molecular biologist Aaron Klug described techniques for the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures from electron micrographs, thus founding the processing of three-dimensional digital images.

D. J. de Rosier and A. Klug, “Reconstruction of three dimensional structures from electron micrographs,” Nature 217 (1968) 13034.

From August 2  to October 20, 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, curated by British art critic, editor, and Assistant Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Jasia Reichardt, at the suggestion of Max Bense. This was the first widely attended international exhibition of computer art, and the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation.

"It drew together 325 participants from many countries; attendance figures reached somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 (accounts differ) and it received wide and generally positive press coverage ranging from the Daily Mirror newspaper to the fashion magazine Vogue. A scaled-down version toured to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and then the Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. It took Reichardt three years of fundraising, travelling and planning" (Mason, a computer in the art room. the origins of british computer arts 1950-80 [2008] 101-102)

For the catalogue of the show Reichardt edited a special issue of Studio International magazine, consisting of 100 pages with 300 images, publication of which coincided with the exhibition in 1968. The color frontispiece reproduced a color computer graphic by the American John C. Mott-Smith "made by time-lapse photography successively exposed through coloured filters, of an oscilloscope connected to a computer." The cover of the special issue was designed by the Polish-British painter, illustrator, film-maker, and stage designer Franciszka Themerson, incorporating computer graphics from the exhibition. Laid into copies of the special issue were 4 leaves entitled "Cybernetic Serendipity Music," each page providing a program for one of eight tapes of music played during the show. This information presumably was not available in time to be printed in the issue of Studio International.

Reichardt's Introduction  (p. 5) included the following:

"The exhibition is divided into three sections, and these sections are represented in the catalogue in a different order:

"1. Computer-generated graphics, computer-animated films, computer-composed and -played music, and computer poems and texts.

"2. Cybernetic devices as works of art, cybernetic enironments, remoted-control robots and painting machines.

"3. Machines demonstrating the uses of computers and an environment dealing with the history of cybernetics.

"Cybernetic Sernedipity deals with possibilites rather than achievements, and in this sense it is prematurely optimistic. There are no heroic claims to be made because computers have so far neither revolutionized music, nor art, nor poetry, the same way that they have revolutionized science.

"There are two main points which make this exhibition and this catalogue unusual in the contexts in which art exhibitions and catalogues are normally seen. The first is that no visitor to the exhibition, unless he reads all the notes relating to all the works, will know whether he is looking at something made by an artist, engineer, mathematician, or architect. Nor is it particularly important to know the background of all the makers of the various robots, machines and graphics- it will not alter their impact, although it might make us see them differently.

"The other point is more significant.

"New media, such as plastics, or new systems such as visual music notation and the parameters of concrete poetry, inevitably alter the shape of art, the characteristics of music, and content of poetry. New possibilities extend the range of expression of those creative poeple whom we identify as painters, film makers, composers and poets. It is very rare, however, that new media and new systems should bring in their wake new people to become involved in creative activity, be it composiing music drawing, constructing or writing.

"This has happened with the advent of computers. The engineers for whom the graphic plotter driven by a computer represented nothing more than a means of solving certain problems visually, have occasionally become so interested in the possibilities of this visual output, that they have started to make drawings which bear no practical application, and for which the only real motives are the desire to explore, and the sheer pelasure of seeing a drawing materialize. Thus people who would never have put pencil to paper, or brush to canvas, have started making images, both still and animated, which approximate and often look identical to what we call 'art' and put in public galleries.

"This is the most important single revelation of this exhibition." 

Some copies of the special issue were purchased by Motif Editions of London.  Those copies do not include the ICA logo on the upper cover and do not print the price of 25s. They also substitute two blanks for the two leaves of ads printed in the back of the regular issue. They do not include the separate 4 leaves of programs of computer music.  These special copies were sold by Motif Editions with a large  (75 x 52 cm) portfolio containing seven 30 x 20 inch color lithographs with a descriptive table of contents. The artists included Masao Komura/Makoto Ohtake/Koji Fujino (Computer Technique Group); Masao Komura/Kunio Yamanaka (Computer Technique Group); Maugham S. Mason, Boeing Computer Graphics; Kerry Starnd, Charles "Chuck" Csuri/James Shaffer & Donald K. Robbins/ The art works were titled respectively 'Running Cola is Africa', 'Return to Square', 'Maughanogram', 'Human Figure', 'The Snail', 'Random War' & '3D Checkerboard Pattern'.  Copies of the regular edition contained a full-page ad for the Motif Editions portfolio for sale at £5 plus postage or £1 plus postage for individual prints.

In 1969 Frederick A. Praeger Publishers of New York and Washington, DC issued a cloth-bound second edition of the Cybernetic Serendipity catalogue with a dust jacket design adapted from the original Studio International cover. It was priced $8.95. The American edition probably coincided with the exhibition of the material at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The Praeger edition included an index on p. 101, and no ads. Comparison of the text of the 1968 and 1969 editions shows that the 1969 edition contains numerous revisions and changes.

In 2005 Jasia Reichardt looked back on the exhibition with these comments:

"One of the journals dealing with the Computer and the Arts in the mid-sixties, was Computers and the Humanities. In September 1967, Leslie Mezei of the University of Toronto, opened his article on 'Computers and the Visual Arts' in the September issue, as follows: 'Although there is much interest in applying the computer to various areas of the visual arts, few real accomplishments have been recorded so far. Two of the causes for this lack of progress are technical difficulty of processing two-dimensional images and the complexity and expense of the equipment and the software. Still the current explosive growth in computer graphics and automatic picture processing technology are likely to have dramatic effects in this area in the next few years.' The development of picture processing technology took longer than Mezei had anticipated, partly because both the hardware and the software continued to be expensive. He also pointed out that most of the pictures in existence in 1967 were produced mainly as a hobby and he discussed the work of Michael Noll, Charles Csuri, Jack Citron, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, and H.P. Paterson. All these names are familiar to us today as the pioneers of computer art history. Mezei himself too was a computer artist and produced series of images using maple leaf design and other national Canadian themes. Most of the computer art in 1967 was made with mechanical computer plotters, on CRT displays with a light pen or from scanned photographs. Mathematical equations that produced curves, lines or dots, and techniques to introduce randomness, all played their part in those early pictures. Art made with these techniques was instantaneously recognisable as having been produced either by mechanical means or with a program. It didn't actually look as if it had been done by hand. Then, and even now, most art made with the computer carries an indelible computer signature. The possibility of computer poetry and art was first mentioned in 1949. By the beginning of the 1950s it was a topic of conversation at universities and scientific establishments, and by the time computer graphics arrived on the scene, the artists were scientists, engineers, architects. Computer graphics were exhibited for the first time in 1965 in Germany and in America. 1965 was also the year when plans were laid for a show that later came to be called 'Cybernetic Serendipity' and presented at the ICA in London in 1968. It was the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation. The principal idea was to examine the role of cybernetics in contemporary arts. The exhibition included robots, poetry, music and painting machines, as well as all sorts of works where chance was an important ingredient. It was an intellectual exercise that became a spectacular exhibition in the summer of 1968" (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/serendipity/images/1/, accessed 06-16-2012). This website reproduces photographs of the actual exhibition and a poster printed for the show.

