Making of ‘Binary Scan’ (by Russell A. Kirsch, 1957), 2016

The story behind the photograph…

Russell A. Kirsch (b. 1929) was an engineer at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), working in Washington, DC. He led the team that developed the world’s first digital image scanner. One of the first scanned images showed Kirsch’s three-month-old son, Walden. The original photograph was captured as 30,976 pixels, in an area measuring approximately 2 × 2 in. (5 × 5 cm). By combining several black and white scans, which were made using different scanning thresholds, it was possible to add greyscale information. In the case of Walden Kirsch’s image, two binary scans were combined to make a composite that showed approximate grey levels. After a long and illustrious career, Kirsch retired to Portland, Oregon, where the portrait of Walden now resides at the Portland Art Museum. The pioneering work of Kirsch’s team was crucial to the development of digital photography, as well as playing a role in the invention of technology that would be vital to future space exploration; it was also key to medical breakthroughs such as CAT scans. In 2003, Life magazine named the scanned image of Walden one of the ‘100 Photographs that Changed the World’.