All the Small Things – how a newborn daughter’s photo made tech history in 1997.
To all the dads out there who became fathers in the early 2000s: when your child was born, who felt the urge to capture that moment and share it with as many people around them as possible?
And who actually had a way to do that without much fuss, ideally over a mobile network? Until smartphones, or simply phones with cameras, became everyday devices, there were still hurdles – mobile charges, and above all, the technology itself.
Philippe Kahn knew this too – a trained mathematician, French immigrant, software tinkerer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
And yet, with a picture of his newborn daughter Sophie, he managed to write a little piece of tech history. In 2016, TIME included the postage-stamp-sized image in its selection of the 100 most influential photographs of all time: a tiny record of a milestone in mobile photo sharing.
What we take for granted today was a much bigger undertaking on that June 11 back in 1997. Sure, the components existed: a digital camera, a mobile phone and an email-capable computer. But getting this combo to work so you could instantly post and send a picture, as we do today – that wasn’t so straightforward back then.
The Masterplan
Perhaps that was exactly why Philippe Kahn set out to capture his newborn’s first photo digitally and share it with the world straight away.
According to reports, he used the 18 hours his wife spent in labor to connect the server technology he had been developing for months to the hardware needed to make it all work.
He fetched parts from the car, someone in on the plan drove to an electronics store for a few missing components, and even a soldering iron came into play on the maternity ward. The result was an improvised stack: a Casio QV digital camera, his Toshiba laptop and a Motorola StarTAC flip phone, all working together through his own code to get a picture onto his server.
Step by Step
He connected the digicam to the computer with a cable, and the software transferred the picture there first. From there, it had to reach his server, which would send a mass email to his contacts. This was where his Motorola mobile phone came in.
A connector from his car’s hands-free kit and a few more lines of code got the phone talking to the computer. That allowed the picture to travel over the mobile network to his server, which then sent out a link by email.
Shortly afterwards, by his own account, the email had gone out to around 2,000 contacts worldwide. They reacted with delight and amazement to the postage-stamp-sized photo – its 320 × 240 pixels made the transfer easier! MMS, today’s social media platforms and smartphone messaging apps didn’t exist yet. Other ways of transmitting data on the move were expensive and technically fiddly – assuming you had the equipment in the first place.
Things Can Only Get Better
Kahn tried to market his idea, but the companies he approached initially waved it away. Mobile phones were for making calls, after all. That was the prevailing view.
Around 2000, as the first camera phones reached the market, his idea found a way forward with partners in Japan. His company LightSurf, which developed his ideas further, was sold to VeriSign in 2005.
Today, his principle of snapping-a-picture-and-sharing-it-straight-away is second nature. So is accompanying your partner into the delivery room when you’re about to become a dad (speaking from experience: 24 hours of labor, and I was only the one standing beside her).
With all his tinkering and the companies he has founded, Philippe Kahn is considered a Silicon Valley legend.
And his daughter Sophie is now well into adult life herself.
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