Working at Bell Labs, in 1969 Willard Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), a sensor for recording images.

Twenty years later, in 2009 Boyle and Smith shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor." The Nobel Prize Committee prepared a report putting the discovery of the CCD in perspective. It may be accessed at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/phyadv09.pdf

"The lab [Bell Labs] was working on the picture phone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor. As the CCD started its life as a memory device, one could only "inject" charge into the device at an input register. However, it was immediately clear that the CCD could receive charge via the photoelectric effect and electronic images could be created. By 1969, Bell researchers were able to capture images with simple linear devices; thus the CCD was born. Several companies, including Fairchild Semiconductor, RCA and Texas Instruments, picked up on the invention and began development programs. Fairchild was the first with commercial devices and by 1974 had a linear 500 element device and a 2-D 100 x 100 pixel device. Under the leadership of Kazuo Iwama, Sony also started a big development effort on CCDs involving a significant investment. Eventually, Sony managed to mass produce CCDs for their camcorders. Before this happened, Iwama died in August 1982. Subsequently, a CCD chip was placed on his tombstone to acknowledge his contribution" (Wikipedia article on Charge-coupled device, accessed 10-06-2009).

English electrical engineer Godfrey Hounsfield at EMI's Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, Middlesex, invented computed tomography (CT), the first application of computers to medical imaging.

Armenian-American medical practitioner and inventor Raymond V. Damadian filed a patent for "An Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue."

Damadian's patent 3,789,832 was granted on February 5, 1974. This was the first patent filed on the use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for scanning the human body, but it did not not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan or precisely how such a scan might be achieved.

On December 7, 1972 Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took the the Blue Marble photograph of the earth from a distance of about 45,000 kilometers (28,000 miles). The image is one of the first to show a fully illuminated Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image.  To the astronauts Earth had the appearance of a glass marble. The photograph became one of the most widely distributed of all photographic images.

Apollo 17 was the eleventh and final manned mission in the United States Apollo space program. In 2012 it remained the most recent manned Moon landing and the most recent manned flight beyond low Earth orbit.

In January 2012 NASA released its 2012 version of the Blue Marble image. Using a planet-pointing satellite, Suomi NPP, the space agency created an extremely high-resolution photograph of our watery world. The Suomi satellite compiled the image from small sections that it photographed over the course of January 4, 2012. The pictures were later stitched together.

In July 2012 many technical details regarding the origins of the 1972 Blue Marble photo were available from Eric Hartwell's InfoDabble website.

American chemist Paul Lauterbur, working at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, developed a way to generate the first Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), in 2D and 3D, using gradients.

Lauterbur described an imaging technique that removed the usual resolution limits due to the wavelength of the imaging field. He used

"two fields: one interacting with the object under investigation, the other restricting this interaction to a small region. Rotation of the fields relative to the object produces a series of one-dimensional projections of the interacting regions, from which two- or three-dimensional images of their spatial distribution can be reconstructed" (http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/lauterbur/index.html, accessed 11-23-2008).

This was the beginning of magnetic reasonance imaging.

"When Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries to Nature, the paper was rejected by the editors of the journal. Lauterbur persisted and requested them to review it again, upon which time it was published and is now acknowledged as a classic Nature paper.  The Nature editors pointed out that the pictures accompanying the paper were too fuzzy, although they were the first images to show the difference between heavy water and ordinary water. Lauterbur said of the initial rejection: 'You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature' (Wikipedia article on Paul Lauterbur, accessed 03-08-2012).

Lauterbur, Image Formation by Induced Local Interactions: Examples Employing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Nature 242 (1973), 190–191.

♦ Lauterbur's Nobel Lecture is available from the Nobel website. You can also watch a 65 minute video of Lauterbur delivering the lecture from this link.

American dentist and biophysicist Robert S. Ledley of Georgetown University developed the ACTA 0100 CT Scanner (Automatic Computerized Traverse Axial)— the first whole-body computed tomography scanner. 

"This machine had 30 photomultiplier tubes as detectors and completed a scan in only 9 translate/rotate cycles, much faster than the EMI-scanner. It used a DEC PDP11/34 minicomputer both to operate the servo-mechanisms and to acquire and process the images. The Pfizer drug company acquired the prototype from the university, along with rights to manufacture it. Pfizer then began making copies of the prototype, calling it the "200FS" (FS meaning Fast Scan), which were selling as fast as they could make them. This unit produced images in a 256x256 matrix, with much better definition than the EMI-Scanner's 80" (Wikipedia article on Computed Tomography, accessed 04-15-2009).

Ledley RS, Di Chiro G, Luessenhop AJ, Twigg HL. "Computerized transaxial x-ray tomography of the human body," Science 186, No. 4160 (1974) 207-212.

In 1974 Raymond Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and developed the first omni-font optical character recognition system— a computer program capable of recognizing text printed in any normal font.

"Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD [charge-coupled device] flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop" (Wikipedia article on Ray Kurzweil, accessed 03-08-2012).

In December 1975 American electrical engineer Stephen J. Sasson of the Eastman Kodak Company invented the digital camera using a charge-coupled device.

"He [Sasson] set about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, using oscilloscope measurements as a guide. There were no images to look at until the entire prototype — an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram), toaster-size contraption — was assembled. In December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The black-and-white image, captured at a resolution of .01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), took 23 seconds to record onto a digital cassette tape and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen.

" 'You could see the silhouette of her hair,' Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying 'You need work,' he said. But Sasson already knew the solution: reversing a set of wires, the assistant's face was restored" (Wikipedia article on Stephen J. Sasson, accessed 04-22-2009).

In 1978, Sasson and his supervisor Gareth A. Lloyd were issued United States Patent 4,131,919 for their digital camera.

There is an image of Sasson's digital camera at this link.

IBM introduced the IBM 3800, the first commercially available laser printer for use with its mainframes.

This "room-sized" machine was the first printer to combine laser technology and electrophotography. The technology speeded the printing of bank statements, premium notices, and other high-volume documents.

Raymond Kurzweil introduced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first practical application of OCR technology.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine combined omni-font OCR, a flat-bed scanner, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. It was the first computer to transform random text into computer-spoken words, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read any printed materials. 

