How the Camera Phone was Invented

When Philippe Kahn rushed his wife to the hospital to give birth in 1997, he had his camera, his laptop, his phone, and his soldering iron (which just happened to be in the car with his other tools). He wanted to share pictures of the new baby with family and friends immediately, but there was no internet connection in the delivery room. So he spent the labor time figuring out how to send a picture through his phone.   

(vimeo link)

The result was the world's first camera phone. Because 2,000 people got to see Sophie the day she was born, we now have selfies, Instagram, and citizen journalism.

In 2016 Time Magazine included Kahn's first camera phone photo in their list of the 100 most influential photos of all time.

-via Laughing Squid


Comments (2)

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I remember reading some blog written by an American guy living in Japan. He was absolutely gobsmacked (as were we all) by all the people taking photos with their PHONES! OMG!1! In retrospect it's pretty hilarious.
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Wasn't the first according to WP:

There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 1990s. There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997. In Japan, two competing projects were run by Sharp and Kyocera in 1997. Both had cell phones with integrated cameras.
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Interesting. Though I think the theory behind imprinting is cultural and culture bleeds together. I don't think blue is a distinctively male color because my parents bought me blue pajamas and a blue blankie, but because the entire culture associates blue with boys and pink with girls.

On another note, women cannot be color-blind and men cannot have super-color vision like some women. Whereas men will be color blind because they lack a third cone responding to the red range, women can have a fourth cone that bisects the red range and gives a richer spectrum of colors. Then there is achromatopsia which is the inability to see color and a really bad name for a baby girl.

Perhaps some of the difference is in the color-opponency cells in the occipital cortex and perhaps the associating of different colors. A part of me suspects women are trained by the culture to recognize a greater range of color names and men are basically not expected to. Wine-tasters also have a wider range of names for flavors, using terms like "earthy" that non-wine-tasters by and large don't use. I doubt the wide range of color names employed by women are innate. But like the wine-tasters, they learn to discriminate.

Even given all that, which is done to be fair, I think there might actually be some innate predilection, but devising a conclusive experiment for that is problematic.
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I don't think forced choice paradigms like making people choose a favourite and least favourite colour has good ecological validity as many adults don't have favourite colours. I know I don't.

@ Ryan S, women can also have colour blindness but it is quite uncommon. Colour blindness is carried on the X chromosome. If males inherit an X chromosome with the mutation it will be displayed in the phenotype. If women inherit 1, she will be a carrier, however if she inherits the mutation from both X chromosomes, it will be displayed in the phenotype.

Also, you have a point about gender differences in the vocabulary of colour:
"Stecklers' study in 1990 concluded that women's ability of naming colors is far more precise than men's and also they have a broader vocabulary for color names such as ecru, aquamarine, lavender, and mauve."
http://www.colormatters.com/news_spring_07/focus.html
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@Muzition and AntDude, the above graph shows females' least favourite colours. Blue was chosen most frequently by both genders as their favourite colour.
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