Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service

with me Rachel Naylor. Today I'm taking you back 25 years to when the first photo was shared

from a phone. I've been speaking to the man who took the picture.

It's the 11th of June 1997 and French software engineer Philippe Khan is about to become a

dad. He's in a maternity ward in Santa Cruz in California and his wife Sonia is in labor.

It's a momentous day but his mind's elsewhere because about nine months ago he'd had an idea

that's about to come to fruition. The idea was to instantly share photos but the Poloid did in the

20th century where you took a picture in a dinner party and you shared it and everybody liked that

well in the world of digital you could instantly share this with lots of people. The trouble is

that at the time there was very little bandwidth and so something had to be done and the key to this

was essentially a server infrastructure and it was able to receive one picture and share links to

many people and so what I did is I spent but eight months putting together a server that could

actually do that you know when you have a project like that you can't really predict when

you know it's all going to come together but it turns out that you know it's the old thing that

if it wasn't for the last moment nothing would get done the timing was just right when Sophie was

going to be born and I felt wow you know all the energy just concentrated to make it happen but

it was certain deputy I hadn't planned to make this for the birth of Sophie but it was

that magical moment that was a great thing and how did your wife feel about you working on it

at that time? Oh well I'm very fortunate where Sonia is also a technologist we're partners and so

you know when you're gonna have a baby you go to these classes and we spend you know an hour or two

here's where you do you massage your wife's neck you help her breathe you help well that

as soon as we got into the maternity say a turn to be it's leave me alone good to your say

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