British physicist Peter Mansfield developed a mathematical technique that would allow NMR scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than the technique  Paul Lauterbur developed in 1973.

Mansfield showed how gradients in the magnetic field could be mathematically analysed, which made it possible to develop a useful nuclear magnetic resonance imaging technique. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible a decade later.

P Mansfield and A A Maudsley, Medical imaging by NMR, Brit. J. Radiol. 50 (1977) 188.
P Mansfield, Multi-planar imaging formation using NMR spin echoes J. Physics C. Solid State Phys. 10 (1977) L55–L58.

The references from Mansfield's Nobel Lecture. You can also watch a 64 minute video of Mansfield delivering his lecture at this link.

Funded by ARPA, The Aspen Movie Map, an early hypermedia project produced at the Architecture Machine Group (ARC MAC) at MIT under the direction of Andrew Lippman, allowed the user to take a virtual tour through the city of Aspen, Colorado.

"ARPA funding during the late 1970s was subject to the military application requirements of the notorious Mansfield Amendment introduced by Mike Mansfield (which had severely limited funding for hypertext researchers like Douglas Engelbart).

"The Aspen Movie Map's military application was to solve the problem of quickly familiarizing soldiers with new territory. The Department of Defense had been deeply impressed by the success of Operation Entebbe in 1976, where the Israeli commandos had quickly built a crude replica of the airport and practiced in it before attacking the real thing. DOD hoped that the Movie Map would show the way to a future where computers could instantly create a three-dimensional simulation of a hostile environment at much lower cost and in less time (see virtual reality).

"While the Movie Map has been referred to as an early example of interactive video, it is perhaps more accurate to describe it as a pioneering example of interactive computing. Video, audio, still images, and metadata were retrieved from a database and assembled on the fly by the computer (an Interdata minicomputer running the MagicSix operating system) redirecting its actions based upon user input; video was the principle, but not sole affordance of the interaction" (Wikipedia article on Aspen Movie Map, accessed 04-16-2009).

D. C. Wells, E. W. Greisen, and R. H. Harten developed the open source FITS (Flexible Image Transport System), which was first standardized in 1981. It is

"a digital file format used to store, transmit, and manipulate scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata.

"A major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images (80 character fixed-length strings) that carry keyword/value pairs, interleaved between data blocks. The keyword/value pairs provide information such as size, origin, coordinates, binary data format, free-form comments, history of the data, and anything else the creator desires: while many keywords are reserved for FITS use, the standard allows arbitrary use of the rest of the name-space" (Wikipedia article on FITS, accessed 03-24-2010).

Because of its special features FITS became a very useful format for the long term preservation of digital images. It was also adopted by NASA as a standard, and was also adopted by the Vatican Library.

In August 1981 Sony announced the first commercial electronic camera, the Sony Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). Not a digital camera, it was actually a video camera that took video freeze-frames.

Sony's first commercially marketed digital camera was the Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997).

IBM introduced the Scanmaster 1, a mainframe computer terminal designed to scan, transmit and store images of documents electronically.

In 1985 an IBM team began scanning the papers related to Columbus' discovery of the new world at El Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla (AGI), Seville, Spain.

"To coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landfall in the West Indies, the AGI project was to capture 10% of the collection estimated to consist of 86,000,000 pages. By 1992, it had indeed collected about 9,000,000 digital image pages onto optical disks, together with a set of finding aids." This was among the earliest practical digital libraries.

J. G. White, E. Southgate, J. N. Thomson and S[idney] Brenner published "The Structure of the nervous System of the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans," Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences, 314 (1986) no. 1165, 1-340. The first map of the functioning structure of an entire brain at the cellular level, this paper has been called the beginning of connectomics.

"The structure and connectivity of the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been deduced from reconstructions of electron micrographs of serial sections. The hermaphrodite nervous system has a total complement of 302 neurons, which are arranged in an essentially invariant structure. Neurons with similar morphologies and connectivities have been grouped together into classes; there are 118 such classes. Neurons have simple morphologies with few, if any, branches. Processes from neurons run in defined positions within bundles of parallel processes, synaptic connections being made en passant. Process bundles are arranged longitudinally and circumferentially and are often adjacent to ridges of hypodermis. Neurons are generally highly locally connected, making synaptic connections with many of their neighbours. Muscle cells have arms that run out to process bundles containing motoneuron axons. Here they receive their synaptic input in defined regions along the surface of the bundles, where motoneuron axons reside. Most of the morphologically identifiable synaptic connections in a typical animal are described. These consist of about 5000 chemical synapses, 2000 neuromuscular junctions and 600 gap junctions" (Abstract).

To photograph, store, and organize the art work of the painter, Andrew Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Fred Mintzer, Henry Gladney and colleagues at IBM developed a high resolution digital camera for photographing art works and a PC-based database system to store and index the images. The system was used by Wyeth's staff to photograph, store, and organize about 10,000 images. "Pictures were scanned at a spatial resolution of 2500 by 3000 pixels and a color depth of 24 bits-per-pixel, and were color calibrated." This was the first digital image database of cultural materials.

In 1987, American software engineer Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, which he called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an employee at Industrial Light & Magic, who urged Thomas to turn Display into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with John on the program, after which Thomas renamed the program ImagePro. But since the name ImagePro was already taken, Thomas renamed the program Photoshop, and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner.  Roughly 200 copies were shipped under that arrangement.  

During this time, John Knoll gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple in Cupertino, and to Russell Brown, art director at Adobe Systems in San Jose. In September 1988 Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute. In February 1990 Adobe releated Photoshop 1.0 for the Macintosh.

Recognizing the importance of computerized information processing methods for the conduct of biomedical research, Senator and Representative Claude Pepper sponsored legislation that established the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) as a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Bethesda, Maryland. NLM was chosen for its experience in creating and maintaining biomedical databases, and because as part of NIH, it could establish an intramural research program in computational molecular biology. 

MIT's Media Lab developed the first holographic video display. The volume of the hologram was just 25 cubic millimeters, smaller than a thimble.

The first image posted to the web was a photograph of a CERN singing group called Les Horribles Cernettes.

Fred Mintzer and colleagues at IBM photographed and developed a database of about 20,000 digital images for the Vatican Library. This was the first library of digital images on the Internet.

The British Library and Kevin S. Kiernan at the University of Kentucky embarked on the Electronic Beowulf project, an effort to photograph and publish high resolution electronic copies of the manuscript. The Electronic Beowulf was a pioneering effort in the digital preservation, restoration, and dissemination of manuscript material.

