Education
Kirsch attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1946. He continued his education at New York University in 1950, in 1952, and later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kirsch attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1946. He continued his education at New York University in 1950, in 1952, and later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Education Personal life Kirsch is married to Joan (née Levin) Kirsch. Kirsch has spent most of his professional life in Washington, District of Columbia where he was affiliated with the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) for nearly 50 years. Now retired, he resides in Portland, Oregon.
In 1951 Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) as part of the team which ran SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer.
SEAC was the United States."s first stored-program computer to become operational, having entered service in 1950. In 1957, Kirsch"s group developed a digital image scanner, to “trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs”, and made the first digital scans.
One of the first photographs scanned, a picture of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, was captured as just 30,976 pixels, a 176 × 176 array, in an area measuring 5 cm × 5 cm. The bit depth was only one bit per pixel, stark black and white with no intermediate shades of gray, but by combining several scans made using different scanning thresholds, grayscale information could also be acquired.
They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize alphanumeric characters and produce oscilloscope displays.
Kirsch also proposed the Kirsch operator for edge detection. Later in life, Kirsch became the director of research of the Sturvil Corporation and an advisory editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). He is currently the advisory editor of the journal, Languages of Design.
The original image is in the Portland Art Museum.
Although Kirsch did not work for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, his invention led to technology crucial to space exploration in the 1960s and beyond, including the Apollo moon landing. Medical advancements such as Sir Godfrey Hounsfield’s Centre for Alternative Technology scan can also be attributed to Kirsch’s research.
