History of Selfies 000 September 2, 2014October 9, 2017 Lava International ltd. Selfies, whether you love them or you hate them, you simply cannot ignore them. Open your Facebook account or your Twitter feed and you are bound to run into at least one selfie. But where did it all come from? Is it just another flash in the pan or is it here to stay? And the biggest question of them all, did the first ever selfie feature a duck-face? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, (Yes, its a proper word now) a selfie is described as, A photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media. However, there were no smartphones or webcams when the first ever selfies were taken. In fact, just having a camera was a huge thing. Thats because the first ever selfie wasnt taken a decade or even 2 decades ago. It was taken more than 100 years ago. Every historian seems to agree that the first ever selfie was taken by Robert Cornelius, an American photography pioneer who clicked a picture of himself in 1839. Robert shot a daguerreotype (one of the first forms of photography) of himself and could also be one of the earliest pictures of a person. On the back of the picture he wrote, The first light picture ever taken. 1839. Thankfully, the duck-face wasnt invented that day. By the 1900s, Kodak had invented the Kodak Brownie Box Camera. It was a (relatively) portable camera and led to many people taking a photographic self-portraiture in front of a mirror. Clearly, people back then had too much free time and not enough Twitter because look at the number of characters that takes up! While the world continued taking self portraits, the word selfie wasnt there yet. It was around the early 2000s that the now ubiquitous word was first coined by someone who had no idea the impact his made up word would have. In 2004, the first ever #selfie was used on Flickr and in less than a decade, selfies were everywhere thanks to cheaper digital cameras followed by smartphones and their front facing cameras and in November 2013, the word selfie was in the Oxford English Dictionary. In August 2014, the word was officially added to The Official Scrabble Player Dictionary, the highest honour that a word can achieve. Now that you know all that there is to know about selfies, go out and start clicking selfies on your Iris X5 and if someone asks, just tell them that you are taking a #photographicselfportraiture. And if you are a #selfiephilic too, do participate in our twitter contest by posting your whackiest selfies @lavamobiles using #x5madeforselfies. For more info: www.lavamobiles.com Save 000