"The equipment we are using to capture the images is the Roche/Kontron ProgRes 3012 digital camera, which can scan any text, from a letter or a word to an entire page, at 2000 x 3000 pixels in 24-bit color. The resulting images at this maximum resolution are enormous, about 21-25 MB, and tax the capabilities of the biggest machines. Three or four images - three or four letters or words if that is what we are scanning - will fill up an 88 MB hard disk, and we have found that no single image of this size can be processed in real time without at least 64 MB of RAM. In our first experiments in June with the camera and its dedicated hardware, we transmitted a half-dozen images by phone line from the Conservation Studio of the British Library to the Wenner Gren Imaging Laboratory at the University of Kentucky, where identical hardware was set up to receive the data. Most of these images are now available on the Internet through anonymous ftp or Mosaic."

Marc Andreesen of the Software Development Group,  National Center for Supercomputing Applications,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced on Usenet the creation of the NCSA Mosaic browser 0.10, and the introduction of the image tag.

Benny Landa of Indigo, Rehovot, Israel, introduced the Indigo E-Print 1000 digital offset press, incorporating ElectroInk technology, also called ink-based electrophotography. The E-Print 1000 was the first digital offset press.

While working on the Netscape web browser, Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II buillt the Fishcam, one of the earliest live image websites. 

Netscape hosted the Fishcam until long after they were no longer Netscape. After a short hiatus, in 2009 it found a new host.  When this note was written in May 2009 the Fishcam was operational and remained  one of the longest nearly continuously running live websites.

Apple introduced the first consumer-priced digital camera that worked with a personal computer-- the QuickTake 100.

In April 1996, during her junior year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Internet personality and lifecaster Jennifer Ringley began the popular website, JenniCam. She was the first real full time online webcam girl.

"Previously, live webcams transmitted static shots from cameras aimed through windows or at coffee pots. Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities.

"In June 2008, CNET hailed JenniCam as one of the greatest defunct websites in history.

"Regarded by some as a conceptual artist, Ringley viewed her site as a straight-forward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. This was a new use of Internet technology in 1996 and viewers were stimulated both for its sociological implications and for sexual arousal. Surveillance became conceptual art, as noted by Mark Tribe in 'New Media Art':

In Web sites like JenniCAM, in which a young woman installed Web cameras in her home to expose her everyday actions to online viewers. . . surveillance became a source of voyeuristic and exhibitionistic excitement. . . Institutional surveillance and the invasion of privacy have been widely explored by New Media artists.'

"Ringley's genuine desires to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her private parts, and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life. Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years" (Wikipedia article on Jennifer Ringley, accessed 05-08-2009).

The Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group (JBIG) and the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1 (ITU-T SG8) Coding of Still Pictures issued the report entitled Call for Contributions for JPEG 2000 (JTC 1.29.14, 15444): Image Coding System. This eventually led to the establishment of the JPEG 2000 file standard for still images.

Marc Levoy and team began The Digital Michelangelo Project at Stanford University using laser scanners to digitize the statues of Michelangelo, and 1,163 fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome.

The quality of the scans was so high that the Italian government would not permit the release of the full data set on the Internet; however, the Stanford researchers built a system called ScanView that allowed viewing of details of specific parts of the statue, including parts that would be inaccessible to a normal museum visitor. You can download Scanview at this link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/scanview/ (accessed 12-23-2009).

The laser scan data for Michelangelo's David was utilized in its cleaning and restoration that began in September 2002. This eventually resulted in a 2004 book entitled Exploring David: Diagnostic Tests and State of Conservation.

"In preparation for this restoration, the Galleria dell'Accademia undertook an ambitious 10-year program of scientific study of the statue and its condition. Led by Professor Mauro Matteini of CNR-ICVBC, a team of Italian scientists studied every inch of the statue using color photography, radiography (i.e. X-rays), ultraviolet fluorescence and thermographic imaging, and several other modalities. In addition, by scraping off microsamples and performing in-situ analyses, the mineralogy and chemistry of the statue and its contaminants were characterized. Finally, finite element structural analyses were performed to determine the origin of hairline cracks that are visible on his ankles and the tree stump, to decide if intervention was necessary. (They decided it wasn't; these cracks arose in 1871, when the statue briefly tilted forward 3 degrees due to settling of the ground in the Piazza Signoria. This tilt was one of the reasons they moved the statue to the Galleria dell'Accademia.)  

"The results of this diagnostic campaign are summarized in the book Exploring David . . . . The book, written in English, also contains a history of the statue and its past restorations, a visual analysis of the chisel marks of Michelangelo as evident from the statue surface, and an essay by museum director Franca Falletti on the difficulties of restoring famous artworks. . . .  

"Aside from its sweeping scientific vision, what is remarkable about this book is that many of the studies employed a three-dimensional computer model of the statue - the model created by us during the Digital Michelangelo Project. Although we worked hard to create this model, and we envisioned 3D models eventually being used to support art conservation, we did not expect such uses to become practical so soon. After all, our model of the David is huge; outside our laboratory and a few others in the computer graphics field, little software exists that can manipulate such large models. However, with help from Roberto Scopigno and his team at CNR-Pisa, museum director Franca Falletti prodded, encouraged, and cajoled the scientists working under her direction to use our model wherever possible. We contributed a chapter to this book, on the scanning of the statue, but we take no credit for its use in the rest of the book. In fact, to us at Stanford University, the timing of our scanning project relative to the statue's restoration and the creation of this book seems merely fortuitious. However, Falletti insists that she had this use of our model in mind all along! In any case, this is a landmark book - the most extensive use that has ever been made of a 3D computer model in an art conservation project" (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/book/book.html, accessed 12-23-2009).

On July 21, 2009 the team announced that they had a "full-resolution (1/4mm) 3D model of Michelangelo's 5-meter statue of David", containing "about 1 billion polygons."

Keyhole, Inc., a software development firm in Mountain View, California, specializing in geospatial data visualization applications, was founded. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972.  Google acquired the company in 2004.

"Keyhole's marquee application suite, Earth Viewer, emerged as the highly successful Google Earth application in 2005; other aspects of core technology survive in Google Maps, Google Mobile and the Keyhole Markup Language" (Wikipedia article on Keyhole, Inc., accessed 11-29-2010).

Michael Hawley, a scientist at MIT, created the world's largest book-- Bhutan: a Visual Odyssey Across the Kingdom. The work, which was also one of the most beautiful books ever published, was undertaken as a philanthrophic endeavor. It has 112 pages and weighs 133 pounds on an included custom-built aluminum stand. It's page openings are 7 x 5 feet. The work was initially offered in exchange for a $10,000 contribution. In November 2008 Amazon.com was offering copies for sale for $30,000 each.

