These days, our phones can easily end up filled with screenshots of almost everything we see online. Maybe it is a recipe we want to try later or a strange conversation we immediately need to send to a friend. It could also be a funny dating profile or a quote we do not want to forget.
Taking a screenshot barely requires any thought anymore. We press a couple of buttons, feel a gentle buzz, and whatever was on the screen is suddenly sitting in our camera roll alongside all our regular photos.
For something that feels so ordinary, the modern screenshot is surprisingly recent. According to Vice, the iPhone became the first mobile phone to include a built-in screenshot function in 2007, with Android following in 2011.
Still, while the technology itself is fairly new, the idea of quickly copying something we see goes back much further. In fact, you could trace part of its story all the way to the nineteenth century.
In 1832, French Brazilian inventor Hercules Florence developed a photographic process designed to reproduce printed materials. His method used paper with tiny holes punched into it, allowing light to create a copy on another specially prepared sheet.
Of course, there were no phone screens involved yet. Still, the basic purpose echoed what screenshots do today: take existing information and turn it into a copy that can be viewed somewhere else.
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A much more recognizable ancestor of the screenshot appeared more than a century later. Vice reports that the first known photograph of a computer screen was taken in 1959.
A programmer had drawn a pin-up model on a huge cathode-ray tube screen owned by the American military, and someone photographed it using a Polaroid camera. The result was an extremely early example of computer art and, technically, a screenshot.
The process was far less convenient than pressing two buttons on a phone, especially considering the computer itself was enormously expensive.
Around the same time, researchers at MIT were exploring new ways for people to work with computers through an early computer-aided design project.
The technology allowed users to interact with a computer while creating designs, which was a major change from how these machines were usually viewed. Since computers were still rare and difficult for most people to access, photographs of their screens became useful for showing others what the technology could actually do.
These early screenshots were mostly seen by people working in science or programming, but they helped make something happening inside a computer visible to a much wider audience.
By the 1980s, screenshots had started to become more common outside scientific and technical circles, thanks to video games.
Players wanted proof of their high scores, so they photographed their television screens and sent the pictures to gaming companies or magazines.
According to Vice, Activision encouraged players to submit photographic evidence of certain scores in exchange for special patches. Nintendo Power also gave readers instructions for photographing their results and featured top scores in the magazine.
