Robert Cornelius Birthday

American photography pioneer best known for taking the world’s first selfie. In 1931, Cornelius started working at the family business of lamp manufacturing and soon became an expert in silver plating and metal polishing. And once daguerreotype photographic process was invented, this skill set was in great demand.

As luck would have it, inventor Joseph Saxton contacted Cornelius to create a silver plate for one of his daguerreotypes, which sparked an interest in photography. Sometime in 1839, Robert Cornelius uncapped his camera lens, ran in front of the camera and stood there for 10-15 minutes. The world’s first selfie was born.

Image Source: By Robert Cornelius – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3f04912.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.العربية | čeština | Deutsch | English | {{#bqqsklmàènlanguage:es}} | فارسی | suomi | français | עברית | magyar | italiano | македонски | മലയാളം | Nederlands | polski | português | русский | slovenčina | slovenščina | Türkçe | українська | 中文 | 中文（简体）‎ | 中文（繁體）‎ | +/−Library of Congress; Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Original uploader was Blackmagictea at en.wikipedia, 2006-07-17 (original upload date), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6350177

Behind this photograph of himself, Cornelius wrote, “The first light picture ever taken“.

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