A more practical and affordable way to appreciate this spectacular volume may be the trade edition published in 2004. In February 2009 this was offered for sale by Amazon.com for $100.00. In my opinion this is one of the finest and most spectacular trade books designed, printed and bound in America, though my aging eyes are not entirely comfortable reading white text against a black background. The clothbound volume, with an unusual dust jacket printed on both sides, measures 15¼ x 12¼ inches (39 x 31 cm).

Flickr, the photo and video sharing and photo and video social networking site, was launched by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada, based company founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. It emerged out of tools originally created for Ludicorp's Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game. Its organizational  tools allowed photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means.

Ludicorp and Flickr were purchased by Yahoo in March 2005.

"Yahoo reported in June 2011 that Flickr had a total of 51 million registered members and 80 million unique visitors. In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources." (Wikipedia article on Flickr, accessed 03-23-2012).

The Journal of Cell Biology began screening digital images submitted with electronic manuscripts to determine whether these images were manipulated in ways that misrepresented experimental results. The image-screening system that checked for image manipulation took 30 minutes per paper.

Google launched Google Earth, a virtual globe, map and geographical information program, which mapped the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained by satellite.  

The program, which Google acquired when it purchased Keyhole, Inc., was originally called EarthViewer 3D. 

Neuroscientists Olaf Sporns of Indiana University, Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin, and Rolf Köttler of Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany, published "The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain," PLoS Computational Biology I (4). This paper and the PhD thesis of Patric Hagmann from the Université de Lausanne, From diffusion MRI to brain connectomics, coined the term connectome:

In their 2005 paper  Sporns et al. wrote:

"To understand the functioning of a network, one must know its elements and their interconnections. The purpose of this article is to discuss research strategies aimed at a comprehensive structural description of the network of elements and connections forming the human brain. We propose to call this dataset the human 'connectome,' and we argue that it is fundamentally important in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology. The connectome will significantly increase our understanding of how functional brain states emerge from their underlying structural substrate, and will provide new mechanistic insights into how brain function is affected if this structural substrate is disrupted."

In his 2005 Ph.D. thesis, From diffusion MRI to brain connectomics, Hagmann wrote:

"It is clear that, like the genome, which is much more than just a juxtaposition of genes, the set of all neuronal connections in the brain is much more than the sum of their individual components. The genome is an entity it-self, as it is from the subtle gene interaction that [life] emerges. In a similar manner, one could consider the brain connectome, set of all neuronal connections, as one single entity, thus emphasizing the fact that the huge brain neuronal communication capacity and computational power critically relies on this subtle and incredibly complex connectivity architecture" (Wikipedia article on Connectome, accessed 12-28-2010).

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, opened PIXAR: 20 Years of Animation:

"The Most Extensive Gallery Exhibition that MoMA has ever devoted to Animation along with a Retrospective of Pixar Features and Shorts."

Notably MoMA found it unnecessary to characterize the exhibition as "computer animation" since by this time virtually all animation was done by computer. They published a 175 page printed catalogue of the exhibition.

The Walt Disney Company, born in the days of manual animation, acquired Pixar, the computer animation company, making Steve Jobs the largest Disney stockholder.

By some estimates 92 percent of all cameras sold in 2006 were digital.

Yahoo and Reuters introduced programs to place photographs and videos of news events submitted by the public, including cell phone photos and videos, throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo's new service entitled YouWitnessNews. Reuters said that it in 2007 would also start to distribute some of the submissions to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribed to its news service. Reuters also said that it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

Physicist and software engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, architect of Seadragon, and co-creator of Photosynth, demonstrated Photosynth in a video dowloadable at the TED website at this link.

Using techniques of computational bibliography, in collaboration with Paul Needham at Princeton's Scheide Library, Agüera y Arcas also did significant original research in the technology of the earliest printing from movable type.

On May 25, 2007 Google introduced the Street View feature of Google Maps in the United States.  It provided panoramic views from positions along many streets, eventually including even views of the very small road on which I live in Novato, California, suggesting that coverage of many parts of the United States became extremely comprehensive.  

On April 16, 2008, Google fully integrated Street View into Google Earth 4.3.

In response to complaints about privacy, on May 12, 2008 Google announced in its "latlong" blog that it had introduced face-blurring technology for its images of Manhattan. It eventually applied the technology to all locations.

Jeff W. Lichtman and Joshua R. Sanes, both professors of Molecular & Cellular Biology in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues, published "Transgenic strategies for combinatorial expression of fluorescent proteins in the nervous system," Nature 450 (7166): 56–62. doi:10.1038/nature06293. This described the visualization process they called "Brainbow."

"Detailed analysis of neuronal network architecture requires the development of new methods. Here we present strategies to visualize synaptic circuits by genetically labelling neurons with multiple, distinct colours. In Brainbow transgenes, Cre/lox recombination is used to create a stochastic choice of expression between three or more fluorescent proteins (XFPs). Integration of tandem Brainbow copies in transgenic mice yielded combinatorial XFP expression, and thus many colours, thereby providing a way to distinguish adjacent neurons and visualize other cellular interactions. As a demonstration, we reconstructed hundreds of neighbouring axons and multiple synaptic contacts in one small volume of a cerebellar lobe exhibiting approximately 90 colours. The expression in some lines also allowed us to map glial territories and follow glial cells and neurons over time in vivo. The ability of the Brainbow system to label uniquely many individual cells within a population may facilitate the analysis of neuronal circuitry on a large scale." (From the Nature abstract).

The Optical Society and the National Library of Medicine announced Interactive Science Publishing.

" 'ISP' represents a new direction for OSA publications. The ISP articles, which appear in OSA journals, link out to large 2D and 3D datasets—such as a CT scan of the human chest—that can be viewed interactively with special software developed by OSA in cooperation with Kitware, Inc., and the National Library of Medicine."

NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed the first-ever pictures taken from the visible spectrum of extrasolar planets. The images were glimpsed by the Gemini North and Keck telescopes on the Mauna Kea mountaintop in Hawaii. 

"British and American researchers snapped the first ever visible-light pictures of three extrasolar planets orbiting the star HR8799.  HR8799 is about 1.5 times the size of the sun, located 130 light-years away in the Pegasus constellation.  Observers can probably see this star through binoculars, scientists said.

"To identify the planets, researchers compared images of the system, known to contain planets HF8799b, HF8799c, and HF8799d.  In each image faint objects were detected, and by comparing images from over the years, it was confirmed that these were the planets in their expected positions and that they orbit their star in a counterclockwise direction.

"NASA's Hubble Space Telescope at about the same time picked up images of a fourth planet, somewhat unexpectedly.  The new planet, Fomalhaut b orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, part of the constellation Piscis Australis (Southern Fish) and is relatively massive -- about three times the size of Jupiter.  The planet orbits 10.7 billion miles from its home star and is approximately 25 light-years from Earth."  (quoations from Daily Tech November 16, 2008).

