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The Web's First Famous Photo Was Les Horribles Cernettes, a CERN Office Band That Sang About Physicists
In 1992 CERN developer Silvano de Gennaro photographed the parody doo-wop group backstage, and a scan of it ended up on Tim Berners-Lee's web server as a stamp-sized GIF.
The band started with a song about a lonely woman whose boyfriend works nights at the collider. De Gennaro, a CERN computer scientist, ran an in-house music show called the Hardronic Festival, and in 1990, Guinness says, a few women from around the lab got up and sang his song. They called themselves Les Horribles Cernettes, the initials a nod to the Large Hadron Collider. Later songs included “Liquid Nitrogen,” “Microwave Love” and “My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize.”
The lineup in the famous picture, per Guinness: Angela Higney from the Red Cross, Michele Muller, a CERN graphic designer and de Gennaro’s girlfriend (now his wife), Collette Reilly from accounts, and Lynn Veronneau, a research administrator.
On July 18, 1992, backstage before a gig, de Gennaro pointed a camera at them. He told BBC Future he said “Okay girls, give me a shot for the album cover.” He cleaned up the background in Photoshop 1.0 on his Mac to make a sleeve.
Then Berners-Lee asked for pictures. On the band’s own site, de Gennaro writes that his colleague wanted “a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls”” and that he “FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch.”” Guinness says the date is lost: “no one remembers the exact date.” The BBC version has Berners-Lee walking into de Gennaro’s office while the photo was on screen.
The image that went up was tiny. De Gennaro told the BBC it was probably 120 by 50 pixels, “the size of a stamp,” and took about a minute to load. Pictures didn’t appear on their own back then. You clicked to fetch them.
The band played its last show on July 21, 2012, at the same Hardronic Festival where it began. The four women in the photo reunited for it.
De Gennaro calls them “the first picture of a band ever to be clicked on in a web browser!” That one is hard to argue with, mostly because nobody has looked for a rival. Whether a log file from info.cern.ch in 1992 still exists somewhere, with a real date on it, is the question that would settle the rest.