Russell A. Kirsch

Russell A. Kirsch (born 1929) is an American former engineer at the National Bureau of Standards who developed the first digital image scanner.

Background

Education

Kirsch attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1946. He continued his education at New York University in 1950, Harvard University in 1952, and later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Personal life

Kirsch is married to Joan (née Levin) Kirsch. Kirsch has spent most of his professional life in Washington, D.C. where he was affiliated with the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) for nearly 50 years. Now retired, he resides in Portland, Oregon.

Career

In 1951 Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) as part of the team which ran SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. SEAC was the U.S.'s first stored-program computer to become operational, having entered service in 1950.

In 1957, Kirsch's group developed a digital image scanner, to “trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs”, and made the first digital scans. One of the first photographs scanned, a picture of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, was captured as just 30,976 pixels, a 176 × 176 array, in an area measuring 5 cm × 5 cm. The bit depth was only one bit per pixel, stark black and white with no intermediate shades of gray, but by combining several scans made using different scanning thresholds, grayscale information could also be acquired. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize alphanumeric characters and produce oscilloscope displays. Kirsch also proposed the Kirsch operator for edge detection.

Later in life, Kirsch became the director of research of the Sturvil Corporation and an advisory editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He is currently the advisory editor of the journal, Languages of Design.

Accomplishments

Because of its importance in the development of digital photography, in 2003 Kirsch's scanned picture of his son was named by Life magazine one of the “100 Photographs That Changed the World”. The original image is in the Portland Art Museum. Although Kirsch did not work for NASA, his invention led to technology crucial to space exploration in the 1960s and beyond, including the Apollo moon landing. Medical advancements such as Sir Godfrey Hounsfield’s CAT scan can also be attributed to Kirsch’s research.