Technology changes at an astonishing pace. If you're over thirty, you can probably remember a time when mobile phones had tiny screens that only showed alphanumeric text, and their only real function was making calls. When the idea of taking and sending pictures from a phone appeared, it felt like science fiction.
Do you remember when mobile phones didn't even have screens that showed more than a few glowing letters and numbers, and you had to use them only for what they were actually invented for, talking? If you remember that era, you can imagine the surprise when you were told that you could take and send images through phones. Twenty-two years have passed since the first image sent from a mobile phone arrived at its destination, showing not only a newborn but also, and mainly, a new way of communicating that would revolutionize telecommunications, social communication, and mobile computing.
The First Photo Sent from a Mobile Phone
The invention was by Philippe Kahn, a tech entrepreneur who, as if it were a home hobby, was the first to send a photograph via mobile phone. The date his "camera phone" was built is recorded as June 11, 1997, and the photograph was of Sophie, Kahn's daughter. While most new parents were waiting for a call or an SMS with a regular description of their firstborn, Philippe went a little further and decided to test the project he had been working on with his wife for several years.
He took the image with a Casio QV-10 (the first commercial digital camera with an LCD) and sent it in GIF format, with a size of 27 KB and a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, through his Motorola StarTAC mobile phone. The connection between the camera and the phone is the most interesting part, because he achieved it through the stereo cables of his car. "I always wanted to have all this working at the moment of taking the photo of my daughter's birth, but I wasn't sure it would happen," he said in an interview in 2017. "It is always the case that if not for doing things at the last minute, nothing would ever get done." The photo was shared on public networks, since the mobile phones of that era didn't even have a screen to view it.
Once the image was sent, the couple received all the congratulations normally given to new parents. That was in 1998, but no one paid much attention until two years later, when in Japan the companies J-Phone and Sharp Electronics decided to launch the camera phone service called Sha-Mail.
And yes, the first photo sent from a mobile phone is all very nice, but... Philippe Kahn did not patent the idea. Of course, Kahn still managed to keep his pride by founding LightSurf, Starfish Software, and FullPower Technologies some time later, with which he did make money, but not even a tenth of what he could have made if he had patented the idea.
Want more about the history of photography? Don't forget to read the article about the first photo uploaded to the web and the one about the first digital camera in history.
