By Rubens / News / / 0 Comments

This is the first photo sent with a mobile phone

Celebrating 20 years since Philippe Kahn managed to send the image of his newborn daughter by phone

The first photo sent via a mobile phone wasn’t done in a Japan’s laboratory or in a Silicon Valley’s garage. It wasn’t an attempt to enter eternity, it was more an excitement and curiosity action. Today we can say that 20 years ago the first picture of the history was sent via mobile.

The 11th June 1997, Philippe Kahn, an engineer and business-man from Paris, saw born his daughter Sophie. Camera phones had not yet been marketed, so any mortal would have sent a message or would have called one by one to their family. However, Kahn connected his digital camera to the phone using the cables that normally connected the sound of his car and sent the picture of his “little Sophie” nestled between the sheets.

Philippe Kahn
Philippe Kahn

Although it sounds heroic, almost science fiction, both Kahn and his wife had long been thinking of how to send photos via mobile. In fact, they came to found a company (“Lightsurf”) to satisfy that need. At the beginning they do not pay much attention, but about three years after the birth of Sophie travelled to Japan and got the idea to take a walk.

Neither Kahn, nor his wife Sonia Lee became millionaires as precursors of the mobile phones with a camera, but their entrepreneur impulse (having founded several companies) has enabled them to live fairly well all these years. As a curiosity, the picture of Sophie was taken with a Casio QV-10 and sent in the GIF format from a Motorola StarTAC. The photo had a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and weighed in at 27 KB, nothing compared to the dimensions that can be achieved today.

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