I just came to a realization that prompted me to give the spotlight to the friend that we don’t appreciate enough: the Pixel.

Everything we have as web developers, designers, or just anyone reading this post, is thanks to the pixel. Pornography, movies, childhood memories, TV, video games — and no appreciation is ever given to the pixel. The spotlight is taken by the applications, the websites, the programming.

No, let us thank the Pixel, the jesus of our optical sensory input. January 24th is now pixel appreciation day.

As on any given appreciation day, let us delve briefly into the history of the pixel as a term and indulge ourselves.

Who invented the pixel? It’s hard to say. The term was first published in 1965 in an article by Fred C. Billingsley. At the time, another popular term for the same concept was pel. Pixel is way cooler. Pixel’s full name is Picture Element, but let’s just call him pixel.

From Wikipedia:

The word is a combination of picture and element, via pix. Pix was first coined in 1932 in a Variety Magazine headline, as an abbreviation for the word pictures, in reference to movies; by 1938 pix was being used in reference to still pictures by photojournalists.

The concept of a picture element dates to the earliest days of television, for example as Bildpunkt (the German word for pixel, literally picture point) in the 1888 German patent of Paul Nipkow. According to various etymologies, the earliest publication of the term picture element itself was in Wireless World magazine in 1927,[2] though it had been used earlier in various U.S. patents filed as early as 1911.[3]

Some authors explain pixel as picture cell, as early as 1972.^[1]

That is all.  Love your pixels.

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