Did You Know That
selfies were invented way before cell phones and before millennials mastered selfies. There was an amateur photographer named Robert Cornelius that used a homemade camera, toxic chemicals and posed himself in 1839 to take the first know selfie ever. Robert was a Dutch immigrant who owned a lamp shop in downtown Philadelphia. He set up his studio in the shop’s backyard. His studio was a box sealed shut except for a hole where he would put a tiny lens that is took out a pair of opera glasses. He would hold his pose about 10 minutes before the homemade camera would capture his pose. He would then run back to the camera and put the lid back over the lens. The selfie was inside the boxed but he had to first take the copper plate inside, fume it with mercury vapor to expose the latent image, rinse the chemical off, dry it, mount it on paper and lastly seal it behind glass.