Google launched Google Earth 5.0. Among the most significant features were Historical Imagery, Touring, and 3D Mars.

" ♦ Historical Imagery: Until today, Google Earth displayed only one image of a given place at a given time. With this new feature, you can now move back and forth in time to reveal imagery from years and even decades past, revealing changes over time. Try flying south of San Francisco in Google Earth and turning on the new time slider (click the "clock" icon in the toolbar) to witness the transformation of Silicon Valley from a farming community to the tech capital of the world over the past 50 years or so.  

" ♦ Touring: One of the key challenges we have faced in developing Google Earth has been making it easier for people to tell stories. People have created wonderful layers to share with the world, but they have often asked for a way to guide others through them. The Touring feature makes it simple to create an easily sharable, narrated, fly-through tour just by clicking the record button and navigating through your tour destinations.

" ♦ 3D Mars: This is the latest stop in our virtual tour of the galaxies, made possible by a collaboration with NASA. By selecting "Mars" from the toolbar in Google Earth, you can access a 3D map of the Red Planet featuring the latest high-resolution imagery, 3D terrain, and annotations showing landing sites and lots of other interesting features" (Official Google Blog, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/dive-into-new-google-earth.html, accessed 11-29-2010).

The Human Connectome Project, a five-year project sponsored by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) split between two consortia of research institutions, was launched as the first of three Grand Challenges of the National Institutes of Health's Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. 

The project was described as "an ambitious effort to map the neural pathways that underlie human brain function. The overarching purpose of the Project is to acquire and share data about the structural and functional connectivity of the human brain. It will greatly advance the capabilities for imaging and analyzing brain connections, resulting in improved sensitivity, resolution, and utility, thereby accelerating progress in the emerging field of human connectomics. Altogether, the Human Connectome Project will lead to major advances in our understanding of what makes us uniquely human and will set the stage for future studies of abnormal brain circuits in many neurological and psychiatric disorders" (http://www.humanconnectome.org/consortia/, accessed 12-28-2010).

IBM Research – Zurich scientists Leo Gross, Fabian Mohn, Nikolaj Moll and Gerhard Meyer, in collaboration with Peter Liljeroth of Utrecht University, published  "The Chemical Structure of a Molecule Resolved by Atomic Force Microscopy," Science, 2009; 325 (5944): 1110 DOI: 10.1126/science.1176210

Using an atomic force microscope operated in an ultrahigh vacuum and at very low temperatures ( –268oC or – 451oF) the scientists imaged the chemical structure of individual pentacene molecules. For the first time ever, they were able to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule.

The abstract of the article is:

"Resolving individual atoms has always been the ultimate goal of surface microscopy. The scanning tunneling microscope images atomic-scale features on surfaces, but resolving single atoms within an adsorbed molecule remains a great challenge because the tunneling current is primarily sensitive to the local electron density of states close to the Fermi level. We demonstrate imaging of molecules with unprecedented atomic resolution by probing the short-range chemical forces with use of noncontact atomic force microscopy. The key step is functionalizing the microscope’s tip apex with suitable, atomically well-defined terminations, such as CO molecules. Our experimental findings are corroborated by ab initio density functional theory calculations. Comparison with theory shows that Pauli repulsion is the source of the atomic resolution, whereas van der Waals and electrostatic forces only add a diffuse attractive background."

♦ You can watch a video of the scientists discussing and explaining this discovery at IBM's Press Room at this link:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28267.wss, accessed 09-12-2009).

Lawrence Wechler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University,  published "David Hockney's iPhone Passion,"  New York Review of Books LXVI, no. 16, 35.

Hockney had a history of exploiting new technologies in his art:

"Hockney continued to explore other media besides painting, most notably photography. From 1982-86, he created some of his best-known and most iconographic work — his “joiners,” large composite landscapes and portraits made up of hundreds or thousands of individual photographs. Hockney initially used a Polaroid camera for the photos, switching to a 35 mm camera as the works grew larger and more complex. In interviews, Hockney related the “joiners” to cubism, pointing out that they incorporate elements that a traditional photograph does not possess — namely time, space, and narrative.

"Always willing to adopt new techniques, in 1986 Hockney began producing art with color photocopiers. He has also incorporated fax machines (faxing art to an exhibition in Brazil, for example) and computer-generated images (most notably Quantel Paintbox, a computer system often used to make graphics for television shows) into his work" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/david-hockney/the-colors-of-music/103/, accessed 01-09-2010).

Google introduced Google Goggles image recognition and search technology for the Android mobile device operating system.  

If you photographed certain types of individual objects the program would recognize them and automatically displace links to relevant information on the Internet. If you pointed your phone at a building the program would identify it by GPS and identify it. Then if you clicked on the name of the building it would bring up relevant Internet links.

♦ On May 7, 2010 you could watch a video describing the features of Google Goggles at this link:

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text

"An initiative of the Vatican Library Digital manuscripts

"by Cesare Pasini  

"The digitization of 80,000 manuscripts of the Vatican Library, it should be realized, is not a light-hearted project. Even with only a rough calculation one can foresee the need to reproduce 40 million pages with a mountain of computer data, to the order of 45 petabytes (that is, 45 million billion bytes). This obviously means pages variously written and illustrated or annotated, to be photographed with the highest definition, to include the greatest amount of data and avoid having to repeat the immense undertaking in the future.  

"And these are delicate manuscripts, to be treated with care, without causing them damage of any kind. A great undertaking for the benefit of culture and in particular for the preservation and conservation of the patrimony entrusted to the Apostolic Library, in the tradition of a cultural service that the Holy See continues to express and develop through the centuries, adapting its commitment and energy to the possibilities offered by new technologies.  

"The technological project of digitization with its various aspects is now ready. In the past two years, a technical feasibility study has been prepared with the contribution of the best experts, internal, external and also international. This resulted in a project of a great and innovative value from various points of view: the realization of the photography, the electronic formats for conservation, the guaranteed stability of photographs over time, the maintenance and management of the archives, and so forth.  

"This project may be achieved over a span of 10 years divided into three phases, with possible intervals between them. In a preliminary phase the involvement of 60 people is planned, including photographers and conservator-verifiers, in the second and third phases at least 120. Before being able to initiate an undertaking of this kind, which is causing some anxiety to those in charge of the library (and not only to them!), naturally it will be necessary to find the funds. Moves have already been made in this direction with some positive results.  

"The second announcement is that some weeks ago the “test bed” was set up; in other words the “bench test” that will make it possible to try out and examine the whole structure of the important project that has been studied and formulated so as to guarantee that it will function properly when undertaken in its full breadth.  

