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Not to take anything away from Kirsch's achievements but that statement is similar to saying "Without Einstein we wouldn't have a theory of General Relativity".
by codethief 4y ago
Not to take anything away from Kirsch's achievements but that statement is similar to saying "Without Einstein we wouldn't have a theory of General Relativity". …which is very likely false: In the 1910s there were dozens of other people looking into unifying gravity with Special Relativity (and electromagnetism) and, eventually, someone else would have surely come up with a theory isomorphic to General Relativity.
In the same way, someone else probably would have invented the digital image scanner.
- mannykannot 4y agoHilbert, for one, was on Einstein's heels: https://jorgenveisdal.medium.com/einstein-and-hilberts-race-to-generalize-relativity-6885f44e3cbe https://jorgenveisdal.medium.com/einstein-and-hilberts-race-...
- 13of40 4y agoYou could almost say that it's such an obvious invention that the first person who had access to an internally programmable digital computer came up with it. Scanning and printing over a wire were implemented in the late 19th century[1], so the only thing left was to be able to store the signal and replay it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto