The first ever selfie was taken in 1839 by an early American photographer named Robert Cornelius.

And when I say early, I mean this guy was one of the first ever people to take a portrait.

There were a few photos taken before his that technically included people, but those people

were generally fuzzy parts of a larger landscape.

The Deggerotype, which was the first publicly available

photographic process and the only real option for taking photos for about 20 years after its invention,

was only invented that very year in 1839. So Cornelius got himself one of these devices,

figured out how to process the resulting images,

and captured an image of himself.

Five years before Louis de Guerre, the inventor of the diaryotype, would have a portrait taken of himself with his own invention.

The de Garotype was a relatively simple machine and made use of a natural phenomena called

Camera Obscura, which is also sometimes referred to as a pinhole image.

This technique for capturing a natural scene was used by Renaissance-era painters at times,

to plot out images onto a canvas by poking a hole in a box or a tent,

and then allowing the photons, the light from

outside, to cast an image of whatever was outside the box onto a surface inside the tent.

The pinhole focused the external light, like a projector.

Now, the resultant image was inverted.

It would be upside down, but this allowed them to project an image of what was outside the tent in three dimensions onto a flat surface, which they could then trace onto a canvas to get its shape, and then they'd take that outline, flip it so it was right side up, and then paint it as usual.

This same concept was used for the daguerreotype, but instead of using that pinhole

projection effect, that camera obscura, to capture an image by tracing it, he built a box with a

pinhole in it that would project the image onto a photosensitive plate, a plate that was

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