Joel Runyon · CC BY 3.0
Russell Kirsch
1929 – 2020aged 91
Built the first digital image scanner at the National Bureau of Standards and in 1957 used it to scan a photograph of his infant son — a 176-by-176 square of black and white, and the first digital image. Every photograph you have ever looked at on a screen descends from it. Son of a Lithuanian pharmacist and a Hungarian homemaker, both Jewish immigrants to Manhattan.