Can You Spot the One Man? 12 Historic Firsts Caught on Camera, From the First Selfie in 1839

On Oct. 24, 1946, a rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico, carried a 35 mm movie camera to an altitude of 65 miles. It snapped a frame every second and a half on the way up.

On the way down, the camera smashed into the desert, but the film survived inside a steel cassette. The grainy frames showed the curve of the Earth for the first time. A 19-year-old on the recovery team later remembered the scientists “jumping up and down like kids.”

In September 1839, a steamship brought the news of Daguerre’s process to America. Within weeks, Robert Cornelius, a Philadelphia metalworker who specialized in silver plating, pointed a camera at himself.

He had to hold still through the whole exposure, arms folded. The result is believed to be the first photographic self-portrait in America, and it now belongs to the Library of Congress. Cornelius wasn’t impressed: the self-portrait was off-center, so when he presented the new process to a learned society that December, he had his partner pose for a better one.

Wilson Bentley grew up on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. On Jan. 15, 1885, at 19, he became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal, using a camera fitted to a microscope.

He went on to photograph well over 5,000 snow crystals and never found two that were the same. His book “Snow Crystals” came out in 1931 and is still in print. “When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost,” he said in 1925. “Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

In 1838, Louis Daguerre pointed his camera at the Boulevard du Temple, one of the busiest streets in Paris. The exposure lasted several minutes, so every carriage and every walker moved on before the plate could record them. The street looks deserted.

Except for one spot. At the lower left, a man stopped to have his boots shined, and he stood still long enough to stay in the picture. He is probably the first person ever caught in a photograph. Nobody knows his name, and look closely: the shoeshiner bent over his feet made it in, too.

In 1957, Russell Kirsch and his colleagues at the National Bureau of Standards, now NIST, built a drum scanner for SEAC, the country’s first programmable computer. The first picture they fed into it was a photo of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, Walden.

The image was only about 2 inches across and 176 pixels on a side. That grainy baby picture led to satellite imaging, bar codes and the camera in your phone. In 2003, Life magazine named it one of the 100 photographs that changed the world.

In 1861, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell gave the first demonstration of color reproduction at the Royal Institution in London. Photographer Thomas Sutton shot a tartan ribbon three times, through a red, a green and a blue filter.

When the three pictures were projected on top of each other, the ribbon appeared in color. The colors were far from perfect, but the idea worked. More than 160 years later, the camera in your phone still splits every picture into red, green and blue.

For years, people argued about whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves in the air at once. The eye is simply too slow to tell.

On June 19, 1878, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge lined up a row of cameras beside a track in Palo Alto, California. A mare named Sallie Gardner galloped past and set off the shutters one by one. The sequence, published as “The Horse in Motion,” settled the argument: for a split second, all four feet leave the ground. The date and the horse’s name are printed right on the card.

Around 1907, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii set out to photograph the whole Russian Empire in color. He traveled in a railroad car fitted out as a darkroom and kept working until about 1915.

He used the same trick as Maxwell’s ribbon: three exposures of every scene on a glass plate, through red, green and blue filters. The Library of Congress bought his plates from his heirs in 1948 and turned them into the color images we can see today, like this portrait of a woman from Artvin in Armenian national costume, taken between 1909 and 1912.

Around 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce coated a polished pewter plate with bitumen dissolved in oil of lavender. He set it inside a camera by the window of his second-story workroom at Le Gras, in France.

After several days of sunlight, the plate showed the courtyard, outbuildings and trees outside. It is the earliest camera photograph known to survive. Niépce himself called his process “the first uncertain step in a completely new direction.” Since 1963, it has belonged to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Viking 1 was the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars. Shortly after it touched down on July 20, 1976, it took the first photograph ever made from the Martian surface.

The camera scanned the ground right beside the lander. In the lower right corner, as NASA’s caption points out, is part of the lander’s own footpad, dusted with sand probably kicked up by the landing. Viking 1 went on to work on the plain of Chryse Planitia for more than six years.

In December 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our planet and travel to another body in space. As their spacecraft circled the Moon, it rolled, and Earth suddenly came into view over the lunar horizon. Anders took the picture now known as “Earthrise.”

His first frame was black-and-white, and the famous color shots followed. In April 2026, the Artemis II crew took the reverse view on their own flight around the Moon: Earth setting behind the lunar surface.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, before its cameras were shut off to save power, Voyager 1 turned back toward home and took 60 frames for the first “family portrait” of the solar system. In one of them, taken from about 3.8 billion miles away, Earth sits inside a ray of scattered sunlight.

It is a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. The picture became known as the “Pale Blue Dot.” The version here is NASA’s 2020 reprocessing of the original frame.