FIRST Photo on the INTERNET ... and other things too.
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And this week I am in San Francisco. I just flew in a couple of days ago, so I've been busy traveling, but new episodes of regular shows like IMG! and DONG are coming soon.
But in the meantime, rather than post nothing, I figured I would share things that have been on my mind. For instance, go back to the Golden Gate Bridge footage. There. Her. That's the girl I sat next to on the flight. Turns out she's an immunology researcher at a university in Italy.
She's studying these parasitic worms in Africa that infect people but then leave those people immune to things like diabetes and allergies. In fact, if you cure these people of the worm infection, they once again become susceptible to things like diabetes and allergies. It's really incredible, so, I guess, good luck girl on the plane to solving that because it sounds awesome.
On the flight, I also did a bunch of reading. I read this entire book: The history of Britain in really tiny little bite-sized chunks. Now, the thing that really blew my mind was about Ireland and the potato famine in the 1840s. So many people died or left the country because at that famine that to this day the population of Ireland is still lower than it was a hundred and fifty years ago before the famine.
Speaking of things like people and birth rates, Breathingearth[.net] is an amazing website. You can just sit there and let the site visually show you, based on recent statistics, where people are being born and dying and how frequently. A blue Sun represents a birth and a black dot represents a death.
This is a picture of Anne Hathaway. So is this. Except this Anne Hathaway is much, much older and she's also quite famous. This Anne Hathaway was the wife of William Shakespeare. Now, we don't have a photograph of her because photography as we know it today wasn't even invented until two hundred years after that Anne Hathaway died.
This is the first permanent photograph ever taken by mankind. It's a view from a window in France taken in 1836. Two years later, in 1838, this photograph was taken. And what's significant about it is that it's the first photograph ever taken that had people in it. If you look down here, for instance, you can see a man at a water pump.
Modern colorization of the image has also claimed to have discovered other people in the picture. Now, none of them are very clear, which is why we should talk about Robert Cornelius. I actually hid this portrait in the beginning of the most recent IMG! And the reason it's significant is that this picture is the first portrait ever taken.
It's the first capturing of light reflected off a human's face. Think of it this way: there is no other photograph of anybody older than this. This is the oldest human we have a photographic record of.
Finally, here's a picture that IMG! would be proud of: a photo of a musical parody group called "The Horrible CERN Girls," formed out of employees at CERN. The initials of their name in French are C, E, R, N. But why should we care about this picture?
Well, in 1992, Tim Berners-Lee uploaded this photo to a website, making this image the very first photographic image ever on the Internet. But here is something that has never happened. Along the border of China and Bhutan is a mountain called Gangkhar Puensum. At 24,800 feet high, it is the tallest mountain in the world that mankind has yet to reach the top of.
The local government prohibits nearing in the region, which means it might be left unconquered for quite some time, making it one of just many things on Earth that we have yet to explore. In a couple of days, we'll have a new episode of DONG, so be sure to subscribe to Vsauce. And as always, thanks for watching.