Just Because Russell A. Kirsch Has Forgotten Who He Is, Doesn't Mean We Have To

Scanned photo of his young son Walden by Russell A. Kirsch,
considered by common consent the first digitally scanned image

Decline and death are an indivisible part of living. We're like flowers, which unfurl from a seed, grow, thrive, and bloom—then drop their petals, wither, perish and become one again with the soil in which they grew. In a way, finding it sad is...I don't know, indulgent? Some word like that. It's really only...natural. (The cycle of birth and death grows more profound to us as we age.)

This short article at Oregon Live about Russell A. Kirsch strikes me as sad even though maybe it's not. It's a brief glimpse into his life now, near the end of his decline.

Kirsch was one of the digital pioneers. He was the leader of the team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that developed the first digital scanner in 1957. I've been reading Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now recently, and finding it very thought-provoking (that term isn't just book-blurb boilerplate; it means what it says, i.e. a book that often sends you off on trails of thought of your own), and I can't help but view Russell Kirsch through the prism of the values the book defends.

Kirsch's has been a useful life, and by several accounts a happy one. His wife is still taking care of him. For the time it takes you to scan this one article, I thought you might want to acquaint with him, if you never have previously.

I look forward to the time when a standard scholarly work about the digital pioneers will illumine all of their biographies, after the fashion of Vasari, Plutarch, or Johnson. (Or Harold C. Schonberg, whose Lives of the Great Composers I enjoyed.) Hope I'm around to read it.

Mike
(Thanks to JG)

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Featured Comments from:

Jim Fix: "Thank you for that article. I met Russell at the start of my computer science teaching gig at Reed in Portland, must've been 2001 or so, probably before his condition had really taken root. I worked semi-regularly at the bakery they mention in that article, Ken's. One day there I was grading papers with 'automata diagrams' on them. There was this dapper, smiling fellow across the table from me, and he struck up a conversation about those diagrams. He was full of energy and curiosity, and natural charm, and he slowly revealed to me the details of his pioneering work, including the scanner prototype he had built, and the National Standards computer he had helped invent. Quite a resumé.

"He apparently was quite fond of images and art, definitely influenced by the life he had with his art historian wife. If I remember correctly, in retirement he was collaborating with her on ways that technology could be meaningfully used to analyze and preserve works of art, especially if it allowed others to share in his wonder about the artistic impulse. I think they had just returned from a visit to a major cave painting site in France, and he was full of ideas about that.

"I was grateful for the conversation, and my own luck, and was happy to learn that he had taken on teaching the same kind of automata material to his group of retired friends, ones that wanted to stay fascinated and engaged with the world around them, even the digital one. Despite his stature, his generosity during our chat left me feeling validated, and with an extra energy that I carried back to my own work.

"Funny how a shared love of a good cup of coffee and a Ken's 'morning bun' can lead to all sorts of other connection. You never know who your neighbor is and what they've been part of, and it's often good to put in a little work to find out.

"I am sorry to learn about his condition and its effect on his loving family. I got to witness a man who seemed filled to the brim with riches."

Mike replies: What a great memory. Thanks for sharing it, Jim.

Comments

[Matt Kallio]

I had the pleasure of hearing Kirsch give a talk at the Portland Art Museum some years ago,
about his work analyzing art works and inventing digital imagery. It was a great talk.
I remember particularly him saying he regretted that he arranged the pixels in a plain, inflexible, rectangular grid. He regretted not taking a hint from the great Byzantine mosaic masters who placed their tiles so as to enhance the image's contours, a kind of smart sharpening. Maybe we have technologies to do this now, or are already doing it for all I know.

[Stan B.]

I look forward to a time when dementia, Alzheimer's and their like can no longer literally rob people of who and what they are; a time when those insidious medical conditions, which I consider well worse than cancer, are long a thing of our bygone past.

[Rob Campbell]

One positive aspect of old(ish) age is that he won't have to waste time on social media! I restrict mine to three sites - all photo-based - and I have never had to play the "Like" button game which seems to represent one of the more mindless occupations of the day.

Not everything about a 'sane' old age is that wonderful, though, and health aside, the longer you last the greater the demands on what you were able to save during your younger days. That's one huge problem about photographic self-employment, because a steady income is not guaranteed, and as a direct result, your pension plans are limited, or at least, they were during my working days. Generally, other than some Gitzo tripods, there's very little a self-employed photographer is left with that he can sell when he retires... most of us thought we never would, but life has its own rhythms and pension plans such as stock photography took our dreams away with it, and digital sure didn't do a lot to help that concept survive!

One thing's for sure: having a devoted other-half makes the trip worth the battles, and the hole deeper when that's lost.

Rob

[William Cook]

Thanks for posting this article. Such an impactful figure in my life yet I’d never heard of him previously—perhaps because all those years ago when I could have/should have been embracing a new medium I was too involved fighting the digital revolution rather than embracing it.

[AlexV]

Jim Fix wrote, “ You never know who your neighbor is and what they've been part of, and it's often good to put in a little work to find out.”

While seamingly obvious, we can forget this point in our age of digialized relations. It is a very nicely expressed comment.

[Randy Cole]

Science is populated with unsung heroes, and Russell Kirsch is certainly one of them. I first worked with digital images in 1970, but I never knew who built the first real digital scanner (thanks, Mike!). Early computers were incompatible and networking was non-existent, so it took a long time before many digital images were available for researchers to work with.

Groups at MIT and USC distributed a few images on magnetic tape in the early 1970s, including the famous "Lenna" image scanned from the November 1972 issue of Playboy. There were fewer than 32 digital images available at the time, so we used to joke that any digital image in the world could be coded into 5 bits.

[Paul Judice]

I recently learned about Willard Boyle, a co-creator of the CCD sensor in 1969 for which he was awarded a Nobel prize 40 years later. Had he lived longer (he died in 2011) we might have been neighbors. He was born in Amhearst, Nova Scotia and retired in the nearby village of Wallace, Nova Scotia where I bought a cottage last year.

In the tiny local museum, buried among seafaring relics, there is a display case that chronicles his accomplishments in physics.

[Mani Sitaraman]

Here's a picture of Walden Kirsch (no longer a baby!) who for many years worked as a TV reporter, and has spent the last 18 years at Intel Corporation in communications.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/249222047/WRK_400x400.jpg