American computer scientist Russell Kirsch has died at the age of 91, ABC News reports. He was the guy behind the 'pixel' and scanned the first digital photo based on that concept.

Kirsch was the one that formed the base of what we now all know as a pixel. In 1957, decades before the first digital camera appeared, the scientist digitized a photo of his son. He did this with a special photo scanner that he built together with colleagues. A rotating drum and light sensors reflected a small image of the child. A scan would be made on the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), one of the first programmable computers.

During a scan, the image was captured on a grid consisting of small squares. By performing multiple scans, not only black values, but also shades of gray could be recorded. The first digital photo was ultimately a 5 by 5 centimeter image and consisted of 31,000 pixels. To get you an idea, your smartphone currently can take photos that consist of twelve million pixels pretty easily.

In 2010, Kirsch told Wired that square pixels made sense at the time, but that he regretted it afterwards. "It was a very stupid thing that has bothered everyone in the world ever since." He argued for pixels in variable shapes, which could have made curves and other lines much tighter. 

He reached an age of 13x7 pixels, rest in peace Russell.