The first image scanned into a computer was a photo of a baby
In 1957 Russell Kirsch and his team at the US National Bureau of Standards built a drum scanner that fed pictures into the SEAC computer. They tested it on a snapshot of Walden, Kirsch's baby son, then three months old, and the machine could hold a width of just 176 pixels. The idea of scanning, though, goes back to a Victorian clockmaker.
Scanners descend from fax machines. In 1843 the Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain patented a design in which a pendulum-driven stylus swept across a raised metal image, sending pulses to a matching pendulum that marked chemically treated paper. It was never built, and it depended on both pendulums swinging in perfect step. Frederick Bakewell made a working machine in 1847 using a foil-covered drum, and in 1862 Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph solved the timing problem with magnetic regulators, becoming the first fax in regular service. Arthur Korn's phototelautograph of 1902 read pages with a light-sensitive selenium cell and became the basis for the wirephoto machines newspapers used for decades.
Early digital imaging arrived surprisingly soon. The Bartlane system of 1920 etched a photograph onto five zinc plates at different exposures and sent it by telegraph in five-bit code, giving five shades of grey. At Kodak in 1937 Alexander Murray and Richard Morse patented the first analog colour scanner, which read transparencies through red, green and blue filters to help make printing plates.
Modern forms took shape in the 1970s. ECRM's Autokon 8400 of 1975, the first flatbed used for digital image processing, scanned pages with a laser and served newspapers for two decades. In 1977 Raymond Kurzweil released a reading machine for blind people, the first flatbed scanner with a charge-coupled device sensor, which recognized printed text and spoke it aloud.
Andy Hertzfeld designed the first home scanner for the Macintosh, ThunderScan, released in December 1984. It was shaped like the ribbon cartridge of Apple's ImageWriter printer, slotted into the print head and read one line at a time as the carriage moved, slowly and only in black and white. Today most scanners use either charge-coupled devices or contact image sensors, while drum scanners with photomultiplier tubes remain the choice for top quality.
Source: Image scanner
