People have always faced issues while taking selfies, especially when there is a very large crowd involved. However, with the use of a selfie stick, group pictures and selfies can be taken with ease. Though the invention of a selfie stick seem like a recent invention, it does have a little history behind it.

The timeline

In the year 1925, Arnold Hogg, a pianist and an entertainer from Rugby, England, used a makeshift selfie stick to click a picture of himself and his wife. Though there exists no historic evidence that dates to the time when the photograph was taken, most people count it as the first use of a selfie stick.

Image: The first ‘makeshift selfie stick’ (image source: bbc.com)

 In 1969, selfie sticks were first used in the Czechoslovak film titled ‘I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen’. In the film, the characters take a selfie by using a stick that extends like a selfie stick, which gets printed out later like a polaroid picture.

In 1984, Japanese inventors Hiroshi Ueda and Yujiro Mima filed a patent, for what was then called a ‘telescopic extender for supporting a compact camera’ or an ‘extender stick’. This device held the camera in place by using a tripod and had a mirror attached to it. This stick was a need of the hour for the inventor because he had difficulty taking pictures with his family on trips.  In 1995, the invention was featured in a book called ‘101 Un-useless Japanese Inventions’.

Image: 101 Un-useless Japanese Inventions (Image source: goodreads.com)

In 2003, the patent for Ueda’s invention ran out and unfortunately his invention did not do as well as it should have. In 2005, Wayne Fromm, a Canadian inventor, filed a patent for an ‘apparatus for supporting a camera, and the method for using the apparatus’, which he called as ‘Quik Pod’. This was a hand-held, extendable stick which could be attached to phones and cameras for the purpose of clicking pictures.

In 2012, Yeong-Ming Wang patented a multi-axis selfie device that could hold a smartphone. The following year saw a large boom in the sale of these selfie sticks and many companies openly copied the designs of the patented inventors.

 In 2014, the term ‘selfie stick’ became popular and Time Magazine declared it as one of the best inventions of 2014. Currently, there exists selfie sticks that can even hold a laptop! Although the selfie sticks are scorned by many, it is considered as an important invention which assists the field of photography to capture pictures of people while they smiled at themselves in front of a mobile or laptop screen.

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