"The work of reproduction uses two different machines, depending on the different types of material to be reproduced: one is a Metis Systems scanner, kindly lent to us free of charge by the manufacturers, and a 50 megapixel Hasselblad digital camera. Digitized images will be converted to the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS), a non-proprietary format, is extremely simple, was developed a few decades ago by NASA. It has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.  

"In addition to the servers that collect the images in FITS format accumulated by the two machines mentioned, another two servers have been installed to process the data to make it possible to search for images both by the shelf mark and the manuscript's descriptive elements, and also and above all by a graphic pattern, that is, by looking for similar images (graphic or figurative) in the entire digital memory.  

"The latter instrument, truly innovative and certainly interesting for all who intend to undertake research on the Vatican's manuscripts – only think of when it will be possible to do such research on the entire patrimony of manuscripts in the Library! – was developed from the technology of the Autonomy Systems company, a leading English firm in the field of computer science, to which, moreover, we owe the entire funding of the “test bed”.  

"For this “bench test”, set up in these weeks, 23 manuscripts are being used for a total of 7,500 digitized and indexed pages, with a mountain of computer data of about 5 terabytes (about 5,000 billion bytes).

"The image of the mustard seed springs to mind: the “text bed” is not much more in comparison with the immensity of the overall project. But we know well that this seed contains an immense energy that will enable it to grow, to become far larger than the other plants and to give hospitality to the birds of the air. In accepting the promise guaranteed in the parable, let us also give hope of it to those who await the results of this project's realization" (http://www.vaticanlibrary.va/home.php?, pag=newsletter_art_00087&BC=11, accessed 03-24-2010).

"Over the weekend, there was a lot of talk about exactly what information Google Street View cars collect as they drive our streets. While we have talked about the collection of WiFi data a number of times before--and there have been stories published in the press--we thought a refresher FAQ pulling everything together in one place would be useful. This blog also addresses concerns raised by data protection authorities in Germany.

"What information are your cars collecting? 

"We collect the following information--photos, local WiFi network data and 3-D building imagery. This information enables us to build new services, and improve existing ones. Many other companies have been collecting data just like this for as long as, if not longer, than Google.

"♦Photos: so that we can build Street View, our 360 degree street level maps. Photos like these are also being taken by TeleAtlas and NavTeq for Bing maps. In addition, we use this imagery to improve the quality of our maps, for example by using shop, street and traffic signs to refine our local business listings and travel directions;

"♦WiFi network information: which we use to improve location-based services like search and maps. Organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute and Skyhook already collect this information globally;

"♦and 3-D building imagery: we collect 3D geometry data with low power lasers (similar to those used in retail scanners) which help us improve our maps. NavTeq also collects this information in partnership with Bing. As does TeleAtlas.

"What do you mean when you talk about WiFi network information?

"WiFi networks broadcast information that identifies the network and how that network operates. That includes SSID data (i.e. the network name) and MAC address (a unique number given to a device like a WiFi router).

"Networks also send information to other computers that are using the network, called payload data, but Google does not collect or store payload data.*  

"But doesn’t this information identify people? 

"MAC addresses are a simple hardware ID assigned by the manufacturer. And SSIDs are often just the name of the router manufacturer or ISP with numbers and letters added, though some people do also personalize them. However, we do not collect any information about householders, we cannot identify an individual from the location data Google collects via its Street View cars.  

"Is it, as the German DPA states, illegal to collect WiFi network information? 

"We do not believe it is illegal--this is all publicly broadcast information which is accessible to anyone with a WiFi-enabled device. Companies like Skyhook have been collecting this data cross Europe for longer than Google, as well as organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute.  

"Why did you not tell the DPAs that you were collecting WiFi network information?

"Given it was unrelated to Street View, that it is accessible to any WiFi-enabled device and that other companies already collect it, we did not think it was necessary. However, it’s clear with hindsight that greater transparency would have been better.  

"Why is Google collecting this data?

"The data which we collect is used to improve Google’s location based services, as well as services provided by the Google Geo Location API. For example, users of Google Maps for Mobile can turn on “My Location” to identify their approximate location based on cell towers and WiFi access points which are visible to their device. Similarly, users of sites like Twitter can use location based services to add a geo location to give greater context to their messages.  

"Can this data be used by third parties? 

"Yes--but the only data which Google discloses to third parties through our Geo Location API is a triangulated geo code, which is an approximate location of the user’s device derived from all location data known about that point. At no point does Google publicly disclose MAC addresses from its database (in contrast with some other providers in Germany and elsewhere).

"Do you publish this information?

"No" (http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/04/data-collected-by-google-cars.html, accessed 05-23-2012).

On June 9, 2010 Google announced in its Official Blog that it had "mistakenly included code" in its software that collected "samples of payload data" from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from encrypted WiFI networks.  It also announced that in response to requests from the Irish Data Protection Authority it was deleting payload data collected from Irish WiFi networks.

Google announced a translation feature for Google Goggles, image recognition and search feature available on Android-based mobile devices.

"Here’s how it works:

"Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words Press the shutter button

"If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate

"Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages."

"Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages. Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well."

From roughly 1,000,000 miles into space the European Space Agency's Planck space observatory took the first photograph of the entire universe.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), introduced Images, an online database of more than 2.5 million images and figures from medical and life sciences journals. 

In October 2010 Kevin Systrom and Cheyenne Foster launched Instagram, an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enabled users to take a picture, apply a digital filter to it, and share on a variety of networking services, including its own. Instagram was purchased in April 2012 by Facebook for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.  After regulatory approval the deal closed in September 2012 by which time Instagram had over 100 million users. 

"On December 17, 2012, Instagram updated its Terms of Service to allow Instagram the right to sell users' photos to third parties without notification or compensation after January 16, 2013. The criticism from privacy advocates, consumers and even National Geographic which suspended its Instagram account, prompted Instagram to issue a statement retracting the controversial terms. Instagram is currently working on developing new language to replace the disputed terms of use" (Wikipedia article on Instagram, accessed 12-22-2012).

In November 2010 the first video of a woman giving birth in an open MRI machine was taken at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany.  The team led by Christian Bamberg, M.D. first published the results as "Human birth observed in real-time open magnetic resonance imaging," in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology in January 2012.  Supplementary material, including the video of the final 45 minutes of labor, was published  as Vol. 206, issue, pp. 505.e1-505e6, June 2012.

Google Earth 6 enabled the user to "fly from outer space down to the streets with the new Street View and easily navigate. . . . Switch to ground-level view to see the same location in 3D."  

The program also introduced 3D trees in locations all over the world, and a more user-friendly interface for the historical imagery enabling comparison of recent and historical satellite imagery when available.

Google introduced the Google Earth Engine.

