Jewish Invention Myths: The Camera Phone

A common jewish invention myth that comes up is the camera phone is crediting it to Philippe Kahn in 1997.

Aish writes that:

‘Remember life before smartphones and selfies? Baby Boomer Philippe Kahn does. He was born in Paris in 1952 to Jewish immigrants of modest means. His mother was a Holocaust survivor. The birth of his daughter in 1997 triggered the birth of a new technology. Kahn wanted to take a picture of the baby and send it to friends directly from the hospital. While in the waiting room, he succeeded! He fired up his computer, wrote some lines of codes, synchronized them with his Motorola mobile phone and digital camera and created the world’s first camera phone.’ (1)

Stephen Pollard writing for the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ modifies this claim by having Kahn send the first photo from a camera phone on the internet:

‘And who first had the idea of using your phone to send a picture? French Jew Philippe Kahn was sitting in hospital looking at his newborn baby and wanted to send a picture to his family there and then. He wrote some code on his laptop, synchronised it with his Motorola mobile phone and a digital camera and bingo.’ (2)

‘MNews’ agrees with Pollard:

‘Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator who developed the first solution for instant photo sharing on public networks. He was also granted several dozen patents in the field of smartphones, wireless communications, synchronization, and medical technologies.’ (3)

We can already see that the Aish claims is by far the most extreme where all Pollard and ‘MNews’ really claim is that Kahn connected his laptop to his phone, write a bit of code and then connected to the two so he was able to send a photo from one to the other.

Even this revised claim is incorrect since the first commercial mobile phone which had the ability to transmit images taken on its camera wirelessly by the internet. The DELTIS VC-1100 digital camera with telephone capacity was on sale by 1994 and was developed in the late 1980s by the Japanese company Olympus, (4) while digital cameras with removable storage devices dated back to 1989 with the SONY ProMavica MVC-5000. (5)

Indeed by 1997 the HITACHI MP-EG1, MP-EG1A, MP-EG10 digital camera could and did send photos over the internet. (6)

Nor did Kahn invent the camera phone since the Finns Kari-Pekka Wilska, Reijo Paajanen, Mikko Terho and Jari Hämäläinen of Nokia patented the first camera phone in 1994 which included the ability to transit the photos taken wirelessly. (7)

All Philippe Kahn actually did was send the first photo generated by a camera phone around the world by email from his laptop and home computer that anyone remembers. He didn’t invent the camera phone or even send the first image from a camera phone to other people.

Therefore, we can see that yet another jewish invention myth is revealed to be complete and utter nonsense.

References

(1) https://aish.com/10-big-jewish-inventions/

(2) https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/did-you-know-that-jews-invented-everything-g0z36e86

(3) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions

(4) https://web.archive.org/web/20070219213129/http://www-users.mat.uni.torun.pl/~olka/historia.html

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

(7) https://patents.google.com/patent/FI942334A/en