The first photograp ever taken

This is the oldest surviving photograp ever taken. It was captured by the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. As he could not draw well, he developed a fascination for lithography and started engraving forms and pictures, made transparent, onto stone and glass plates. After experimenting for 10 years this picture emerged.

Moron question of the day!

Did he post it on instagram?

He did not. It took 8 hours to capture this scenery in a fairly complex proceeding. Niépce placed a camera obscura (an optical device, which projected an image of its surroundings on a screen) in the window of his upper-story workroom  at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras. But the real innovation was that he also ‘put a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum) in the camera and uncapped the lens. At the end of the day he took out the plate and rendered the image visible by washing it with a mixture of oil lavender and white petroleum, which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light.’ The result was a permanent direct poisitive picture. The first ever made! It is a scenery containing outbuildings, courtyard, trees and landscape as seen from that upstairs window.

Niépce himself called this method ‘Heliography’. He died only 7 years after his invention without any recognition. After travelling from hand to hand it was real value was appreciated by Harry Ransom who purchased it for the Gernsheim Collection. It was subsequently donated to The University of Texas at Austin by Helmu Gernsheim in 1963. It still rests in the university in its original frame.

I had seen this picture before I read about it a few times and I was completely convinced that there is a person in it, on the left side. Maybe I am just imagining it because of the millions of ‘duckfaces’ and mirror self portraits on facebook. But I like to think that it could be the inventor himself who snuck into the picture to finally get the credit he deserves after all.

The first video ever uploaded on youtube

For most people using the World Wide Web nowadays, youtube is one of the main ways of expressing themselves and consuming content of others. It has become the main centre of visual communication around the world. Regardless of what you want to watch, this is the place where you will find it.  Although around 30% of videos account for 99% of views on the site it is still estimated that users upload an hour of video content every second. Yes I also thought that those other 70% must be junk then. However, if we look at the most viewed video on the site ever (‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber) or at the top ten most subscribed channels like ‘smosh’, ‘JennaMarbles’ or ‘nigahiga’ the collective selection of internet users seems like a disappointment. Do not get me wrong – Ray William Johnson videos cheer me up too and I love the ‘Simple Pickup’ guys. I just think that there should be a normal balance between home – made jokers and public intelligence influencing the interests and opinions of viewers. A video like this  ,which deserves a post as for example should get at least more than 10 million views and a channel like TED should be in the top 10 of subscribed channels and not have 5 times less subscribers than ‘The Annoying Orange’. That is just my opinion and hopefully the new search rank in youtube will improve what we find.

Ok, now what was the first video ever uploaded on youtube?

Moron question of the day!

Was the first video on youtube black and white?

Nope. Youtube is not as old as your mom! The first video was uploaded on the site at 8.27 PM on Saturday April 23^rd 2005, yes really it only started in 2005! It is called ‘Me at the zoo ‘and just shows the co-founder of the site Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo talking about the really, really, really long trunks of elephants.

Now do not be disappointed. This extremely boring video was just the beginning of a virtual universe where now you can find whatever you want. And if you are hungry for original and visually beautiful content there is always vimeo. (youtube is going to find and kill me for this :D).