World Selfie Day: Who took the first-ever selfie?

By Nandini Bishnoi

Grab a phone, smile, click a selfie!

Taking a selfie has now become commonplace wherever you are, from restaurants to castles. People take selfies while doing (nearly) any and everything. These days, there is no awkwardness attached to taking a selfie in public, and with the rise in the number of filters, it has become a common activity to pass time in private too.

But how did the selfie come in to being? On this World Selfie Day, let's take a look at the origin of this trend.

The first-ever 'selfie' was taken in 1839. While not termed as such then, the self-portrait was taken by Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist and photography enthusiast, in Philadelphia. Cornelius took a picture of himself in the back of his family's chandelier store. He set up the camera and then ran into the frame for the picture, thus having clicked the first-ever 'selfie'.


In 1966, astronaut Buzz Aldrin took a picture of himself during the Gemini 12 mission, making it the first selfie taken in space.


However, the word ‘selfie’ was only founded in 2002, when an Australian man, Nathan Hope, got drunk at his 21st birthday and posted a picture of his stitched lip with the caption “sorry about the focus, it was a selfie”.

And then, there was no looking back.

Between 2003 and 2005, more than a century after the first selfie, the trend evolved into its modern version, growing bigger with people posting these photos on the social networking site MySpace.


By 2013, the word was added to the Oxford Dictionary, which described it as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.” It went on to be named the Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionary in 2014.

The same year, DJ Rick McNeely started celebrating June 21 as ‘National Selfie Day’.


Now, with the rise of social media and new technology, selfies have become an everyday affair. Whether it was Ellen DeGeneres's viral Oscar selfie or PM Modi's many selfies, this trend transcends age, industry, and boundaries.