(http://blog.google.org/2010/12/introducing-google-earth-engine.html)

"Google Earth Engine brings together the world's satellite imagery—trillions of scientific measurements dating back more than 25 years—and makes it available online with tools for scientists, independent researchers, and nations to mine this massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences to the earth's surface" (http://earthengine.googlelabs.com/#intro).

Ristech, the motto of which was "Automation of Digitization," introduced the Book2net Spirit, which they described as:

"the very first entry level high resolution book scanner. The Spirit is designed to replace photocopies in Public, Government and Corporate Libraries. By eliminating the need for paper, toner and maintenance – Libraries can reduce cost. The Spirit can easily be attached to a cost recovery system or coin-op to generate revenue.

"Key Features:

• Public Use Walk-up BookScanner

• High Resolution Images

• 1 second image capture • Scan to USB or Email

• Embedded Touch Screen PC included"

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III), a major multi-filter imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory, Sunspot, New Mexico,  released the largest digital color image of the sky assembled from millions of 2.8 megapixel images, and consisting of more than a trillion pixels.  This may be the largest digital image produced to date.

Bringing technology developed for Street View indoors, Google introduced The Art Project.  Simultaneously they introduced an Art Project channel on YouTube.

These projects allowed you to take virtual tours of major museums, view relevant background material about art, store high resolution images, share images and commentaries with friends.

Each of the 17 museums involved also chose one artwork to be photographed using gigapixel photo capturing technology, resulting in an image on the computer containing seven billion pixels and providing detail not visible to the naked eye.

360cities.net posted a 40 gigabyte panorama of the baroque Philosophical Hall containing 42,000 volumes in the Strahov Monastery Library in Prague.  

The spectacular image is particularly useful since tourists visiting the monastery may only glimpse this library room from one roped-off entrance. When the image was posted on YouTube and on 360cities.net it was the largest interior panoramic image taken to date, showing all aspects of the room in the smallest detail.

♦ An article published in Wired magazine on March 29, 2011 provided production details, multiple images, and a video showing how the panorama was created.

"The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

"Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

"The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:  

"1. Find the right thing Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

"2. Get the best summary With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

"3. Go deeper and broader Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

"We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!"

In October 2012 the Münchener Digitalisierungs Zentrum of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München (Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library in Munich) introduced the 3D-BSB Explorer, a gesture-controlled 3D Interactive Book Reader developed jointly by the center and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute.

"For the first time ever, magnificent over one thousand year old books are also on view in a digital 3D format at the "Magnificent Manuscripts – Treasures of Book Illumination" exhibition at the Kunsthalle of the Hypo Cultural Foundation in Munich. The Interactive 3D BookReader forms part of the exhibition which opens on Friday, 19 October 2012 at the Kunsthalle of the Hypo Cultural Foundation in Munich.  

"Allowing visitors to leaf through volumes illuminated in gold and encrusted with precious stones is something that most museums simply cannot permit. Secure in their glass cases, these exhibits seem remote and untouchable. Yet with the Interactive 3D BookReader, developed by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in partnership with the Bavarian State Library, visitors can now not only view digitalized books in 3D without any need for special glasses, but browse through them, enlarge them and rotate them as well. The Interactive 3D BookReader opens up virtual access to these magnificent treasures of the art of illumination. Visitors don’t even need to touch the screen as an infrared camera captures the movements of one or more of their fingers while image processing software identifies their position in space in real-time. This is how they can move, browse, rotate and scale the exhibits shown on the screen. Even the slightest of finger movements can be translated into movements of the cursor. The monitor screen of the Interactive 3D BookReader shows the user's right and left eye two slightly offset images which combine to give an in-depth impression. The two stereo views are adapted to correspond to the viewer's actual position. This means that visitors don't need special 3D glasses to view the books in three dimensions" (http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/media/press/experience-magnificent-books-in-digital-3d.html, accessed 02-23-2013).

In February 2013 a video demonstration of the 3D-BSB Explorer was available on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpSP2ojWtIs&feature=youtu.be

Once cell phone cameras with their very limited lenses and image processors became the most popular means of taking photographs, mainly because cell phone images could immediately be emailed, posted to websites, social media, etc., it was probably inevitable that camera companies would introduce regular more full-featured cameras incorporating computers that could be connected to the Internet through Internet "hot spots" or cellular connections. The first models offered at the end of 2012 were full-featured and overpriced, but the concept appeared to have great potential: 

"New models from Nikon and Samsung are obvious graduates of the 'if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em' school. The Nikon Coolpix S800C ($300) and Samsung’s Galaxy Camera ($500 from AT&T, $550 from Verizon) are fascinating hybrids. They merge elements of the cellphone and the camera into something entirely new and — if these flawed 1.0 versions are any indication — very promising.  

"From the back, you could mistake both of these cameras for Android phones. The big black multitouch screen is filled with app icons. Yes, app icons. These cameras can run Angry Birds, Flipboard, Instapaper, Pandora, Firefox, GPS navigation programs and so on. You download and run them exactly the same way. (That’s right, a GPS function. “What’s the address, honey? I’ll plug it into my camera.”) But the real reason you’d want an Android camera is wirelessness. Now you can take a real photo with a real camera — and post it or send it online instantly. You eliminate the whole 'get home and transfer it to the computer' step.  

"And as long as your camera can get online, why stop there? These cameras also do a fine job of handling Web surfing, e-mail, YouTube videos, Facebook feeds and other online tasks. Well, as fine a job as a phone could do, anyway.  

"You can even make Skype video calls, although you won’t be able to see your conversation partner; the lens has to be pointing toward you. Both cameras get online using Wi-Fi hot spots. The Samsung model can also get online over the cellular networks, just like a phone, so you can upload almost anywhere" (Pogue's Posts, NYTimes.com, 12-19-2012, accessed 12-21-2012).  

After cell phones cameras became the most popular way of taking pictures, it was probably inevitable that a way would be found to make them look and act like cameras:

"now available for the iPhone 5, the 'gizmon iCa' polycarbonate case transforms your smartphone into a working rangefinder camera. a working shutter button is built into the top of the case - making it easy to capture images without having to pre-load the camera interface app. incorporated with a viewfinder on top of the enclosure - the design helps eliminate glare in direct sunlight, as with an additional lens opening from the flash unit. the case also ships with a second interchangeable section that allows for the fitting of any of the accessory lenses" (http://www.designboom.com/technology/the-gizmon-ica-5-case-for-the-iphone-5/, accessed 02-07-2013).

Gizmon, a division of ADPLUS Co. Ltd, Kumamoto-city, Kumamoto, Japan, also produced a series of ad-one lenses and filters for the iPhone that could be used without the iCA polycarbonate case.